Evan Stone’s Battle Against Gay Porn Movie Piracy on Torrent Sites
Evan Stone, an anti-piracy lawyer from Texas, has started his campaign against P2P users illegally sharing gay porn via torrents. He has filed over 4,500 cases against gay porn sharers and studios, possibly filing every case in Texas.
Stone gives judges IP address lists for them to write subpoenas to Internet provider, who then have to provide the names and addresses of the subscribers owning these IP addresses. Once the lists are acquired, settlement letters are sent to the file sharers to indicate the amount needed to prevent Stone from filing a named lawsuit against them. These lawsuits could cost around $150,000 per copyright infringement count.
Stone claims that his crusade is aimed to protect the artists. His crusade began with gay pornographic movies – it has now spread to the anime community.
Evan Stone Begins His Crusade
Stone’s crusade began when he started a small record label that was Internet-based and artist-focused. He aimed at having a 50-50 split with his artist, but the label soon failed. They were overcome by the Napster file sharing program and had to close down the business.
Having a degree in film and five years experience as an app developer, his skills were more than adequate to trace and be in pursuit of net-based illegal users. When he later attended law school, he specialized in entertainment law and soon became the in-house counsel for FUNimation. As his duties as legal counsel, he sent take down notices to anime distributors and moved forward with legal actions against some. Usually, just flooding the file sharing websites with fake files posing as real anime movies was their way of ensuring that the copyrights were not violated.
The downside of this was, for torrent sites, they are mostly overseas and cannot be prosecuted due to jurisdictional problems.
Stone then also joined Locas Entertainment in 2010, who aimed to stop piracy of their gay-porn materials. This venture showed significant results.
In September 2010, client Mick Haig Productions filed a lawsuit against 670 file-swappers, but the identities of these file-swappers are yet to be identified. The only thing they held were ISPs of violators.
Evan Stone Pushes Forward
Stone made a mistake of sending out unapproved subpoenas to users. The cases were dismissed, but Stone made grudging comments about how the judge, as well as the defense attorneys who opted to represent the unknown users, were “…renowned for defending Internet piracy and renowned for their general disregard for intellectual property law.”
Stone considers himself as different from the rest of the lawyers in his field. His vast knowledge of the entertainment industry, as well as the Internet and specifically of BitTorrent, allows him inside knowledge in filing separate lawsuits to those specific people who are working together, as well as in isolating users who have been violating the intellectual property law.
After trolling sites like isohunt.com, kickasstorrents.com, and nyaatorrents.org, Stone’s investigator found 1,337 IP addresses to use in the case. The work paid off in favor of FUNimation. Each user with the One Piece episode having the file “b305c19f8e8bdab5e39b33a4ffc364a12beb110b” was sued.
As an interesting twist, Stone’s logo for his Copyright Defense Agency is similar to the East India Company Crest – which hired “mercenaries” which seafaring pirates were deathly scared of. For Evan Stone, his logo is a symbol of the anti-piracy movement he’s spearheading.
Computer Use in Legal Work: How Automation Software is Changing Law
Computers have been dominating the workplace these days. In this modern world, companies have become ultimately dependent on computers when it comes to continuous or automatic tasks where humans are no match with when it comes to process time. It completely eliminates the factor of “human error” and the inherent disadvantages of humans versus computers, such as the need to sleep or rest, the need for variety, etc.
Modern technology has enabled data to be sorted, collected and analyzed quickly and perhaps more cost-effectively when compared to hiring a number of people to work on them to collect and analyze the data and then paying them an appropriate level of wages and benefits.
Artificial intelligence allows data extraction, sorting and analysis to be tailored to the need of the client, wherein concepts that are identified using deduction processes can be added to their features. These developments are leading to law firms where the majority of staff will be limited to those operating the machines alone – not to people doing the gathering, sorting and analyzing of the data.
Computer logic has become very much intelligent and has become, at times, more than at par with how humans think. Computers are replacing workers at an alarming pace in many corporations – with the notable exception of tasks needing high levels of creativity.
Automation has become both good and bad for the economy. Automation progresses as technology progresses. Applications on computers are replacing the humans who used to do their jobs as computers do those jobs faster – often doing double the work that would be done in 8 hours by a single human being.
Economics will be greatly impacted by the changes in technology. Although it may not directly create unemployment since people tend to get more and more creative in finding something to do for work, the advancements in technology will continue to grow.
E-discover, an application being used in the legal world, uses both linguistic and sociological logic in order to filter information when users search for information. Apart from language, the social aspects implied in the searches will be included in the results.
Information-sifting has become so sophisticated that applications are already able to identify and deduce human interactions pertaining to events, telephone calls, emails, messages, etc.
They are also capable of decoding data used to cloak information being conveyed through these venues.
Cataphora, a software that analyzes data, is capable of “…showing who leaked information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an S.E.C. filing is being edited an unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways, by an unusual type or number of people.”
It is also programmed to identify human emotions implied within an e-mail or a call. Detection of shifts in human emotions can mean an alert implying illegal activities.
Clearwell, a program from a company in Silicon Valley, analyzes documents by searching for concepts, which simplifies material review in litigation. In an example given by the company, an analysis task that would normally take an entire work week could be cut down to 3 days using the software.
Although computers may seem to have advantages in certain types of analysis tasks, the “human factor” involved in identifying relevant information still remains in the hands of the person operating the computer.
Taking for example the case of Enron, wherein over five million messages had to be processed for the prosecution, Andrew McCallum decided to purchase a copy of the database for $10,000 for the University of Massachusetts and made it available for research, which made a huge impact within the legal community.
Although technology has its own limitations as when data need to be audited by a person, it still makes a huge impact in terms of how fast the work is delivered.
In terms of accuracy, humans commit errors – hence the term “human error”. This is what Mr. Herr found when he back-tracked and did analysis on previous jobs to check the difference in results between humans and computers. The 40% difference in accuracy he found in favor of computers leads us to think about companies, corporations and the legal profession as a whole, and the savings from expenses it will have when software as such is used.
Right to Be Forgotten in Google: How Europe Is Fighting to Be Deleted
If you’re in America, the Internet being the information superhighway often seems like it’s synonymous to “free information for all”. In Europe, on the other hand, the main push is heading toward the “right to be deleted” – the ability to delete all information about oneself on the internet.
This “right” has been approved in Spain, which led to Google deleting more than 80 people’s out of date search results (including doctors getting malpractice suit news coverage deleted once acquitted). Google’s legal counsel has actually published information about the case on his personal blog (Peter Fleischer: Privacy), which contains his personal views on the matter and not Google’s official position. Even so, the contents of the blog is a worthwhile take on the privacy movement being approved to allow people to an “Easy Delete” button of sorts, where users are being given the option to keep things private and away from the public eye.
Given that the Internet has become a venue seemingly giving a license to people in having unlimited access to other people’s private information, privacy movements such as this are moving forward to attempt to strengthen internet information security.
Fleischer, Google’s counsel, talks about the 8 points concerning the “right to be forgotten”. His concepts include how to make yourself unsearchable online, how tech giants retain your activities online and how long they are kept, and the expiration date of the information about you.
Fleischer also asks questions in his writing and leaves them open-ended for readers as conversation points. He also specifically points out the question regarding the legal issues in Italy, where Google executives, including him, are facing charges of invasion of privacy because of YouTube users.
The write-up is worth reading. It helps readers understand difficult to understand concept into layman’s terms.
In closing, the European Commission will be the one to decide whether the “right to be forgotten” will be approved or not. If the resolution of this issue will be acceptable to Google and other tech giants still remains a question to be answered.
