![]() ![]() Once the film company has the name and address of the customers, they send out settlement letters. ![]() The spreadsheet is converted to a PDF and attached to a discovery demand filed with the court, asking a judge to grant subpoenas to all the ISPs. The companies identify the service provider for each IP address from a public database, then generate a spreadsheet, with the IP, the name of the service provider, the date and time of the download, and sometimes the size of the file and the BitTorrent client used. firm GuardaLey, the companies start by trolling BitTorrent sites for the films in question, and dipping into the active torrents, capturing the IP addresses of the peers that are downloading and uploading pieces of the files. Using an outside contractor, like the U.K. ![]() "Most people don't want to have a public lawsuit against them for Teen Anal Nightmare 2, so they settle." "This is a mass copyright litigation machine," says Lory Lybeck, a Seattle attorney representing dozens of the defendants. It's now being mimicked by individual production companies. Copyright Group, a coalition of indy film producers formed explicitly to make money by suing downloaders. This strategy was pioneered last year by the U.S. The movie studios, in contrast, often are suing thousands of people at once, in a total of just about three dozen lawsuits (.xls) often filed in the plaintiff's lawyer's backyard and far from the defendants' homes. The RIAA lost millions of dollars with this strategy, which required them to pay individual $350 filing fees for each case, and sometimes engage local counsel. It's a bread-and-butter legal precept meant to prevent people who live in California from having to answer to lawsuits in Texas, for example.įollowing that standard – more or less – the RIAA generally targeted dozens or so defendants in each suit, not thousands, and filed each case in the jurisdiction of the users' ISP. Civil defendants are normally sued in the courthouse nearest to where they committed the alleged wrongdoing – in this instance on computers in their homes or work. They differ from the music litigation campaign in another significant way, as well. 'Most people don't want to have a public lawsuit against them for Teen Anal Nightmare 2, so they settle.'In contrast to the the RIAA's much-criticized and now-abandoned war against music pirates – which targeted 20,000 downloaders in six years – the movie lawsuits appear to have been designed from the start as for-profit endeavor, not a as a deterrent to piracy. ![]()
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