Lawyers can safely sue thousands of anonymous person-to-person file-sharing program users simultaneously, based on a recent court ruling.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., announced that a mass-lawsuit against BitTorrent users can proceed and that Internet service providers now have to give the names of those anonymous users to lawyers. Mass-subpoenas like this are typically reserved for court cases that are "logically joined" — or ones that basically amount to the equivalent of a crime syndicate. Filing each case individually can cost around $350, so this can save lawyers a lot of money.
Judge Beryl Howell said the claims against the anonymous BitTorrent users were "logically related" and allowed the subpoenas to continue — despite some concerns that a number of the users might be outside the operating area of that federal court. Geolocation tools that can identify a geographic area with only an Internet protocol address will let users outside of the federal court's operating area identify themselves and file motions to be removed from the mass lawsuit.
File-sharing program users are typically targeted by copyright owners like the Record Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America because they trade music and movies across the Internet without paying for them. The penalties for being caught by the RIAA and MPAA illegally sharing music and movies can be very stiff — ranging from enormous fines to jail time.
Howell is still a bit of a fringe case, as many judges have severed mass-lawsuit cases dealing with anonymous file-sharing program users. But the new ruling does set some additional precedent that might open the door to additional mass-subpoena filings. It's a way to efficiently sue the tremendous number of file-sharing program users on the Internet that typically go about their business and are never caught because the process can be tedious.
Tags: BitTorrent, file sharing, law, P2P
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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=48a2beedc51e490fa37270c44ced1ad3
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