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
