[Major gay porn site sues for illegal downloading] Be very very careful.

They've been very aggressive. They recently got a $250,000 judgment against a mid-20s guy who was simply making their vids available on bittorent, and they have a half dozen other judgments against other people for similar sorts of things.

There are also a number of other gay adult companies (and straight ones) that have recently banded together to combat piracy in similar ways; the industry is suffering and a lot of companies have gone out of business due in large part to piracy, so they are finally striking back.

So... sharing and downloading content is probably not the brightest idea. It's a much smaller market than music theft, so the likelihood of getting caught is a lot higher.

 

My understanding is the people such as the site owner in question are going after people sharing videos, not simply having them on a hard drive. But... keep in mind that if you use bittorrent, the default for bittorent is to share every file you download, so unless you explicitly move it out of the sharing directory then it will probably be shared with others.

Likewise, the way bittorrent works, as you are downloading a file, before it's even complete, you are sharing portions of that file with other users, so you're sharing it at the moment you start downloading it... so even if you move the file out of the sharing directory on completion of download, you're still taking a risk.

 

But keep in mind that if you're downloading using a peer-to-peer client, it *is* sharing while the file is downloading, at least with all the clients I've seen. That's one of the ways that bittorrent manages to download so efficiently. It's only after the download is complete that you can move the file out of the sharing directory, or turn off sharing. So you still have to be careful.

And you can ignore the letters from these companies at your peril; the ones I know of do actually file suit on at least a portion of the people they serve letters on, and usually the settlement is a lot less expensive than even filing the first answer to the lawsuit; even if you win in court, in the US at least, you won't get your legal fees back, and a full-blown trial could easily run $50,000-100,000.

 

(a) it is most certainly illegal to view, copy, download, or upload content you don't own or have license to use/share.

(b) If you do, in fact, copy, download, or upload content you don't own, any copyright holder can, legally, sue you, or threaten to sue you for copyright infringement. The statutory fine for copyright infringement, which includes using the content without permission, uploading, downloading, etc., is $25,000 *per infringement* which has been interpreted by some courts to mean $25,000 for each song or movie or whatever on your hard drive that you cannot prove you purchased.

(c) It is very rare to find attorneys who will defend these cases without cost unless there is a significant civil liberties issue or something of that nature. A few cases have been taken by someone pro-bono because of the interesting legal issues, but that seems to be on the wane recently. Copyright infringement by itself is pretty open-and-shut, and there's not much of a meaningful opportunity to gain a money judgement against the people suing an infringer, so I'd be pretty surprised if anyone competent in the legal field would take such a case for free... and even if they did, there are still court and other legal costs (expert witnesses, etc) which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

People who make flippant statements like "Oh, you can find someone who will defend you" or "Oh, you can just sue him" have generally not tried to sue someone or been sued. It is enormously expensive, time-consuming, and draining, and even if you win, you don't get your time back and often not even all of your expenses.

So the argument that it's illegal to sue someone for downloading or other theft of intellectual property is flat-out wrong, and even if it were not, the costs of defending against a wrongful case, at least in the US, could bankrupt many people.