A film company suing 5,865 BitTorrent downloaders over the flick Nude Nuns with Big Guns doesn’t own the rights to the movie, according to court documents and interviews. Incentive Capital of Utah took ownership last month of the B-rated flick about a sister who is “one Bad Mother.” Yet two weeks after Incentive Capital foreclosed and assumed Camelot Distribution Group’s titles because of an allegedly soured loan, Camelot filed a mass copyright lawsuit (.pdf) on behalf of Nude Nuns claiming it owned the rights.
In a Thursday story, Wired.com featured Camelot Distribution Group’s legal tactics as part of a nationwide practice by small-time movie houses trying to extract legal settlements — in the $3,000 range — from as many as 130,000 alleged BitTorrent downloaders across the country. The story questioned Camelot’s and others’ legal methods, but assumed Camelot owned the film.
“They don’t presently own that film,” Joseph Pia, Incentive Capital’s attorney, said Friday in a telephone interview from his Utah office. “We are the legal title owners. ”
God, Guns, and Bikers… The heck with the movie, the poster is worth the price of admission.
I have made some suggestions to studios that they engage more aggressively in providing virus infested versions of films for illegal downloaders. At least one studio has expressed interest in this.
In the future, studios will probably have it in their contracts that they retain the right to sue movie downloaders and retain all revenues thereof. Kind of like movie merchandising rights, but only applying to litigation fees and fines. And since that would be an unknown amount of revenue, it would have to be negotiated as a separate factor in new movie contracts. What’s next? Making such fees a Futures Commodity?