MPAA sues Hotfile.com

The Motion Picture Association of America just announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Hotfile on behalf of various movie studios. The MPAA charges that the 2-year-old website has "profited handsomely" from encouraging and providing the means for "massive copyright infringement." From the MPAA's press release:

Sometimes referred to as cyberlockers, download hubs like Hotfile bear no resemblance to legitimate online locker services. In fact, Hotfile openly discourages use of its system for personal storage. Hotfile's business model encourages and incentivizes users to upload files containing illegal copies of motion pictures and TV shows to its servers and to third-party sites, so unlimited users can download the stolen content - in many cases tens of thousands of times. Hotfile profits from this theft by charging a monthly fee to users who download content from its servers. Hotfile also operates an incentive scheme that rewards users for uploading the most popular files - which are almost exclusively copyrighted works. Hotfile profits richly while paying nothing to the studios for their stolen content.

Hotfile is operated by Anton Titov, a foreign national residing in Florida. The studios are suing Hotfile and Titov for direct infringement for unlawfully distributing copyrighted works, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement and vicarious infringement, for actively promoting, enabling and profiting from their users' copyright infringement. A civil lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida for damages and injunctive relief for violations under the United States Copyright Act of 1976.

• [caipirina]

  A friend of mine who has experience with those kids of cyberlockers tells me that hotfile is actually the fastest one when it comes to a link turning into a ‘this file has been removed based on copyright concerns’

  So, I guess they are trying … let’s see where that is going

• [Anonymous]

  Is this the first time the MPAA sues this kind of service? If not, what has been the outcome previously?

• [Anonymous]

  Rapidshare is a Swiss company, they won in Swiss courts. Might play out differently in a US court.

  They could of course try to seize the file hoster domain names, but I figure that will just make more people adopt download managers. It would be trivially easy to program download managers to redirect from invalid domains to valid domains (hotfile.com -> hotfile.it).

• [Anonymous]

  how ridiculous. hotfile does nothing else than rapidshare or fileserve or whatever…

  they all operate within the legal limits. they know the law very well and have said takedown request pages which rule out any intentional unlawful use of their behalves.

• [Anonymous]

  @grizlybexar

  They can check the scene release sites, like rlslog.

  TBH I think this is easy case for the MPAA to win.

• [Jack]

  How exactly do these download sites profit? By asking for payment for higher-speed downloads mixed with ads? And how do they host? Do they have servers all over the place?

  I’m just fascinated by sites that are basically bandwidth hogs can somehow exist viably.

• [Anonymous]

  I’ve been using Hotfile for years, paid for the service months at a time here and there. Would someone like myself be at risk for having my name and information turned over or seized by the powers that be?

• [Anonymous]

  So lets say you had a comic book or book you want to distribute on your blog, but didn’t want to pay a publishing house or e-book publisher. Couldn’t you use a locker like that to distribute your content?

• [grizlybexar]

  according to the hotfile.com FAQ:
  “Q.Can I search the Hotfile server for certain files?
  A. No. Hotfile protects the privacy of our users. Only the person storing a file on Hotfile gets the download link. That person decides who should have access to the link. A file can only be downloaded if the download link details are known.”

  so how does the MPAA know their precious movies are being hosted?

  • [Pantograph]

    Rumor has it that there are Tumblr blogs dedicated to sharing hotfile links to infringing material. Not that I would know of course. It’s not the sort of site decent law-abiding citizens such as myself frequent. The mere thought of spending my free time browsing for pirated software, music or ebooks on sites like those makes me feel uneasy.

    However, a simple Google search will reveal that people will download all kinds of things.

    • [rtresco]

      Tumblr, you say. Is that anything like the Facebook I’m on?

  • [Anonymous]

    WEll.obviously they DO know since they found out. Who cares how htey know?

    That is probably the WORST excuse ever…”How could you have possibly KOWN I was breaking the law!”

• [adonai]

  So long as they abide by the DMCA and take down links when requested, they should fall under the safe harbour provision. Any unauthorised files hosted are the responsibility of the uploader, not the provider.

  Didn’t Rapidshare win something along these lines fairly recently? Is the MPAA/RIAA just going to keep on suing cyberlockers until they finally win and can establish a favourable precedent?

• [KeithIrwin]

  Reading the brief they’ve filed, it’s pretty apparent that they’re stretching quite a ways. The only evidence of HotFile encouraging users to upload pirated content to their servers is that HotFile encourages users to upload files which are a) heavily downloaded by others and b) large. The MPAA is asking the courts to assume that large, heavily-downloaded files must be illegal content. They make a big deal in their brief of being scandalized by the fact that HotFile is not a service for people to store their own files, as if that’s the only legal thing that a website which allows people to upload files can be. That might somehow bolster their case if HotFile was claiming to be an on-line locker service, but there’s no reason to believe that they will make any such claim. The MPAA also accuse HotFile of having, prepare to be shocked, an affiliate program.

  It’s not just that the brief they’ve filed doesn’t contain a smoking gun: it doesn’t even assert that one exists. They’re accusing HotFile of being what it is: a site which facilitates the distribution of large files to a wide audience and asking the courts to declare any site which does that to automatically be illegal despite full compliance with the DMCA and no evidence that they induced users to engage in piracy. I certainly hope that the courts don’t do that because it would set a terrible precedent and effectively rewrite the law to amend the safe harbor clause of the DMCA to say “except for big files which a lot of people download because those must be pirated”.

  Mostly, though, what all this shows is that the *AA groups are going to have to reach farther and farther. They pretty much got to write the DMCA, but now it turns out that even it doesn’t go far enough for them. The problem is that they didn’t foresee that sites like HotFile (ad/subscription-supported large-file distribution sites which are completely content-ignorant and have no search or index mechanism) could exist. Now that they do, they want them gone. The reason that these sites can exist and be profitable is that bandwidth and storage costs have fallen so low that a peer-to-peer model is no longer necessary. As bandwidth and storage gets cheaper and cheaper, newer types of sites will be used for piracy too. Next will probably be sites which allow you to host your own blog or other website. As storage becomes cheaper, their maximum allowed file size will reach a point where you can slap a movie up on your blog without violating the maximum file size. Once that happens, the MPAA is going to want those sites gone too. Any site or program which allows ordinary, anonymous users to host and distribute large files (for some definition of large), is going to be on their hit list.

  I’m no particular fan of piracy, but you can’t remove the sites which allow people to distribute pirated files for free without also removing the sites which allow artists to distribute their own albums and music videos for free because those are the same sites. The long-range eventuality of the plan the MPAA is following will be a total lock-down on any means of widely distributing large files. That’s too high a price to pay for stamping out piracy.

• [netdiva]

  there are all kinds of sites on the internet that host hotfile links. I suspect a good google (or bing) search and rooting out particular forums will give them all the info they need.

• [Michael]

  How dare that foreign national profit richly!

• [Anonymous]

  Because they said so!
  That is enough isn’t it?

  It does not matter that Hotfile has a DCMA takedown system that they follow, it is to much effort to try and find all of these links scattered all over the interwebs. They should just shut down if they are unwilling to invest the time, effort, and money to protect our property!

  Let us ignore all of the legal uses of these sites, and focus on the people sharing movies. Let us ignore that free users can download any link that is shared. We have to present the view that this is a commercial business setup for profit and breaking the rules. Sort of how the previous Harry Potter movie made billions, but on paper it lost hundreds of millions so we took a write off.

  Someday it would be nice for the “industry” to pull their heads out of their collective asses and figure out why it is people share these files. Some surely are trying to “stick it to the man” for their stupid anticonsumer tactics, but there are many reasons files are shared. Maybe if they removed their stupid delays and demands and put the items into the market while the demand was high at a reasonable price they would sell more than before. But that can not possibly work, it has worked for other business models but let us ignore those completely. Everything has to be the same as it always was and nothing can change!

  VCR will be the Boston Strangler of Hollywood!
  Funny once they embraced the technology it was huge revenue.

  Maybe it is time to get rid of the old dinosaurs who predict doom at every leap forward in technology, and find those willing to at least try to see consumer demand and meet it without trying to force it to be like the old model.

• [Rayonic]

  It’ll be interesting to see what kind of plausible deniability Hotfile can claim.

  Also interesting is the fact that, unlike with torrents, downloaders are not uploaders too. So they’re technically not distributing the copyrighted material.

• [Anonymous]

  oh noes… my comcast replacement system is in jeopardy. surprised this didn’t happen years ago when rapidshare first sprouted.

• [MadRat]

  If you look in the Submiterator, the MPAA is also threatening to take Google offline.

• [Maklite]

  I little googlefu will get you the links. I don’t personally think this lawsuit has any ground (but I still think it will succeed.) Hotfile has a perfectly good DMCA take down request form that anyone can fill in and get your files removed, sure it may take a few years to get through every single file but it’s all in accordance with the law. Like the release says, the user has sole responsibility for how the links get spread and as such they should get the brunt of the lawsuit, (obviously this is more or less impossible with how the interent works).

  In a weak comparison, it would be like suing FedEx for distribution of copyright when someone uses them for a mail order bootleg DVD service.

  • [Anonymous]

    Don’t give them any ideas. Fed Ex is probably NEXT!!!

• [Suds]

  What of the right of two people to hold a privet conversation, be it by email, irc, torrent or file-lockers like Hotfile? For that matter, what about over the phone or whispered into the others ear? Where does the snooping stop?!

• [Anonymous]

  “Also interesting is the fact that, unlike with torrents, downloaders are not uploaders too. So they’re technically not distributing the copyrighted material.”

  Rayonic: No, but they might be “2nd order inducers”. Downloaders pay for premium access, thereby inducing Hotfile to use funds to induce uploaders to keep on truckin’

  On the other hand, MPAA press releases induces me to vomit. Who can I sue?

  Related: the filelocker usage now accounts for a huge amount of online file sharing. As bandwidth and space costs decrease it will only keep growing. I think we ain’t seen nothing yet. Such services will beef up and get automatic interconnection with facebook/gmail social networks.

• [Anonymous]

  Only a month since the last lawsuit against Hotfile.com. Did this MPAA suit look for domain confiscation too?

  http://torrentfreak.com/hotfile-1000-users-and-paypal-named-in-piracy-lawsuit-110118/

• [Anonymous]

  “Hotfile profits from this theft by charging a monthly fee to users who download content from its servers”

  It actually gives you the OPTION of paying for FASTER downloads. As a guest ‘user’ I’m not charged anything.

  It is free with time limits between downloads, which are easily beaten by changing ip and deleting cookies – same as rapidShare, easy-share and the rest of them.

  I can’t understand why anybody would pay for any of these sites unless they were using them commercially or scared of lower speed downloading.

• [Anonymous]

  And here’s Hotfile’s intellectual property policy: http://www.hotfile.com/ippolicy.html

  “HotFile is a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. section 512 (“DMCA”). HotFile has adopted the following policy concerning copyright infringement in accordance with the DMCA and copyright law. Hotfile will respond promptly to claims of copyright infringement reported to its designated copyright agent. It is Hotfile’s policy to: (1) accommodate and not interfere with standard technical measures (as defined by the DMCA) used to identify and protect copyrighted works; (2) disable access to or remove content that it believes in good faith may infringe the copyrights of third parties; and (3) discontinue service to users who repeatedly make such content available or otherwise violate HotFile’s Terms of Service. Please do not abuse the HotFile service by using it to distribute materials to which you do not have the rights.”

• [teapot]

  I hope hotfile wins this sham of a case. I know for a fact that their response to DMCA requests is speedy because I have been frustrated by taken down links many times (often on content that couldn’t have been up there more than a day). If the MPAA and rights holders can’t find the alleged infringing content to request a takedown, it is merely a demonstration of their own incompetence.

  Email services and ftp servers are also used to distribute content. Does the MPAA have a right to shut them down if infringing content is promptly removed upon request? Of course not.

• [Anonymous]

  Responding to possible petty theft with seemingly criminal behaviour is how I would describe this.

  For example, in the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it is a felony to falsely accuse someone of a crime. Too much of what the RIAA and the MPAA does seems to fall under this description, IMO.

  Mailing of a false notice of copyright infringement (attempting to extract damages from someone without legal grounds) is mail fraud, a federal offense. Are these organizations somehow sheltered from prosecution for criminal wrongdoing???

  MORE OPINION, stealing from thieves is still theft, regardless of which direction it is going in, and it should be prosecuted according. Creating an organization to orchestrate this should fall under the RICO act.

• [Anonymous]

  The problem is the MPAA is trying to accomplish a couple different things.

  1 – They do not want to have to fund protecting their own IP. They seek to shift the cost to search engines, cyberlockers, and anyone else other than them. They want the benefits but not the responsibilities required to protect it.

  2 – They want the news coverage so they can create opportunities for elected officials to do soundbites about how we have to protect this most valuable property even if we have to step on people’s rights.

  3 – This is only about the money. They believe that all of the cyberlockers are multibillion operations and they want that money in their pockets. If they are successful it is only because of their IP not because being able to share files quickly and easily is a market demand being filled.

  4 – Unlike torrent swarms they have no way, other than expensive legal fights, to get the details of the users accessing the files so they can offer them a sub$3000 settlement offer to line their pockets. So they will get the congress critters to create a new law making everyone keep records for as long as the media corps want them available for free, and make them carry the costs.

  We are rapidly approaching a point in history where the people are going to lay down and get screwed or stand up and remind the congress critters that they work for the people, not for the “corpeople constructs” with the most money. They lie about the damage it causes, they fictionalize their losses, and demand the removal of the peoples rights. It is time to stop protecting the old business models at the expense of innovation.

• [Anonymous]

  So why doesn’t the MPAA get off its sue-happy ass and create a competing system? If people are willing to pay for content, doesn’t that mean that the MPAA can co-opt the system, offer a steadier and better product, and make money themselves?

  The sooner they accept no one wants to go to an actual movie theater anymore to see most films, the better.

• [Anonymous]

  Substantial Non-Infringing Use