"Porn suits" -- interesting article by Paul Rapp, Esq.

Interesting article by Paul Rapp, Esq., a Massachusetts attorney:

Porn Suits

 This article originally appeared in the 9.20.12 issue of Metroland.

In recent months there has been a flood of federal copyright infringement lawsuits that are having a severe impact on a lot of innocent people.  These lawsuits are a variant on the P2P suits brought by the major record companies and movie studios several years ago, a strategy that was a public relations and a financial disaster for the various companies.  These new suits are fine-tuned and efficient, and they’re brought by little-known companies that could care less about their public image.  These are porn suits.

            It works like this: a porn company hires an “investigator” to monitor bit-torrent activity for a particular movie.  The investigator collects all of the internet addresses that were downloading from a torrent over a 2-3 month period, and divvies them up by state and by the internet companies supplying service to the internet addresses.  The porn company lawyer then starts a lawsuit against all of the internet addresses in a given state that were on the torrent for a given movie.  The cases are captioned “[Porn Company] v. John Does 1-120.”  The cases all have multiple John Doe defendants, often over 100.   The porn company then gets the court’s permission to engage in early “discovery” so it can get the real names associated with the internet addresses that were identified by the investigator.  Permission is routinely granted, and the porn company subpoenas the internet companies (Time Warner, Comcast, etc.) for the names.  The internet companies then contact each of its subscribers, explaining that the subscriber is going to be named in a lawsuit for downloading a porn film (and these films have charming titles like “Anal Cum-swappers 2” and “OMG I’m Banging My Daughter’s BFF”) in 30 days.  The subscriber’s options are (1) to do nothing and be named in the lawsuit, (2) go to court to quash the subpoena, or (3) contact the porn company’s lawyer, who will demand $3000 to quietly let you out of the lawsuit, with your good name intact.......

Complete article




Ray Beckerman, PC