Contra Piracy on the lawsuit bandwagon

[silicon_toad2000]

http://torrentfreak.com/we-need-to-kill-piracy-to-make-bittorrent-distribution-viable-trolls-claim-130712/

An anti-piracy group currently trying to obtain the identities of almost 3,000 people, including individuals located at universities around the United States, has an interesting explanation for its activities. Contra Piracy, who are trying to sue over the 50 Cent movie “All Things Fall Apart”, are defending their “right to sue” deal by suggesting that BitTorrent needs to be cleaned up in order for legal distribution by the same means to thrive.

Back in March a lawsuit filed by attorney Boden Davidson on behalf of his client Contra Piracy targeted individuals said to have downloaded and shared the 50 Cent movie All Things Fall Apart.

Contra Piracy, a claimed non-profit group, said they had monitored 2,919 individuals infringing the movie on more than 280,000 occasions. In order to stop these infringements they need the identities of the file-sharers from ISPs.

As usual, Swiss-based Contra Piracy aren’t the creators of the movie. Instead the outfit obtained “enforcement rights” from Los Angeles-based Hannibal Pictures to pursue the action. With around $8m in settlements potentially on the table, it was certainly a deal worth doing.

However, thanks to documents recently filed with the courts, we can see that Hannibal Pictures, the apparent injured party in the case, are only set to collect 40% of any “income” generated as a result of them signing over P2P / BitTorrent distribution rights to Contra Piracy. The signing over of these rights is generating quite a lot of interest with the court too.

Chief Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte previously ordered Contra Piracy to show cause why the case should not be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction when it was noted that Contra only had “enforcement rights”. Contra was also ordered to hand over all documents relating to the rights agreements it had with Hannibal Pictures.

Last month Contra responded, stating that it had standing to sue for copyright infringement because it had been granted the right to copy and distribute the movie over the BitTorrent protocol.

However, the Court said that it needed to see further documents that had not yet been handed over, contrary to its earlier order. Judge Laporte clearly wanted to see details of the deal between Contra and Hannibal when she referenced an earlier Righthaven case in which it was deemed that Righthaven lacked standing based on a bare right to sue.

Contra were given a couple of days to come up with the paperwork and to clarify how the BitTorrent protocol would be used to “commercially distribute copyright works” as its agreement with Hannibal apparently allows it to. Their filing is interesting to say the least.

“The legitimate commercial distribution of copyrighted works via the P2P/BitTorrent protocol is certainly viable in a technological sense, however the extent of legitimate commercial distribution via P2P/BitTorrent in a market sense is severely limited by the rampant, mass infringements of copyrighted works utilizing the P2P/BitTorrent protocol,” attorney Boden Davidson wrote.

[GhostShip]

I beleive the judge is on the right track here, theres no such things as an "enforcement right", they are either the copyright holder or not, that alone grants standing.

If they persist with this nonsense and it can be shown by any of those who where part of the bit torrent swarm that this company took an active part in sharing the relevant file then all of the defendants can claim the file was distibuted legally by the copyright holder thus no law has been broken.