In the latest turn of events, a lawsuit filed against the BitTorrent owner – originally made on grounds of employment law – now finds a piracy angle to it.
It is being said that the allegations regarding the lawsuit could potentially involve movies such as The Lion King and a “fraudulent scheme” for making “a profit from the illegal piracy of those materials.”
TorrentFreak reports, back in 2018, Justin Sun of Rainberry Inc. ended up acquiring BitTorrent Inc.
Though the name Rainberry is not widely known among the common public, its subsidiaries such as TRON, TRX, and BitTorrent are frequently in the limelight.
Generally speaking, many crypto-based press organizations tend to closely follow Justin Sun and his activity as his Twitter feed contains more information about crypto than anything else.
In this regard, crypto press such as Coindesk started reporting about the employment law dispute between former Rainberry Inc. employees and Justin Sun, as well as another colleague of his.
Digging deeper into the piracy angle highlighted in the recent reports by a few media outlets, it was found that the lawsuit involving the aforementioned parties contained allegations against Rainberry Inc. for forcing employees to participate in pirating Hollywood movies.
The exhaustive 70-page lawsuit details several accounts of racism, witnessing physical violence, threats, and so on.
Here’s what the lawsuit read with regard to the piracy angle: “Defendant Justin Sun and his hand-picked mainland Chinese-born subordinates were engaged in illegal piracy of copyrighted materials for defendant Rainberry Inc., in order to make a profit from the illegal piracy of those materials, as well as other illegal and unscrupulous activities”.
Filed by Richard Hall and Lukasz Juraszek, former product manager and engineer respectively, it is being asserted that they were both subjected to harassment as they raised concern over the illegal copyright infringing activities.
What’s more, the lawsuit says that Hall and Juraszek were sacked from their positions at Rainberry Inc. as they refused to “engage in criminal violation of state and national statutes concerning piracy of intellectual property.”
Hall was initially touted to work as the Senior Director of Product Management on the BitTorrent File System (BTFS), an emerging file-sharing product.
However, Hall found loopholes in the file-sharing system wherein users could be rewarded with crypto tokens for “unknowingly storing and distributing inappropriate content”.
Hall states that he was demoted and later on, terminated from his position due to his efforts to highlight the potential downsides of the BTFS.
Regardless of Hall’s presence, the BTFS was implemented, after which Juraszek found infringing content such as the Chinese subtitled version of the Lion King (while it was still in cinemas), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and many other movies on the system.
After a series of exchanges with the management over his dissatisfaction regarding infringing content on their system, it was stated that Juraszek was also fired on grounds of sharing information with a third-party.
The plaintiffs are demanding $15 million in damages, whereas Sun is supposedly racking up a strong defense and demanding the complaint to be withdrawn with the plaintiffs bearing his costs.
