A car salesman who supplemented his income by running a cottage industry, illegally selling adult pornography, has been given a suspended jail sentence.
Simon Pearce also received a hefty £10,000 court costs order and will have to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.
When trading standards officers visited his home they found Pearce had a stock of 5,500 copied DVDs.
He had a price catalogue of "thousands and thousands" of titles.
The 44-year-old, of Newstead Way, Loughborough, pleaded guilty to possessing unclassified recordings and also British Board of Film Classification R-18 recordings for the purpose of supplying them, between January 2009 and January last year.
The High Court ordered O2 to hand over the personal details of more than 9,000 O2 broadband subscribers to Golden Eye International and the pornography firm Ben Dover Productions.
Ben Dover is a pseudonym of Lindsay Honey, a British performer, director and producer of pornography, who set up Golden Eye International in 2009.
The judge however said his intention to demand £700 from each of the O2 customers he accuses of unlawful filesharing was “unsupportable”.
The judge also said the letter Golden Eye International intended to send demanding payment was “capable of causing unnecessary distress because it could be read as an implicit threat of publicity once proceedings have been commenced”. It intended to threaten those who did not pay the damages with court action.
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The personal data of more than a million pornography connoisseurs has been exposed, after the YouPorn site was found to be storing email address and passwords on a public-facing server.
It appears that the information was being stored in a debug log file with a publicly accessible URL, according to security expert Anders Nilsson of the Swedish firm EuroSecure. Nilsson noted that, judging from the contents of the log file, it had been publicly accessible since around November 2007, and had been showing new registration data ever since then.
"For a security professional it is baffling how coders working on a website with such sensitive content can make mistakes of this magnitude," Nilsson wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "Allegedly hundreds of megabytes of data has been secured by people with unknown goals. Cyber criminals can easily go through these e-mail addresses and match them with passwords and this way gain access to e-mail accounts."
According to the security expert, the debug log file was found on Tuesday, probably by "someone sweeping websites for publicly accessible, but hidden folders".
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IOWA CITY, Iowa — A judge has ordered the operators of a popular pornographic website to pay $4 million for copyright infringement to an Iowa-based adult film company — a ruling that should serve as a deterrent to others who pirate content online, a lawyer said Monday.
U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett in Cedar Rapids entered the judgment last week against Mark and Mina Faragalla of Beaumont, Calif., who operated PornVisit.com. He ordered them to pay the maximum damages of $150,000 per infringement to Norwood, Iowa-based FraserSide IP LLC, a subsidiary of Nevada-based adult entertainment company Private Media Group, Inc., and to stop stealing its copyrighted works.
"Simply having the word 'million' in a judgment sends a message — it is going to be better to comply with copyright laws than to make money from the work of others," said Phoenix attorney Chad Belville, who represents FraserSide. "The only way online piracy will truly be slowed or stopped is to take the financial incentive away."
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File-sharing and the unlicensed distribution of copyrighted works has been the subject of a massive amount of copyright litigation. Copyright trolls argue “willful infringement” as the basis for legal action, which almost always results in settlements. Defendants are eager to avoid the costs of litigation and pass on the obligation of paying statutory damages. Plaintiffs prefer the more certain and profitable outcome of a settlement to the tiresome necessity of proving standing.
Yet, it would appear that one such defendant has decided to challenge copyright trolls over the bullying on the ground that there should be no copyright protection for the particular downloaded works. Hard Drive Productions had sued Liuxia Wong over the illegal downloading of Hard Drive’s adult work “Amateur Allure Jen.” Ms. Wong chose retaliation and is now suing Hard Drive seeking declaratory relief against Hard Drive’s harassment. Ms. Wong is arguing that she did not download the adult work and that she could not infringe on Hard Drive’s copyrights as “Amateur Allure Jen” is not entitled to copyright protection.
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