>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
yes dghandi, tell us your story.

my story (edited to comply with my settlement agreement):

Years ago I never went to movies or watched TV, never gave the entertainment industry a dime.

One day while taking the bus to work I saw a front page article about the MPAA whining about being beat down by this new tech called bittorrent. Well being a tech geek I had to check it out.

So I started torrenting movies, mostly stuff I had not heard of, but the whole thing got addictive. I set up a server with a TV out card and built a cable channel for the house, standard geeky obsession with new tech.

Since I spent so much time playing with movies, and catching some crappy 0-day cams I actually started paying to go to the theater. I really have no problem morally with doing something which costs the industry nothing, and works as very good advertising in terms of getting me to pay for their product, but they disagree.

I try to have good netticate, which in bit-torrent world is keeping a ratio around 3:1, which also exposes one to the torrent scanners who gather data for the MPAA's lawyers.

The MPAA has been massaging copyright law from the point where it punished market competition, to the point where it punishes non-market activity. Now the law says, even if you cause no harm, or even have a positive effect on the companies profits you still owe them $150K per copy of a work which you distribute. The only legal defense is that you did not do it, and I'm really not willing to commit perjury, especially when I don't feel I have done anything immoral.

So, if this is your situation, you basically get a letter that says "you owe us $300k", but with a phone number you can call to make a settlement. Obviously you call a lawyer, they tell you that going to court, even if the lawyer works for free and you win (not a real possibility) will cost $10-20k in court costs alone. The lawyer also says that if you try to pursue court proceedings, every computer in your home (I lived with many people, so that's a lot of hardware) will be seized, and then destroyed in the process of collecting evidence, and you wold have to pay for the computer forensics that destroyed your own stuff.

The MPAA offers to settle under terms I am not allowed to discuss, but which is significantly less costly for the defendant then going to court and winning.

Obviously the only economically reasonable choice is to pay the settlement, since they have twisted the law to make any other option absurd. The law is being used as a tool of extortion. I did spend about a week considering donating all my money to the EFF, quiting my job and trying to take them on in court, and then spending the rest of my life as an itinerant anti copyright activist, so they couldn't get a cent out of me, but in the end it seemed like a hollow sort of martyrdom.

I have to say that emotionally the most disturbing thing about the whole situation for me is that they would destroy everybodies computers, no matter the outcome of the case, if I even dared to challenge them.

So now I won't watch anything any of the MPAA studios(or subsidiaries) put out, and I consider them a waste of celluloid. They got all the money from me they are ever going to get, and given what it cost them to get that money in torrent-spies and lawyers, they would have made much more money if they had just left me alone.

Note that my refusal to go to the theater also significantly reduces my GF's likelihood to go either, so they loose more then my money, and I hope other people consider this situation when they decide where to spend their entertainment budget.