20,000 BitTorrent Users Sued for Downloading Uwe Boll’s Far Cry

Posted by on March 31st, 2010   Filed under: Industry News, Internet
Source: Hollywood Reporter

bittorrentlawsuit

Downloaded any shitty movies lately? If so, you better watch your back. The US Copyright Group is on the warpath, and they’re coming to get you. Over 20,000 people have reportedly been slapped with copyright infringement lawsuits in a federal court over the past few weeks after downloading one of five movies: Uwe Boll’s Far Cry, Steam Experiment, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man or Call of the Wild 3D. Another 30,000 more cases are expected to be added in the near future for illegal downloads of an additional five titles that are probably equally as obscure.

This is the latest in a number of scare tactics being employed by movie studios to combat movie piracy via BitTorrent. In the past, they had filed some lawsuits against a few specific individuals, but this time around they decided to try a new strategy by targeting thousands of perpetrators at once. Also, although previously it was difficult to prove that the downloaded file was, in fact, the movie in question, and that the accused person was the one downloading it, they are now employing new technology from a German-based company that allows them to monitor torrents in real-time.

So why are they only targeting downloads of these relatively unknown movies, and what does this mean for the future? It seems that the MPAA has been adopting a wait and see approach, and if Internet Service Providers co-operate in releasing personal info for the suspected pirates, they will be going full steam ahead with even more lawsuits related to bigger studio films. Their goal is to create a revenue stream from what they see as “the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel”. Right now it’s unclear what their chances of success are, but the brute force method of dealing with piracy seems doomed to fail. Can they truly hope to scare people into abandoning illegal movie downloads, or at least make enough money to counteract the cost?



  • I’d hang myself before standing in a court of law and admit to watching Far Cry.

  • Heh. Warner Bros has been in this game for some time too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/30/warner-bros-hiring-student-spy

  • Are you safe if you live in a third world country?
    Is it possible they start chasing Iraqis for this also?

  • Matt in Maine

    Who would actually pay for that movie?

  • Christopher

    @Matt

    Americans obviously. I mean, Hollywood is where most of the shitty movies come from, and they earn a whole lot of money from them (Transformers, Avatar, etc. etc.)

  • Paul Andrews

    I think those that dowloaded Far Cry have suffered enough.

  • michael bay

    Its a retarded concept to go after people who have downloaded shitty movies. Wouldn’t you want to protect your ACTUAL money makers? Don’t they know that this “german software” can easily be downloaded to counter their attempts? Who’s giving them advice? Homer Simpson?

  • michael bay

    Wait! I figured out their advising CEO, its Timmaay from South Park.

  • Matt in Maine

    Well I suppose he’s got to make his money back somehow.

  • cib3k

    This was only a test. They’re trying to see if it works. They went for little movies because there is a small number of people downloading them and they can sue them all. Monitoring big movies means going after hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s too much. They start with little movies and if everything plays out well they continue with bigger ones. If they sued me, I’d try to organize the other victims and strike back with something like a class action suit. There would be a large number of people involved, and by putting little of our money together we’d be able to get the best lawyers money can buy. We’d probably not have any chance of winning, but we’d put up a fight serious enough for the MPAA and copyright groups to consider that it’s too much trouble going after us.

  • or you could just buy the films….

  • This doesn’t surprise me a bit but I won’t have any remorse from what I download. I usually buy-rent movies but find myself going thru the illegal interweb routes when looking for a specific, hard to track down movie that I wanna watch. I.E. was Triangle that the Film Junk folks recommended. I have a wide selection at my repertory video box but no chance of finding that.
    So until they come up with a viable web-based rental service (a la Netflix instant watch) that will provide an infinite catalog, I’ll continue to go thru the dark route.

  • Bubb

    It’s the same with the porn piracy davenport bs, these movies are cheaper to buy the copyrights for and therefore are easier to try and sue people over.
    Yes it’s stealing etc, but these techniques to take peoples money is a joke, its a bit like going behind the govenments system itself.

    Real laws or diffirent actions are needed.