from www.myce.com – More film studios in the porn industry are beginning to take a tough stance toward piracy of their work by filing lawsuits against alleged file-sharers and subpoenaing ISPs for the personal information of “John Doe” defendants.

This month, Los Angeles porn studio Third World Media filed suit in the U.S. District for the Northern District of California against 1,568 defendants accused of illegally sharing the film “Miss Big Ass Brazil #4”. The case came just two weeks after the same studio filed a similar complaint against 1,243 John Does in the U.S. District Court in West Virginia.

So far, the Adult Copyright Company, an antipiracy company owned by attorney Kenneth Ford, has lodged complaints against over 5,000 alleged porn file-sharers in courts across the US. And they’re not done yet.

“My intention is to file suit against several thousand more illegal downloaders in the next week or two,” Ford recently said in an interview with CNET.

“The coming lawsuits will name in the neighborhood of 10,000 Doe defendants.”

The most recent complaint included 64 pages of information about the defendants including IP addresses, ISP names, and dates and times they allegedly shared the files. Now the courts will begin the process of subpoenaing the ISPs to force them to hand over customer names associated with the IP addresses.

Third World Media’s cases join those filed by Millennium TGA, Lightspeed Media Corporation and Hard Drive Productions against 300 defendants last month.

While the tactics used here are nearly identical to those used in the recent Hurt Locker file-sharing case, the negative stigma associated with porn is getting the attention of advocacy groups.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently spoke out against the cases, and criticized the industry for filing lawsuits against innocent people.

“I think for these porn cases it’s especially troubling, even having your name associated. People have a very good interest in [not just avoiding being sued] but not having their name associated here if they have been wrongly accused,” said Cindy Cohn, who is in charge of the EFF’s opposition to the suits.

“We’ve heard about a lot of people say they are wrongly accused with some pretty good stories about how it couldn’t have been them. So, it does appear to us that whatever investigative techniques that plaintiffs are using here, they are not very good.”

Of course it’s never good to be accused of a crime, but the stakes are a lot higher for some once pornography is involved. These cases have the potential to damage both personal relationships and business reputations of the defendants if the ISPs agree to turn over names of the alleged porno-pirates.