Hollywood film studios are now targeting cyberlocker services with copyright lawsuits, signaling the beginning of the war over the cloud.
File-hosting service Hotfile has made a business out of giving users a place to store their content and share it with a select group of others, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said, in its suit, that this is the new haven for pirated movies.
"In less than two years, Hotfile has become one of the 100 most trafficked sites in the world," the MPAA said. "That is a direct result of the massive digital theft that Hotfile promotes."
According to the MPAA, Hotfile is operated by Florida resident Anton Titov. Titov was recently sued by Liberty Media Holdings, an adult film studio, for copyright infringement.
Cyberlocker services like Hotfile are seen as one of big alternatives to BitTorrent file-sharing services and have been growing in popularity ever since The Pirate Bay got into its first round of trouble.
With these services, users don't need to download or operate any software and, so far at least, there seems to be a much smaller risk of getting a virus or getting caught. Users simply log in to a locker service and watch or download whatever content was stored there by the original owner.
Some locker services actively filter out copyrighted content and don't let users upload it or share it, but others do not monitor the content being uploaded. The MPAA was careful to acknowledge the distinction since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions protect Internet service providers that obey certain rules. It also said that Hotfile doesn't even come close to qualifying for safe harbor protections.
Hotfile "openly discourages use of its system for personal storage," the MPAA said. "Hotfile's business model encourages [users] to upload files containing illegal copies of motion pictures and TV shows to its servers and to third-party sites."
The MPAA said Hotfile isn't engaged in 'free information' and that the service is simply piracy for-profit since it charges users a monthly fee.
Major record label EMI is currently suing MP3tunes.com, a digital locker that specializes in storing music.
MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson recently posted a recounting of oral arguments from EMI versus MP3tunes. Robertson said that during the 1.5 hour hearing, the judge asked tough questions on both sides, but Robertson was confident at least his service will be saved.
"From the questions you can see that the Judge is looking at our case in light of YouTube which was found to be legal," he wrote.
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