joegratz.net

LokiTorrent Lawsuit: No Hoax

22 Comments

1. Not again..
   It would sure be nice to hear from Webber himself…

   Comment by ao — February 24, 2005 @ 9:04 pm

2. ALL court and legal documents in the US have numbering down the side.
   I would ask where you got this document as it seems to have been copied (re the little messy bits at the edges of the pages). However, the numbering is missing! Someone playing tricks maybe?

   Comment by Freddy Fingers — February 24, 2005 @ 9:08 pm

3. fuck the MPAA

   Comment by Anonymous — February 24, 2005 @ 9:46 pm

4. Thanks for posting those documents. Original sources are wonderful.

   I wonder about the million dollars in damages payment. I assume he doesn’t have anywhere near that amount.

   Comment by Seth Finkelstein — February 24, 2005 @ 11:20 pm

5. ah it seems that the researcher did not do enough… well research and has given a negative image to the owner of Lokitorrent. It’s too bad that they had to go down, but it does make me wonder exactly what did happen.. is he going to use that money for lawyer fees? By the looks of it he is going to need a large sum of cash to save his ass from the multitude of lawyers the MPAA has attacked him with. Kudos on your research and here is a heads up to everyone who believed (without proper research) that the owner had taken the money and ran with it. Now the big question: is he going to release those server logs? It would make a great case of morality if they offered him a lesser fine in exchange for the server logs… put that on reality tv.

   Comment by dubbers — February 25, 2005 @ 2:04 am

6. also i will submit this to slashdot for publicity

   Comment by dubbers — February 25, 2005 @ 2:04 am

7. Great work. In this broadband internet age, everyone seems to jump the gun. I’d like to see a retraction from Slashdot, how about you?

   Comment by Nate — February 25, 2005 @ 2:13 am

8. followed your link from;
   http://earthreactor.com/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=2146
   I would really like to see those docs against webber but your links don’t work how bout a e-mail with a good link or maybe just attach the pdf. And good job doing the legwork on this. -john

   Comment by John — February 25, 2005 @ 5:24 am

9. I can’t believe it! It says that he has waived the right to appeal or make an injunction against this decision. Its that possible to do? I thought everybody has the right to appeal. Maybe not in America.

   Comment by Officer bar_brady — February 25, 2005 @ 5:50 am

10. Glad somebody knows their shit.

    Comment by Twig — February 25, 2005 @ 7:17 am

11. Mr. Bar_Brady: He had the right to appeal. Then he agreed to give it up, voluntarily. Nearly all legal rights can be waived voluntarily. And besides, since Webber agreed to this settlement, appeal would be pointless.

    Mr. Fingers: Not all legal documents have numbers down the side. Feel free to download the documents from the court yourself and check.

    Dubbers: There is no fine being imposed; Mr. Webber has been charged with no crime. He’s agreed to pay some money to some movie studios to get them to drop their civil lawsuit against him.

    The real lesson? People engaged in unethical behavior like profiting from the illegal copying of movies sometimes do other unethical things that you don’t like. So don’t give them your money. Or trust them. Give the money to the EFF instead. They’ll make the best use of it.

    Comment by Joe Gratz — February 25, 2005 @ 11:56 pm

12. LOL. Me laughs at the dickheads that dontaed to his court fund.

    You stupid people. I could smell scam from Australia. This just proves that humanity is such a stupid race

    Comment by Bradley — February 26, 2005 @ 3:51 am

13. http://beast.spookyshaunt.co.nz/MPAA.complain.against.LokiTorrent.pdf

    this was on lokitorrent.com awhile back

    Comment by BeastNZ — February 26, 2005 @ 8:21 am

14. Slyck News Is linking your Blog in a Story surounding your research into the ‘missing’ Lokitorrent Judgement
    http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=686

    Comment by Matt — February 26, 2005 @ 9:01 am

15. Thx for nailing slashdot’s lame reiteration of the misinformed earthreactor story. One question though persists in the minds of the concerned, or maybe the paranoid: there is reportedly a ‘gag order’. But it doesn’t seem to be documented. Is this usual, no big deal, or cause for doubt…or, what basically?

    Anyway, thx again for bringing some news to this story and wiping out some of the gossip.

    cheers

    Comment by phil — February 26, 2005 @ 10:50 am

16. Thanks for doing the sleuthing. I hadn’t seen this site in the past, and I’ve enjoyed reading it and will definitely bookmark it and return to it.

    However, I must take issue with your characterizing things as not being a hoax. It is the case that these are real legal documents, certainly, and that the motions have been gone through. But surely you must have noticed that the date on the complaint and the date on the settlement are the same date. Real law suits are not settled on the same date that they are filed. It’s quite clear that the settlement was decided upon before the suit was filed, in which case the obvious question is: why file a complaint? If both parties are amenable, why not just draw up a contract? He agrees to pay restitution and so forth and they agree to for-go legal action against him. No need to involve the court system.

    Clearly, the only reason why this complaint exists is so that he will legally be able to claim that they sued him in the event that people bring action against him for fraud. It also seems highly unlikely that he will pay the companies which sued him the 1 million dollars specified in the settlement, so one must also question the truthfulness of the settlement. It’s quite possible that the parties involved have, in fact, committed perjury.

    Anyway, thanks for digging up the documents and setting the record straight about whether or not their was a lawsuit, but this certainly doesn’t mean that the lawsuit isn’t a hoax, just that if it’s a hoax, it’s one which did the appropriate legal paperwork.

    Keith Irwin

    Comment by Keith Irwin — February 27, 2005 @ 1:34 am

17. [...] e article about it * The whole MPAA vs LokiTorrent case is a bit blurry, also check out this site which states that they are in fact in trouble with the MPAA, b [...]

    Pingback by DiZASTiX’s Realm » Blog Archive » Finding torrents post SuprNova — February 27, 2005 @ 7:54 pm

18. Keith –

    The reason for most of the strangeness that you noted is that the complaint I posted wasn’t the original complaint. As it says, it’s the *amended* complaint. Initially, the studios just sued John Does #1-10, saying that whoever was running LokiTorrent was infringing. They didn’t know Webber ran it yet. Because they sued this Doe, they were able to subpoena information about the owner of the site (from web hosting companies and the like, I suppose). Then, once they knew who Webber was, they amended the complaint, replacing “John Doe” with “Edward Webber”. (For a little while after you file a civil complaint, you can ask the court for permission to amend it. That’s totally normal.)

    By the time they amended the complaint, they already had contacted and settled with Webber. So it’s not weird that the amended complaint and the judge’s order approving the settlement were signed on the same day.

    Why didn’t they just drop the lawsuit and sign a contract with Webber having basically the same terms as the settlement? Why get a judge involved? Well, for one, they’d already filed the lawsuit, long before they knew who Webber was. While they could withdraw the complaint, this didn’t really take much more trouble. The real reason they wrote up a settlement and had it approved by the judge instead of just signing a contract is the possible remedies if Webber didn’t abide by the terms of the agreement. Violating a court-imposed injunction gets you criminally charged with contempt of court. Breaching a private contract ordinarily means you just have to pay the other party money to make them as well-off as they would have been if you hadn’t breached. Under a contract, if Webber put LokiTorrent back up, he’d have just one more big bill from the MPAA that he couldn’t pay. Under the court-approved settlement, if Webber put LokiTorrent back up, he’d risk going to jail.

    I stand by my characterization of the lawsuit as “not a hoax”; the studios really did sue Webber in a real federal court and he’s likely to pay real damages. In my book, when the studios sue, it’s no hoax.

    Comment by Joe Gratz — February 28, 2005 @ 1:03 am

19. I see. Thank you for clearing that up.

    I had actually noted that it described itself as an amended complaint, but I guess I dismissed that since it didn’t have any indication of what was actually being amended, which I expected it to. But then, although I’ve become fairly familiar with many aspects of law simply as a matter of civics over time and can read legalese better than most, I’m not very familiar with the particulars of what’s filed when and how. I’m not a lawyer or legal student, myself.

    I was wondering if you’d be willing to dig up the document from the initial complaint. I’m curious as to what the actual time-line was on this.

    Thanks.

    Keith Irwin

    Comment by Keith Irwin — February 28, 2005 @ 5:42 pm

20. No problem. The rest of the documents filed with the court are here:

    http://unicast.org/stuff/lokitorrent/

    (I got mine straight from PACER, rest assured.)

    The initial complaint is here:

    http://unicast.org/stuff/lokitorrent/docket-1.pdf

    Note that all they knew when they filed the complaint was the IP address of http://www.lokitorrent.com.

    Joe

    Comment by Joe Gratz — March 2, 2005 @ 12:43 pm

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