from www.arstechnica.com – Evan Stone is not the devil; indeed, the antipiracy lawyer sees himself on the side of the angels. But his crusade against the Satanic forces of BitTorrent has been, by his own admission, a pitched battle in which he is vastly outnumbered. He describes his work as “charging hell with a bucket of water.”

From his office in Denton, Texas, Stone needed only six months to make himself the main file-sharing lawyer in the state. On July 17, 2010, he sued 65 anonymous P2P users trafficking in gay porn. In August, he sued 113. In September, Stone went after 670. October brought a case against 1,106; then, two weeks later, the same porn studio went against another 2,619. Stone has singlehandedly filed almost every such case in Texas.

The procedure in each case is similar. Stone presents judges with a list of IP addresses, and he asks them to authorize subpoenas forcing Internet providers to convert those numbers into real names and addresses. With this information in hand, settlement letters go out, asking for a couple thousand bucks to prevent Stone’s clients from filing a named lawsuit against the person in question (such lawsuits could result in judgments of up to $150,000 per count of copyright infringement).

Not that the work is making him rich; Stone says he drives a 2002 Toyota and isn’t in the P2P lawsuit business to get rich.

“I’m trying to protect the artists,” he tells me when we spoke last week about his business and his background.

On January 24, Stone finally secured the backing of a new set of artists: the anime community. Bringing a case on behalf of anime importer FUNimation, Stone sued 1,337 people for sharing a One Piece episode (“Ace rescued! Whitebeard’s final order!”), one widely available for free online at sites like Hulu.

The number 1,337 spells “leet” if you squint at it the right way, and Stone chose this little bit of leet-speak as “my nod to the hacker community. I know who you guys are.”

Despite sharing the same name as a porn star, Stone didn’t intend on getting into bed (as it were) with the porn business. In 1998 and 1999, he was out in LA and starting a tiny record label at about the time that Napster burst into public consciousness and the Diamond Rio MP3 player hit the store shelves (where it was promptly sued by the major music labels). His business was artist-focused and Internet-aware; years before iTunes, Stone wanted to sell tracks on the ‘Net and give half the money to his artists, a generous split.

It didn’t work. His artists felt like Napster killed their business, and the label shut down.

“Piracy’s been an issue for me for a long time,” Stone says.

With a degree in film and five years under his belt as a database app developer, Stone comes to the complex issue of piracy with a geek’s mindset and an artist’s interests. “I live and breathe this stuff,” he says, a far cry from some of the other lawyers who have entered the file-swapping field in the last year.

When he later attended law school, he focused on entertainment law and ended up as in-house counsel for FUNimation. At the anime distributor, he saw piracy up close. The company had an in-house team with custom software that spent its time sending takedown notices and DMCA complaints to anyone who would listen, like ISPs (who sometimes took action) and torrent sites (which rarely did). The company hired outside firms to flood torrent sites with bogus files. FUNimation put more than 90 series online for free streaming. Nothing stemmed the flood of anime on Usenet and BitTorrent.

Many of the torrent sites were based overseas, making them difficult to threaten, and Stone eventually felt like the only option left was to sue individual American file-swappers. “I didn’t know what other options we had,” he says. “We were at our wit’s end.”

But FUNimation wouldn’t commit. The recording industry had spent years pursuing individuals, only to abandon the money-losing “education” effort after years of work and mountains of bad press. FUNimation had its own reputation to consider.

Not every industry has the same scruples. Through a friend, and separate from his work for FUNimation, Stone hooked up with gay porn creator Lucas Entertainment in 2010. They “weren’t so timid about BitTorrent litigation,” he says, and they wanted the online piracy of their material to stop. Stone brought the case for them in federal court, targeting users of gay-torrents.net, one of the largest such sites in the world.

Surprisingly, it helped. After the litigation was filed, the admins of gay-torrents.net removed Lucas Entertainment torrents from the site to “protect their users.”

The lawsuit had the “first tangible deterrent effect I’ve seen on the BitTorrent side,” Stone says.

Not that all his cases have gone so well. In September, he brought a suit on behalf of Mick Haig Productions against 670 file-swappers. In most of these cases, the accused have no representation in the early stages of the case because no one knows who they are. This means that Stone generally gets to file his complaint and seek expedited discovery without opposition from any lawyer (though the ISPs have increasingly challenged what they view as burdensome mass subpoenas).

In the Mick Haig case, the judge had doubts about this process. On his own initiative, he reached out to lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen, asking them if they would represent the interests of the anonymous defendants at least until those people were named and officially brought into the case with their own counsel. The EFF and Public Citizen agreed and mounted a vigorous opposition to Stone’s request for subpoenas. In addition, they argued that Stone had made a host of mistakes, and that he was not in fact allowed to seek massive statutory damages in the case.

Public Citizen’s Paul Allen Levy then heard from both users and ISPs that Stone had sent subpoenas anyway, without the judge’s permission, and Levy sent a tough letter to Stone about the matter. A few days later, Stone dismissed the case and blasted the judge for appointing “a trio of attorneys renowned for defending Internet piracy and renowned for their general disregard for intellectual property law.”
A man apart

Stone takes pride in his work, distinguishing himself from the other P2P lawyers out there. In other mass P2P lawsuits, many of which have already been largely dismissed by judges, the “basis for joinder [of all the anonymous defendants] was absurd,” Stone says.

When filing his cases, Stone knows enough about BitTorrent to make sure that he only groups defendants who have participated in the same swarm; if the swarms differ, Stone files separate lawsuits in order to plausibly make his claim that people are working in concert.

Another example: clients have approached him about lawsuits, hoping to make money from them even in cases where very little of their content is being traded online. Stone is reticent about this. “I don’t like working with people who have that mindset,” he says.

Last month, his work in porn paid off, as FUNimation consented to try a single case against the file-swappers to see what would happen. Stone’s investigator trolled sites like isohunt.com, kickasstorrents.com, and nyaatorrents.org to grab the 1,337 IP addresses used in the case, and he made sure that every user being sued was sharing the One Piece episode with a hash of “b305c19f8e8bdab5e39b33a4ffc364a12beb110b.”

Stone drums up his P2P business under the name Copyright Defense Agency and his logo is a rip-off of an old East India Company crest. That’s by design, since it sums up Stone’s hope for his business.

“This was a very purposeful appropriation, as a sort of inside joke, which I’m happy to say that at least two or three people have finally figured out,” he says. “Historically, seafaring pirates were terrified of The East India Company (or the ‘mercenaries’ it hired, rather). So the crest has become a sort of anti-piracy symbol for me.”

As for the East India Company, it too was hugely controversial, and whether you approved of its doings largely depended on whether you worked for the company or not. As one character in a recent novel puts it, the business was more accurately called “the devil’s company.” But it certainly was merciless with pirates.