The MPAA has taken the next step in its bid to control the internet by moving on from taking down pirates, suspected pirates, and confused elderly women; to attacking legitimately useful web services. Services of the type relied upon and used heavily by internet power users. Services like HotFile.
THR reports that the MPAA is suing Hotfile for copyright-infringement. They claim the service is “responsible for the theft of thousands of MPAA member companies' movies and TV shows” and that their service “encourages and incentivizes users to upload files containing illegal copies”.
The first part of their claim may or may not be true. The second part doesn't seem to exist in the same reality as the rest of us.
Hotfile is an upload service. What they do is allow you to upload large files and store them on the internet. It’s not bittorrent or a file sharing service. Other people can’t see or use the file you upload. You upload the file, they give you a direct link to that file, and then you can download it wherever and whenever you need it using only that link. Or better still you can send that link in an email, as a way to mail files that are just too large to send as an attachment. It’s an incredibly useful, almost critical internet service and Hotfile is one of several providers doing it for free.
There are at least half a dozen other services doing the same thing, sites like Megaupload and Sendspace. Odds are if you’re a regular internet user you’ve either received files or sent files using one of these services at some point or another, and the files you shared were not copyrighted material. In fact here at Cinema Blend HQ, publicists for many of Hollywood’s biggest studios frequently use services just like Hotfile to send us the authorized trailer files or posters we share with all of you. The MPAA wants to put a stop to it.
Suing HotFile because someone, somewhere, has at some point or another used it to share copyrighted files is like suing the postal service for allowing people to mail bootleg DVDs through first class mail. HotFile fills exactly that same niche on the internet. Like the postal service they simply give people a way to send things directly from one person to another, or more often than not to themselves. And like the postal service, they don’t read your mail before they send it, if they did we wouldn’t use their service.
The internet needs HotFile and services like it. The MPAA and their lawyers on the other hand, don’t like it because they can’t control it. The MPAA says, “their files are indeed 'hot,' as in 'stolen.'” So I guess we’re to assume they started with Hotfile instead of Sendspace, because their legal team hoped they could use the company’s name to make them seem like criminals instead of what they really are, which is Speedy Delivery Mr. McFeely.
Imagine if the MPAA had been around when Jim Casey and Claude Ryan took the first steps towards starting UPS back in 1907. Today I probably wouldn’t be able to send a forty-pound desk chair from Portland to Dallas in under four days. Instead, I’d have to get in my car and drive it, just to be sure that the box with the chair in it didn’t also contain a copy of Nic Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous.
