Anime downloaders sued in Singapore settle, disappear

[_leareth]

Anime downloaders sued in Singapore settle, disappear

The two men at the heart of the first online downloading lawsuit here have backed down from contesting the suit filed against them by a group of Japanese anime studios

Comments

[_leareth]

I see all this as big business laying a heavy stick on the few unlucky souls that they manage to net.

Certainly when it comes to individual downloaders I agree that it's the case, however I'd argue that going after specific uploaders as Nintendo did is a far better strategy than suing a few downloaders who were unlulcky enough to be picked out of the thousands of people who would have downloaded that file.

Although I guess they want to set up examples, the problem is if they consistently win, they might become far too litigous.

Some already are -- the RIAA and the movie industry in America being the best examples. It hasn't worked out for them too well either in terms of PR (the RIAA) or even legally (the movie industry a few weeks ago).

Besides, boundaries might become so broad that it might soon be a crime to even accidentally click on the wrong youtube video.

We'll have to see what's in the ACTA agreement, I suppose. As far as YouTube goes, however, they already have a take-down policy available to content owners to remove infringing media, and also they already automatically scan every file that's uploaded to see if it matches any logged copyrighted material, thus preventing the uploading in the first place.