It seems that the porn industry is currently ramping up its anti-piracy efforts after filing lawsuits against 300 individuals accused of copyright infringement. The lawsuits were filed by Millennium TGA, Lightspeed Media Corporation and Hard Drive Productions in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
The news was first reported by Evan Brown on the Internet cases blog. The lawsuit filed by Hard Drive Productions, accuses Bittorrent users of illegally downloading “Amateur Allure” web content. Lightspeed Media Corporation, in the mean time, is accusing (PDF) another 100 alleged copyright violators of downloading Jordan Capri and Tawnee Stone web content. Finally, Millennium TGA, INC. is accusing (PDF) an additional 100 alleged file-sharers for illegally downloading Shemale Yum, Shemales From Hell, and Shemale Pornstar. While this may or may not be a complete list, specific details appear to be found in subsequent “Exhibit A”s which doesn’t appear to be available at this point in time. The lawsuits themselves do not name which sites were associated with the alleged swarms, only that trackerless (in the traditional sense) BitTorrent is possible.
This isn’t the first anti-piracy effort made by the porn industry. Earlier this year, the Adult Entertainment Trade Association (AETA) posted a video encouraging users to pay for their porn. The video was pointed out by Threat Level over at Wired:
Brown suggests that the case resembles the now infamous Hurt Locker lawsuits where 5000 alleged copyright violators were targeted in the litigation sweep. Since the lawsuits moved to discovery, there have been two cases where ISPs refused to comply. The first was Time Warner Cable which said that the workload was far too great for the staff to keep up. The second case where an ISP fought against the copyright claims was Midcontinent Communications citing jurisdiction issues.
Because there is a bit of a difference between 300 IP addresses and 5,000 IP addresses, the order of magnitude might make a difference between ISPs affected crying foul over an overwhelming workload and simply allowing copyright holders to obtain the information necessary to litigate actual people – whether or not the conduct of the IP address corresponded with those that actually downloaded the infringing material in the first place. Still, very few people even fight general copyright infringement lawsuits often due to financial issues and, considering the content in question, it’s unlikely that there will be much of a fight by those accused this time either.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
