Jump to content

Grandpa is sued over grandson's downloads


kopi_O

Recommended Posts

MILWAUKEE (AP) — A 67-year-old man who says he doesn't even like watching movies has been sued by the film industry for copyright infringement after a grandson of his downloaded four movies on their home computer.

The Motion Picture Association of America filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence of Racine, seeking as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over the Internet file-sharing service iMesh.

The suit was filed after Lawrence refused a March offer to settle the matter by paying $4,000.

"First of all, like I say, I guess I'd have to plead being naive about the whole thing," he said.

"I personally didn't do it, and I wouldn't do it. But I don't think it was anything but an innocent mistake my grandson made."

Lawrence said his grandson, who was then 12, downloaded The Incredibles, I, Robot, The Grudge, and The Forgotten in December, without knowing it was illegal to do so.

The Racine man said his grandson downloaded the movies out of curiosity, and deleted the computer files immediately. The family already owned three of the four titles on DVD, he said.

"I can see where they wouldn't want this to happen, but when you get up around $4,000 ... I don't have that kind of money," Lawrence said. "I never was and never will be a wealthy person."

Kori Bernards, vice president of corporate communications for MPAA, said the movie industry wants people to understand the consequences of Internet piracy. She said the problem is the movies that were downloaded were then available to thousands of other users on the iMesh network.

"Basically what you are doing when you use peer-to-peer software is you are offering someone else's product that they own to thousands of other people for free, and it's not fair," Bernards said.

Illegal downloading costs the movie industry an estimated $5.4 billion a year, she said.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpoli...-download_x.htm

Damn MPAA :unsure:

Link to comment
Share on other sites


  • Replies 2
  • Views 2.2k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

It's the fact of life. You win some you lose some.

Be careful when using the Internet, and especially P2P, the most dangerous method ever :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites


  • 1 month later...

they are a bunch of a holes its not like everyone is downloading the movies lik ehe said they owned 3 of the four so they should owe the mpa what 20 dollars at most what are they gonna do about the people like me who go to the store rent the movie and burn it as a fulll copy they cant do shit or what are they gonna do if i rip a dvd upload it to rapidshare or something they are abunch of greedy assholes

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...