Hurt Locker' downloaders - you've been sued

**Data** · June 1, 2010

This post has been copied from Greg Sandoval CNET News | June 1, 2010 6:47 AM PDT

Producers of the Oscar-winning film, "The Hurt Locker" have made good on a promise to file copyright lawsuits against people who have illegally downloaded the move via file-sharing networks.

Voltage Pictures, an independent production company, filed a copyright complaint on Monday against 5,000 John Does in federal court in Washington D.C.

For more on this story, read 'Hurt Locker' downloaders, you've been sued

**Areala** · June 2, 2010

This post has been copied from Greg Sandoval CNET News | June 1, 2010 6:47 AM PDT

Producers of the Oscar-winning film, "The Hurt Locker" have made good on a promise to file copyright lawsuits against people who have illegally downloaded the move via file-sharing networks.

Voltage Pictures, an independent production company, filed a copyright complaint on Monday against 5,000 John Does in federal court in Washington D.C.

For more on this story, read 'Hurt Locker' downloaders, you've been sued

I heard about this from a friend at work today. It will be interesting to see exactly who or what those IP addresses of every John Doe and Jane Doe involved actually point at. My guess is that they'll discover a lot of unsecured WiFi networks (especially in places like apartment complexes or housing developments where the homes are built very close together), hotspots in hotels and coffee shops, and possibly even public terminals in libraries, university computer labs, or cybercafes which will make it nearly impossible to determine who was doing what and when by ISP records alone. Another chunk will likely be taken up with parents or guardians who had no idea that the minors under their care were even capable of sharing copyrighted films. And probably another chunk will be people who have computers infected with malware that turn their PCs into open seeding stations for some other pirate group's antics and didn't know it (hell, one of my best friends works in IT and even one of his home machines ended up with one of those programs on it, so it's not just clueless newbies who can fall victim to it).

The problem with this is that the people who are serious about their piracy are going to know how to hide their steps enough to avoid getting caught in a broad net like this one, or will be operating out of servers in areas like Hong Kong or Taiwan, which don't recognize international copyright law in the first place. The people they do manage to catch doing this who were doing it willfully and deliberately with the intent to defraud the copyright holders will represent such a small percentage of the overall total that it won't serve as any kind of useful deterrant, no matter what the end-resulting fines turn out to be.

*huggles*

Areala