20,000 BitTorrent Users Sued in One Lawsuit by George Ziemann -- April 1, 2010 Sadly, this is not an April Fool's joke. Or the actions of the MPAA. The upside is that they seem to be doing it wrong. The complete story is at the Hollywood Reporter. I only want to talk about a few paragraphs. "In what may be a sign of things to come, more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington D.C. federal court for copyright infringement. A handful of cases have already settled, and those that haven't are creating some havoc for major ISPs." "Another lawsuit targeting 30,000 more torrent downloaders on five more films is forthcoming, we're told, and all this could be a test run that opens up the floodgates to massive litigation against the millions of individuals who use BitTorrent to download movies." Two problems already. As the RIAA discovered, using one John Doe lawsuit to target a batch of infringers at once just pisses off the court and the ISPs, deprives the accused from being able to answer the subpoena. "When the U.S. Copyright Group filed its recent lawsuits and approached AT&T and other ISPs for account information, the lawyers say they were stunned at the reaction. "Their subpoena compliance group said, 'We thought we had shut this (approach) down with the MPAA before.'" Much more concerned about their customers than the entertainment community is: "ISPs are charging $32 to $60 for each IP address account requested. ISPs cite the cost of notifying the account holder and giving them opportunity to file a motion to quash the subpoena." So it will cost between $640,000 and $1.2 million just to find out who the accused are, much less take any of them to court. The second problem is that downloading is not a crime. The RIAA's cases included charges of distribution, without which there is no actionable infringement (although they were never called upon to prove that anyone other than themselves made a copy). "The lawsuits were filed by... the US Copyright Group, on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers. "According to Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the firm, the program captures IP addresses based on the time stamp that a download has occurred and then checks against a spreadsheet to make sure the downloading content is the copyright protected film and not a misnamed film or trailer." Wait a minute. They've got a spreadsheet? That almost sounds like they are the Bittorrent hosts, if bittorrent files weren't broken up into a zillion tiny pieces and spread around the net. This is another reason why there won't be a way to make distribution stick. During the time the person was downloading the file, they weren't sharing it yet. I could quote a paragraph from a book and post it here. Elsewhere, someone else quotes the second graf, a third person uses paragraph three and so on until the entire book is online. Yet the individual quotes are not, by themselves, enough to qualify as infringement. If you can figure out where they all are, you could read the entire book. Bittorrent figures that out for you. This idea is dicey enough that neither the IFTA (Independent Film and Television Alliance) or the MPAA would get behind it until they see whether these guys can get away with this. The most annoying part? "We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel." They see suing people as a revenue stream. If their results are anything like the RIAA's, this revenue stream would mostly come from college kids' tuition, perhaps prematurely ending their college education. For the sake of a crappy Ewe Boll movie.

Related Content New litigation campaign quietly targets tens of thousands of movie downloaders -- Hollywood Reporter