James Delahunty
16 Mar 2005 7:01
Alexander Hanff got a bit of a nasty shock last Saturday morning when he opened his front door only to be served with a lawsuit by Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios and Warner Bros. The movie studios claim that he ran a BitTorrent hub where he made it possible for P2P users to download and share copyrighted movies with each other. In case you've been away for about the past four months, you probably are familiar with action taken by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) against several BitTorrent sites.
However, this situation is a little different. For example, he was served with a lawsuit by major Hollywood studios at his home in England on a Saturday morning. He also never administered the site, just paid for it. A group of online friends ran the site, and he has never even met one of them in person. Also, he has no plans in backing down and taking a beating from the studios, he plans to fight this battle.
"I am certainly not going to settle for anything that will compromise my integrity or the integrity of our members," Hanff said. "They can bankrupt me. I don't own a house, so they can't take it. I own a few guitars that they can have and an old inkjet printer. It's a waste of their time and of my time." He believes that BitTorrent hubs should be treated the same as P2P networks, which are generally considered legal. On a BitTorrent hub, there are no pirated files, only .torrent files which can be used along with a BitTorrent client to locate other BT users who can share the files with you.
It's also worth pointing out that BitTorrent is in fact completely legal software, as well as the many clients that have been written to use its technology also. BitTorrent is used for enormous amounts of legitimate purposes, such as distributing Open Source software at very low cost, which pretty much any BitTorrent hub is capable of doing. Hanff believes that hubs do pretty much the same thing as search engines do. "Torrent files don't contain any data," Hanff said. "This is a search engine scenario. Why aren't Google, Yahoo or Microsoft getting sued?"
Hanff shut down the site himself in December following the legal action taken on other BitTorrent hubs around the world. "The servers were wiped clean by the administrators," Hanff said. Another thing that upset him about this case is the fact that he never received even one complaint from any of the movie studios. "I never received a complaint, and I took the site down on my own," he said. "Now, three or four months later, I am getting served." The suit was actually filed on December 14th in the District Court for Northern Illinois.
"Though you may currently be located in the United Kingdom, you will be subject to the jurisdiction of the United State federal court by virtue of your engaging in BitTorrent activities through a US Internet Service Provider, among other reasons," the studios said via their lawyers. They claim that the site provided links to thousands of pirated files, many of them movies like "The Bourne Supremacy" and "Big Fish". They threaten to seek anywhere from $750 to $150,000 for each pirated movie that ended up listen on the hub.
There were never any ads on the site so Hanff never even made any money off the hub. He is going to appeal for legal advice and possibly financial support on his site, but is discouraged over the LokiTorrent case where users donated money, but the site didn't last very long. "Loki kind of ruined it for people like me, but I am going to appeal for legal advice on the web site," he said. This will be an interesting fight to watch.
Source:
The Register