Hotfile Sues Warner Bros. For Copyright Fraud and Abuse

Found on TorrentFreak on Tuesday, 13 September 2011
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The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software.

"Warner continued to make these misrepresentations even after Hotfile explicitly brought this rampant abuse to Warner’s attention, ruling out any possibility that its wrongful actions were accidental or unknowing,” Hotfile writes in its complaint.

Hotfile has repeatedly notified Warner about this issues, but instead of improving the takedown system the number of fraudulent takedowns only increased.

“By increasing the number of links it was taking down with Hotfile’s SRA, and indeed falsely inflating these numbers, Warner was increasing the number of times it could present ecommerce links to Hotfile’s users for its own enrichment,” Hotfile argues in the complaint.

Sadly Warner will probably get away with this since they have the deeper pockets. However, I doubt there is any legally binding reason to make the takedown tool easy to use. Hotfile could add several captchas to block bots from doing automatic deletions and require an explanation describing why the file needs to be removed.