from the slowly-but-surely dept
Over the last 9 months or so, we've seen a whole bunch of
mass copyright shakedown firms pop up -- quite frequently focusing on using claims of infringement over
porn movies to try to get people to pay up to avoid being taken to court (and, more specifically, being taken to court for your porn habits). Thankfully, it looks like judges are starting to recognize the problems with these lawsuits. We've already noted that the US trailblazer for these types of lawsuits, US Copyright Group had to
drop most of the defendants in a couple of its lawsuits, and it's not clear if the firm will really
file the new lawsuits it's promised.
The key to making this all economical, of course, is for the shakedown factory to sue a whole bunch of defendants at once, to try to force the ISPs to hand over names as cheaply as possible. However, in a group of lawsuits filed over some porn films, a judge has
said that the copyright holder improperly joined together so many defendants. Rather than dismiss the cases outright, the court has simply said that joining all the cases together in one case is improper, and narrowed the cases down to a single defendant each -- meaning that the subpoenas for the thousands of other defendants were all quashed. All of the
court orders are effectively the same, so I'll just include one after the jump in this post.
However, the reasoning is pretty simple. Basically, it makes no sense to lump together hundreds or thousands of people who had nothing to do with each other, just because each of them may have done the same thing. The court notes various case law examples that say that just because a group of people all did the same thing, it does not mean you get to sue them all in the same lawsuit. Part of this is because each defendant may have a totally different defense, noting that one defendant may be an innocent parent, another might have a roommate who used his or her computer, while others may have actually infringed. Thus, it makes no sense to lump them all together. Hopefully, other courts dealing with similar lawsuits follow these rulings as an example.
Filed Under: copyright, joinder, mass filings, porn
