31 responses to ‘What company do you keep? (Open letter to Robert Redford)’

1. We have come to expect great things from Redford. This movie sure was not worth seeing, even when I paid 74 cents for rental from Redbox.

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   • The quality of the movie is beyond the point, although I don’t disagree that this is not the best of Redford’s works.

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2. This letter exposes the weakness in your position. I agree with you about lawyers who violate court orders and engage in litigation misconduct. But infringement is also wrong. And penalties are supposed to be high enough to act as a deterrent. A slap on the wrist is not effective. I don’t understand your opposition to settlement demands of two thousand dollars or so. You admit that 70% or more of the accused parties are guilty. Taking into account legal costs, secretaries, paralegals etc $2000 is not out of proportion to the actual damage because it costs money to enforce copyrights. Infringers should pay an amount sufficient to pay costs of enforcement including attorney fees. Further, what is wrong with demand for a quick settlement? If the accused infringer goes to court and loses he will be assessed attorneys fees and costs in six figures. Your mistake is in failing to recognize that copyright owners are entitled to recover costs of enforcement. A quick settlement for a few thousand dollars is a bargain for an infringer compared to what would happen in a court proceeding. This model is no different than our traditional tort system for personal injury, defamation, product defects, invasion of privacy etc. If is not extortion to offer a settlement that realistically factors in litigation costs. Lawyers do deserve to
   be paid for enforcing the law. It costs real money to run a law office and pay lawyers. While I understand your frustration with Prenda, you are unfairly putting all lawyers who pursue these cases in the same class. Piracy is a huge problem. I represent many indie record labels who are barely surviving because they can no longer sell their records which are ripped off on bit torrent type sites. You only see one side of the equation without understanding that piracy now forced musicians to live in poverty, take jobs as waiters, and watch in frustration as their songs appear everywhere without fair compensation. We do need to enforce copyright laws.

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   • There’s a 70% chance you did it. Pay me.

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   • I accuse you of Murder. Im almost sure a good 70%. Can i now ruin your life? Hell lets just execute you the odds are on my side.

     I bet you disagree with that. But its just what your claiming is fair. Swap murder with copyright infringement and execute with bankrupt and financially ruin you

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   • The problem with the copyright system is that it actually costs a hundred thousand dollars or more to defend OR prosecute a copyright case for a 99 cent song or video. The massive costs have created a system where guilt or innocence is irrelevant. Its become a giant game of deep pockets and bluff. The current bittorrent lawsuit plague is exploiting the flaws in our legal system to the unfair detriment of many innocent AND Guilty parties. We need to reform copyright law specifically in regards to online infringement in a way that deters infringement with proportional punishment. For example: A system where copyright holders could demand a fixed fine of $10 for a song and $35 for a movie billed through the internet provider (without releasing subscriber data) would benefit far more copyright holders, have a deterrence effect on large scale infringers and would not bankrupt people for the crime of downloading a TV show or pop hit. If the accused wished to fight the claim, there could be an appeal process, or transfer to the legal system, either small claims or regular litigation with expenses awarded to the winner.

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   • I don’t want to reply to you, I already did many times, we are going in circles and it’s a waste of time.

     My last attempt was in a discussion on DTD’s site, where I finally articulated the idea that is also a core idea of this article: monetization of an artifact is OK, and copyright was meant to facilitate it; at the same time, monetization of a derivative, i.e. infringement, creates wrong intensives: to sustain and expand infringement. Prenda’s seeding its own files or Linda Ellis’s “send to a friend” forms are the extreme examples. Although Keith Lipscomb was never caught using these particular dirty methods, his overall behavior (and other dirty tricks he uses) makes his ostensible fight against piracy a farce in the eyes off any reasonable person. Even a less hypocritical troll “businessmen” would be devastated if (hypothetically) infringement suddenly stopped. Trolls are like ants that nurture aphids.

     One thing I couldn’t help replying this time.

     “Deserved to be paid”: you repeat this phrase over and over again. I don’t know in what society you think you live, but it is not capitalist America, a system that made this country prosper. I lived a sizable part of my live (including adulthood) in the Soviet Union, where the authorities hammered into our heads a Marxist concept that we deserved to be paid according to our labor, not to the market value of the fruit this labor had borne. We all know what happened and continuing to happen to the countries that stick to this concept. You cannot change the human nature, and the opportunity highly depends on incentives. My friend worked for a small boiler house that produced heat only to a workshop, and the sole purpose of that workshop was to repair parts for the boiler house. I’m not kidding. Did he deserve to be paid for his work?

     I’m not an anarchist and I don’t believe that traffic light poles grow naturally, yet I believe that the goal of a governed free market is to herd incentives and facilitate social security — not to guarantee income. The copyright laws in their current state, due to corruption (lobbying), have screwed up all the good incentives and created a plethora of wrong ones. Copyright trolls are mostly systematic problem, but the ethical aspect is important too, so I believe that I also create small correctional incentives by spreading the word, comforting victims and sometimes flexing my Google muscle (e.g. my campaign against Sanjin Mutić was a success: Triskele Foundation seriously confronted him due to unwanted exposure).

     Usually I avoid talking about my political views, but I couldn’t help this time. Here is me on the political compass, drifting a bit to the right with age, but quite stable on the vertical axis:

     

     Here is the copy of my reply to you from dietrolldie.com” (for yours and mine convenience):

     Nor is there anything wrong with assigning a copyright or patent to a company, the sole business of which is to enforce the copyright or patent against infringers.

     This is a 100% wrong and dangerous statement. Alas, this is the situation we currently “enjoy,” but in the long run this approach is harmful to everyone (except trolls). I’ll explain.

     When a creator enjoys copyright protection, his main moneymaker force is still his talent, his creations. He makes money from exhibits, concerts, records and memorabilia sales. He uses copyright protection given by law to limit people from reaping the fruit of his labor / investments. He wants infringements either to stop, or to be limited, or to be converted to positive publicity. There is a plenty of examples when a creator successfully converts infringers to paying customers, immediately or in the long run — by shaming, educating, and simply being a “good guy.”

     I somewhat sympathetic when a creator is angry about piracy and enforces his copyrights. But again, the goal of the “enforcement” for a creator is to stop/limit infringement. He is almost always happy and forgiving when a pirate confesses, buys his stuff and spreads the word.

     If a sole business of a company is enforcement, the incentive is diametrically opposite. Business is business, it always wants to grow and it never kills its diary caw. The incentive of a troll (and a non-producing, enforcement-only entity is a troll in the most strict definition of this term, 99% agree with that) is to monetize infringement, not the original artifact. I.e. he depends on the infringement to continue and expand.

     Therefore, a non-producing, copyright/patent enforcement-only businesses (trolls) are not only harmful to the society in general (due to cruel indifference to people’s circumstances and dont-give-a-shitness about nurturing future customers), but also harmful to the original creator.

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     • This is for you, Maurice.

       I have a question. Do you have children? If so, when those children were young adults with already formed concepts of right and wrong, did you exercise a zero tolerance policy in your family? Or did you warn/explain why they were wrong at least once before applying punishment? I’m not of course talking about physical punishment, but we all as parents use both carrot and stick (in a figurative sense).

       Zero tolerance implies zero empathy and zero mercy. This is the concept I refuse to accept.

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   • Funny, you’re so talkative here and you ignored me over on TorrentLawyer.
     Could it be that your advice to SUE THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BUY FROM YOU, is what is damaging your clients incomes?
     That your unwavering support of a business model that can not survive in the current market without laws so out of proportion to the alleged crime is the real problem?
     I say alleged because you are unable to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt they did the horrible act, which is why this law enjoys the easier bar of more likely than not.
     Think how much money your clients could save if they fired you, and spent the time to connect with fans to understand why the files are being shared.
     Your income is driven by inflicting misery and greed upon not only the targets but upon your clients.
     You are instrumental in destroying their brand and claim it is the fault of piracy and not a terror campagin using $150,000 as a bludgeon to obtain magnitudes beyond any actual damage they might have suffered.

     The law you cling to is from an age when making a copy was only done by people who invested lots of money to make the copies to profit from, hence the huge awards possible. If not for lawyers and lobbyists like yourself, the law could have been updated to reflect the idea that Control+C and Control+V isn’t being done for profit.

     Study after study has shown that people who file share purchase MORE, and your advice to your clients who stand to benefit from this is SUE THEM. So how much revenue do you actually cost them vs the inflated imaginary dollar claims you quote. Real money lost following you vs imaginary dollars that never existed. Seems like your the problem in the model, meddling in it adapting to what the market wants.

     You paint us all as evil pirates, yet I’ve never suggested they give it all away for free. I actually can see both sides and I can see where the fault lies… its your meddling with promises that you can’t possibly deliver on that damages them much more than gaining new customers from a shared track.

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     • The last paragraph is brilliant, TAC.

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     • Here is a fine example of adaptation. Many Russian bands get a sizable income from people voluntarily paying them. I never failed to pay my favorite bands (Zorge was the latest transaction) — sometimes twice the suggested price, although I could quite legally download for free, which I do to sample bands I never heard of. But I’m always back with my credit card if I like it. Zorge is not a super-popular band (it just resonates my inner bits), but they are doing fine, and the record sales is not the only source of income: they tour a lot, work with movie producers etc.

       Kroogi is running “pay what you want model” and their commission is 15%: 85% goes directly to the artist. The most prominent Russian rock musician Boris Grebenshikov publicly stated: “After 2-3 years after uploading, the income is comparable to the income from the CD sales.” And his band “Aquarium” is shared on torrent sites a lot.

       It’s time to retire, Maurice: you have no idea what are you talking about when it comes to Internet and ability of businesses (including creative ones) to adapt.

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       • http://theslip.nin.com/
         The site says it all. We are in a new age, and business models that do not differ much from the Phoenicians no longer work.

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   • Right, because indie bands didn’t have to keep a day job before the Internet came around. Oh, right, until they got signed to a label of course they did, as their only income was gig money. And how exactly has piracy ruined that gig money income stream?

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   • Ah, Sorry Morry. I was wondering when you would show up to sing the praises of suing grandmothers without computers. How’s the gay music label thing working out for you – does it even exist? Going by how you make your posts and routinely never cite your sources, I’m sincerely doubtful as to whether this claim is legitimate. Either way, I must admit that the chances of me supporting your product are not high; my tastes in music lie elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll take this as tacit approval stating that I am a viable target for your litigious nature.

     “70%” was nowhere near SJD’s quote. “70%” was a quote taken from one of your heroes of copyright, Mike Meier, who was effectively forced to admit that his suing campaign was 30% inaccurate. As it is, the accuracy rate of copyright enforcers is probably much lower going by anecdotal evidence.

     Hell, I don’t know why SJD bothers to be civil with you. You seem to be very supportive of copyright enforcers being complete douches even when they’re suing the wrong people. I, on the other hand, choose to be not so civil, and I can expect people incorrectly identified by these moneymaking schemes to be much less patient with you. In your words? You are unfairly putting all families with a computer and Internet connection in the same class.

     For what it’s worth – there’s a good reason the RIAA “ended” its campaign, because it realized how bad it was making them look. Artists have largely distanced themselves from the willingness to bankrupt potential customers. If you want to continue on this self-destructive path of whining and kicking and screaming – by all means, be my guest.

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   • “what is wrong with demand for a quick settlement? If the accused infringer goes to court and loses he will be assessed attorneys fees and costs in six figures.”

     Dude. You just answered your own question. If the accused goes to criminal court, and it’s proven with 100% certainty that they are guilty, then they’re punished. Copyright infringement cases however aren’t criminal cases, and are tried in the civil court system where the burden of proof is preponderance of evidence. If it’s more likely than not that the accused is guilty, then they’re found guilty, and get tagged with those fees and costs in six figures. If the odds are marginally better than 50/50 that you did it, you’re bankrupt and your life is ruined. That’s an ENORMOUS incentive to just pay the few grand to the lawyers to make them go away. Throw in the shame factor of pornography, like 99% of these copyright cases are, and that’s enormous incentive multiplied upon itself.

     When I got my troll letter in the mail, this was the prime cause of my own mental anguish. I knew I was innocent, hands down. But in the civil court system, could I prove my innocence? I was one of several THOUSAND defendants in the same boiler-plate case that never actually went to trial, as so few actually do. My choice was to either pay a few grand I didn’t have to buy the certainty that I wouldn’t be wrongly accused, or have a six figure liability hanging over my head for years. The fear and uncertainty of whether or not I was able to prove my innocence had me one signature away from taking out a horrible loan so that I could afford to pay the settlement. Fortunately for me, I spoke to a few of the right people who told me to just wait a little while longer and see what happens. As time passed, I grew more and more convinced that nothing was going to happen. I still have a six-figure liability over my head, but with each passing day, that Sword of Damocles moves further from me.

     Your mistake is in failing to recognize that these copyright trolling lawsuits cast a WIDE net, and snag a large percentage of people who are simply innocent. You cry about starving artists suffering in poverty as their work gets shared by the faceless minions of the internet, but in my case, it was the lawyers who brought the threat of poverty and financial ruin to me. I did nothing wrong, and found myself in an untenable position of having to prove that I did not illegally download some fucked up porn title.

     Lawyers deserve to be paid for enforcing the law? If you’re suddenly the enforcement arm of our legal system, then YOU need to suck it up and start doing a better job of it. Try to come up with something that’s a little better than “meeeehhhhh, I think you may have done something wrong, so you’d better just pay me a minor shit-ton of money, otherwise I’m going to ruin your good name and come after you for an extremely large shit-ton of money.” Because you know what that’s called? Extortion.

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     • Excellent letter CTVic. “what is wrong with demand for a quick settlement?”

       Quick settlements and confidentiality agreements are secret strategies for bilking the totally innocent and innocent infringers out of huge sums of money. Entrapment and extortion are the key words they operate by.

       The punishment does not fit the act. Is the unauthorized sharing of a poem in a funeral program by a grieving widow criminal? Is subjecting infringers to months if not years of abuse AND then finally settling for a “reduced fine” of $2500 a deterrent? How does forcing people to sign a confidentiality agreement with the settlement inform anybody of the problem?

       I find it telling that content creators believe any effort to make the public aware is futile. Yet, this is how every other law is enforced. First by education, next by issuing warnings, then by issuing a ticket. Fines and sentences increase with the number of offenses. Content creators could lead the way in that education. Federal tax dollars should fund a BEWARE DON’T SHARE campaign and the campaign needs to be on-going and part of the education system from grade 1.

       People have been trained all their lives to share and believe they are contributing to the content creators success – in fact are encouraged to make content viral. They don’t consider themselves thieves, liars or criminals. My hope is that these cases will make it to court – and the lies and tactics will be publicized further. One day the people who lead these terror campaigns will have to publicly answer to their abuse and the world will finally know who they are and who they harmed “protecting their copyright”.

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   • I have read an article (just can’t remember where) last month that there was a report made by a certain IT expert sometime ago from Germany regarding the accuracy of the data being provided to the TCYK. On that article, it was mentioned that the report attests to the accuracy of the said data. Is this true? If it is, then chances are that for those people who received a letter from TCYK either they have actually done the infringement themselves or somebody must have done it without their consent. Either way, as far as I am concerned, if you are guilty of it, then you should be punished under the copyright law. I am not taking sides here. All I am just saying that, being a business owner myself, I wouldn’t want anybody stealing something from me. Copyright infringement is piracy, and piracy is no less than thievery.

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     • Some random thing I read said some random person said its perfectly perfect.
       You understand the company providing this tracking was being paid a portion of the cash from the settlements right?
       You understand that the company files statements from people who are magically unavailable to answer questions from the defense?
       You understand that an IP address != a person.
       You understand that another one of this companies clients has had experts check machines to find the content at question, and when they can’t make claims it was hidden to well or super expertly erased rather that consider that the person they are harassing isn’t responsible.
       You understand there are serious concerns that names appearing on documents in these cases are signed by fictitious companies/people who only exist to submit papers supporting questionable claims but never can be found to answer questions.

       You understand your position is – Someone claimed these people did something, so they are guilty. Would you like to end up in jail if I claimed you produced CP without any real evidence? Would you like me deposing your neighbors asking if they have ever seen you filming the CP I alleged you produced? Would you like to take your chances in court when my expert will claim you destroyed the evidence and you should be found guilty and pay extra for hiding the evidence I couldn’t find?

       These parasites are demanding payments from the people who pay the bill, not those who actually infringed the copyright. Defending yourself against these actions & protecting yourself from being liabled/slandered to the world costs more than the settlement. Having to decide if justice or being financially ruined (as they run from the cases denying you getting your costs if you prevail) isn’t justice and it is extortion.

       This isn’t a kid stealing a chocolate bar from your store costing money. Comparing it to stealing is a nice way to confuse people about the real damages & harm making a copy creates. As you like to read things online and get educated, why not look at what happened to Prenda and imagine for a moment that these firms are merely seeking to create another revenue stream for films that don’t do as well as they thought they should (not because people say it without paying, but because they suck).

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3. “Some trolls stoop even lower: there are allegations supported by a solid proof that infamous Prenda Law seeded (uploaded) its own “copyrighted” files to lure file-sharers and subsequently sue them. It’s disgusting, but not surprising. Why not surprising? I’ll explain in three paragraphs below.”

   Linda Ellis, the woman who claims to have authored The Dash poem, used the “Tell a Friend” form on her website to do exactly what is alleged in the above article. She continues to use the ruse to this day ( along with a couple “copyright reps” and Google ) easily nabbing people who believe the alleged Christian spiritual advisor wants readers to spread the advise The Dash poem offers. The poem is posted on thousands of internet sites – on my opinion – with the implied approval of the author. Her prime targets are not horny teens but religious, grief stricken families and charities. These victims seem unable to take a stand and speak publicly about the harassment allowing The Dash trolling operation to thrive.

   Copyright infringement is the “crime” of this century but the abuse of innocent infringers is the real crime and it is far reaching and unending. The Dash poem is the most financially damaging piece of literature ever written. Literally no other written work has caused so much heartache and hardship – obliterating any good those words intended.

   BEWARE DON’T SHARE!

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4. The address on the copyright registration seems to be Nicolas Chartier’s personal address, although, strangely, Yahoo lists voltagepictures.com site for this address. Why did not he specify the “official” Voltage Pictures address rather than his personal? Fishy.

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   • Chartier would benefit from asking Steve Lightspeed’s opinion before providing his home address on a public document while extorting so many people.

     You can take Nicolas Chartier from the janitor, but you can’t take the janitor from Nicolas Chartier.

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5. Maurice, direct your Indie clients to talk to Louis CK and see how he is doing. Indie content does not mean quality content. Tell them to produce content people are willing to pay for and they will.

   https://buy.louisck.net/purchase/live-at-the-beacon-theater

   Scroll to the end of the page to read about his take on Bittorrent.

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6. Audio of Vogt call appears incorrect. should be, I think: https://soundcloud.com/fightcopyrighttrolls/copyright-troll-keith-vogt

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   • Thanks for noticing! Corrected.

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7. FYI; as DieTrollDie tweeted, since the end of August, Malibu Media (XArt) and TCYK, LLC are only BitTorrent copyright troll cases filed..

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8. https://buy.louisck.net/news

   Scroll to the bottom. Dec.13 and 21, 2011

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9. I barely understand what is being discussed here but I do love a Good Lawyer Fight!

   Fighting Discussion Board Trolls by Accurately Quoting past Discussions, sometimes on other Boards is Awesome!

   Keep Your Steel Sharp Fellows!

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10. id like to open a discussion about “copyright infringement” If you are one person who happens to find a movie online and downloads it to watch, why dont studios just send u a bill. hypothetically, i am not downloading this movie for profit but for my own enjoyment, unless it is crap like many are.

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11. Vogt sounds really unprofessional here. He also comes across as a bit of a dimwit.

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