Movie Studio Tells BitTorrent Users: Turn Yourselves In!

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Earlier this month we reported on a case brought by movie studio Liberty Media. They had been boasting to the media of a huge $250,000 settlement they had extracted from a BitTorrent user. After becoming suspicious on seeing this huge amount, a record in BitTorrent terms, TorrentFreak did some digging and came to a handful of conclusions.

Essentially the defendant in the case would not be paying anything like $250,000 and this amount had been touted around publicly in order to scare others into not sharing Liberty Media content. We concluded that since this was a single person lawsuit, and not those containing the hundreds and thousands of Does to which we have become accustomed, the motives behind this action were unlikely to be turn-piracy-into-profit.

We are reporting today that in the latter respect, we were far too generous.

Through the adult entertainment industry’s XBIZ Newswire, Liberty Media, via their subsidiary Corbin Fisher, have announced their latest anti-piracy scheme which demonstrates clearly why they were so concerned with their $250,000 settlement headline.

So, BitTorrent users, have you downloaded any Liberty Media movies? If so the company says it is time to hand yourselves in. From 8th February for 14 days, the kind folk at Liberty are offering an amnesty.

“Despite the fact that these people are stealing from us, we wanted to give them a chance to admit their mistakes and move on,” said Brian Dunlap, Corbin Fisher’s COO. “Therefore, we are offering this limited period where we will resolve these cases quickly and cheaply.”

That’s right folks. When handing yourselves in, you shouldn’t go empty handed but have a crisp stack of dollars in your fist totalling a cool $1000. In return the company says you won’t get sued and will get a year’s membership to their websites as a bonus.

For those that choose not to settle, Liberty is warning that it will soon launch lawsuits against BitTorrent users.

“A list of thousands of torrent users has already been provided to Corbin Fisher by an independent research group, and all of these users will be targeted in the first wave of lawsuits to be filed in February,” the company added. “Anyone who has shared Corbin Fisher content via a torrent site is encouraged to contact the company immediately.”

“The company won millions of dollars in court judgments in the past year, including a recent $250,000 judgment against a single torrent user,” Liberty warns.

And there you have it. That’s what the earlier boasting about the $250K settlement was for – propaganda and scare tactics to fuel their pay-up-or-else scheme.

Liberty Media’s lawyers are currently fairly busy. Earlier this month the movie studio filed suit against file-hosting site Hotfile and 1000 of its users. PayPal was also named as a defendant alongside calls for it to freeze Hotfile’s account. The court was also asked to seize Hotfile’s domain name.