|
SAN FRANCISCO: A TorrentSpy lawyer vowed Thursday to
appeal a $110-million legal judgment against the website for
directing people to unauthorized online copies of films and
television shows.
Valence Media shut down its
TorrentSpy website in March and filed for bankruptcy last week in
the face of a lawsuit brought against it by the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA).
The Los Angeles federal judge
presiding over the case ruled on Wednesday that TorrentSpy should
pay $110 million in damages for its role in online piracy of
copyrighted motion pictures and television shows.
“This substantial money
judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these
sites,” said MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman.
TorrentSpy lawyer Ira Rothken
counters that the judge’s decision stemmed from Valence’s
refusal to reveal the identities of website users and that whether
the website infringed copyrights was never resolved in court.
TorrentSpy sent “spiders”
crawling the Internet to find torrent files without asking their
contents and then compiled online addresses in a public index hosted
on computer servers in the Netherlands.
Torrent files get their name from
the software protocol used to create them and are commonly used to
store film, television and other digital video on home computers of
people who share them in “peer-to-peer” networks.
The judge ruled Valence culpable
of “vicarious” copyright infringement along with inducing and
contributing to such acts, according to the MPAA. A court order was
issued barring TorrentSpy from operating.
Film piracy costs the worldwide
motion picture industry more than $18 billion annually, with
$7billion of that revenue loss blamed on illegal distribution of
movies on the Internet, according to the MPAA.
--AFP
|
