 | |
Type of site | Archived screen capture |
|---|---|
| Owner | Unknown |
| Created by | Unknown |
| URL | Showstash.com (inactive) |
Showstash.com was a website that cataloged hyperlinks to television shows, cartoons, anime, and feature films. In July 2007, ShowStash.com was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement, and the site was subsequently shut down [1] .
The Showstash.com domain name was registered on October 30, 2006 [2] and the website was first available to the public two weeks later. It listed 2093 episodes of 247 shows when it launched. [3]
The site was shut down after the MPAA sued its owners in July 2007 [1] (Disney Enterprises v. Showstash.com). According to the judges, Showstash.com was guilty of contributory copyright infringement because they «searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows». The total copyrights damages caused by Showstash.com was estimated at $2.7 million, [4] [5] [6] an estimation based on 108 titles linked from Showstash.com that brings the per-title damage cost to $25,000. Following the court order, the defendants confidentially settled a smaller fine with the plaintiff, [7] namely Columbia Pictures, Disney Enterprises, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal City Studios, Universal City Studios Productions and Warner Bros Entertainment. [8]
Cinematube.net was also caught in this trial. While this gave a lot of publicity to little-known websites such as Showstash.com, the MPAA still hit them hard in its push to crack down all illegal distribution of copyrighted content online. The MPAA sued Showstash.com two weeks after it was awarded $110 million in damages in its legal battle against TorrentSpy. [4] Pullmylink.com, Peekvid.com, Youtvpc.com, Ssupload.com, and Videohybrid.com were also targets of the MPAA, who identified them as «one-stop shops for copyright infringement». [9] [10] Right after the Showstash trial, the MPAA went after Fomdb.com and Movierumor.com. [11]
Showstash.com's traffic had reached more than 2 million unique visitors monthly before closing down. Currently, the domain name Showstash.com redirects to an open proxy service and has no content for streaming or download.
ShowStash.com contained a collection of links to multimedia organized into four main categories: television shows, anime, cartoons, and movies. The ShowStash.com update process, performed daily, involved verifying reported links and adding new video links submitted by users both on the community forums and via the submission form. ShowStash.com relied on its users to maintain the site; its staff was in constant communication with frequent visitors by way of the forums. It was powered by a custom PHP script that was custom developed for the site.
A screener (SCR) is an advance screening of a film or television series sent to critics, awards voters, video stores, and other film industry professionals, including producers and distributors. Director John Boorman is credited with creating the first Oscar screeners to promote his film The Emerald Forest in 1985.
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TorrentSpy was a popular BitTorrent indexing website. It provided .torrent files, which enabled users to exchange data between one another.
This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.
You can click, but you can't hide is a propaganda campaign run jointly by several international associations, most notably the MPAA and the GVU, as part of the larger "Respect Copyrights" campaign against peer-to-peer file sharing of motion pictures. The associations have long alleged that Internet file sharing, or maintaining a file sharing tracker, network or search engine, constitutes copyright infringement because the practice hurts their profits.
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The use of the BitTorrent protocol for sharing of copyrighted content generated a variety of novel legal issues. While the technology and related platforms are legal in many jurisdictions, law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies are attempting to address this avenue of copyright infringement. Notably, the use of BitTorrent in connection with copyrighted material may make the issuers of the BitTorrent file, link or metadata liable as an infringing party under some copyright laws. Similarly, the use of BitTorrent to procure illegal materials could potentially create liability for end users as an accomplice.
TorrentFreak (TF) is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing, as well as on copyright infringement and digital rights.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, as well as the video streaming service Netflix. Founded in 1922 as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and known as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) from 1945 until September 2019, its original goal was to ensure the viability of the American film industry. In addition, the MPAA established guidelines for film content which resulted in the creation of the Production Code in 1930. This code, also known as the Hays Code, was replaced by a voluntary film rating system in 1968, which is managed by the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA).
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Hotfile was a one-click file hosting website founded by Hotfile Corp in 2006 in Panama City, Panama. On December 4, 2013, Hotfile ceased all operations, the same day as signing a $4 million settlement with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the settlement had previously been misreported as $80 million.
Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, 715 F. Supp. 2d 481, is a United States district court case in which the Southern District of New York held that Lime Group LLC, the defendant, induced copyright infringement with its peer-to-peer file sharing software, LimeWire. The court issued a permanent injunction to shut it down. The lawsuit is a part of a larger campaign against piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Popcorn Time is a multi-platform, free software BitTorrent client that includes an integrated media player. The applications provide a free "alternative" to subscription-based video streaming services such as Netflix. Popcorn Time uses sequential downloading to stream video listed by several torrent websites, and third party trackers can also be added manually. The legality of the software depends on the jurisdiction.
Mp3skull was a website that provided direct download links to MP3 files located on third-party sites. It was founded in 2010 and the site has been the subject of controversy for helping users to find unauthorized copies of copyrighted music.
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