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“He who steals my purse steals trash,” declares the wily Iago in Othello.

If you remember your Julius Shakespeare, Iago’s the troublemaker who causes Othello, a black man, to kill his white wife Desdemona out of jealousy. And thus we had the beginnings of the OJ trial.

While it’s fair to believe that anyone stealing porn nowadays is stealing trash, certain enterprising attorneys don’t think so. Thus we have the beginnings of the new peer-to-peer porn lawsuit, copyright infringement game called, “Sue their asses off”.

Lawyers repping these novel court cases have created a whole new cottage industry based on the gotcha principle, designed to sneak up on you from behind like the Viet Cong and crack down on thousands of unwary file sharers allegedly downloading porn online.

Why porn fans steal porn is pretty obvious. For the privilege of paying out the ass to walk into trade shows like Adultcon and AEE, while underwriting Fry’s exorbitant retail prices for the product, fans have to scrimp on the other end. Funny when you think about it, because the porn industry, by holding these events, is basically hosting the very fans who are sucking them blind with illegal downloads.

It was the record industry that first came up with the bright idea of making file sharers’ lives miserable with lawyer letters and Draconian fines for downloading songs. But when porn saw how on the DVD front, suits were targeting as many as 5,000 anonymous defendants for scurrilously obtaining films like Hurt Locker and Far Cry, the idea was struck to go after thousands of perpetrators at a shot.

In September 2010, Larry Flynt fired perhaps the first shots on Ft. Sumter in this new civil war with a lawsuit against 635 “John Does”. This was Flynt’s attempt to curb the sharing of the company’s adult movies on P2P networks like BitTorrent. After that it became a matter of monkey see, monkey do with more and more suits being filed every few days.

A heretofore obscure attorney out of Texas named Evan F. Stone became the lead dancer in the new conga line. Stone’s strategy was very simple: frighten some porn sap into a settlement to avoid trial and public humiliation. The Capone mob worked similarly well on that principle by offering protection to avoid accidental store front bombings.

For a couple of months equally obscure lawyers like Stone got their names in print for doing exactly the same thing Stone was doing, by wielding a scythe and going for thousands of heads at a time. As we speak, court cases are going on in West Virginia, South Florida, Illinois, Texas, and California, but not necessarily limited to those states because with every porn ambulance flashing its lights, there’s a new attorney coming out of the woodwork chasing it.

[If you’re keeping additional score, the attorneys most associated with the new P2P lawsuit strategy besides Stone are M. Keith Lipscomb of Miami Florida, John L. Steele of the Media Copyright Group in Illinois; Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver of the Washington, D.C.-based US Copyright Group; Kenneth J. Ford who used to have the Adult Copyright Company in West Virginia but is now with Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver; D. Gill Sperlein of the California-based IO Group-Titan Media, and Michael Fattorosi right here in Porn Valley.]

But in November of 2010 a federal judge in Washington D.C. named John Preston Bailey remembered something called obstruction of due process. You may have heard about it. It’s taught in all the better law schools, but attorneys like Stone and Kenneth Ford were filing suits as though they were hearing this idea for the first time. Consequently attorney Ford found himself chopped off at the knees when Judge Bailey dismissed every defendant but one in one of Ford’s mass lawsuits in West Virginia.

In the period between September 24 and November 11 of last year, Ford going for a Guinness record book entry, filed nine mass lawsuits against more than 22,000 alleged file-swappers, each accused of sharing porn with titles like Teen Babysitters and Teen Anal Nightmare 2 and Batman XXX: A Porn Parody. For his part, Axel Braun took the subtle “Fuck ’em all. I’m suing everybody” approach.

Ford’s initial lawsuits were relatively small, but once he had enough confidence in his methods, by late October he went crazy with filings against 7,000 and then 9,000 individuals at once.

On October 29, Ford helped Braun and Axel Braun Productions sue 7,098 anonymous online Does for sharing the film Batman XXX: A Porn Parody. But U.S. District Judge Bailey, a federal judge nominated by George W. Bush no less, elected to toss all but one of those in the circular file.

Then on November 4, Ford stepped up his game again, drafting a complaint on behalf of porn producer West Coast Productions against a 9,729 people for reasons known only to them why they were compelled to download Teen Anal Nightmare 2.

Stone, who’s been an attorney for less than a year but has seen every episode of The Practice, at least twice, was subsequently thrown for a loss when opposing lawyers caught on to his version of the Statue of Liberty play in the Mick Haig Productions case. This one involved a Haig title, Der Gute Önk.

Ditto Larry Flynt. Last October, through Stone, the Flynt company filed several lawsuits which sought the identities of several thousand Internet users said to have infringed copyright. In December, the cases suffered a setback when ISP Time Warner Cable refused to hand over customer details. Legal pundits began speculating this was the beginning of the end for porn lawsuits. Except no one as yet had the heart to tell porn about it.

In the Haig case, Public Citizen and the Electornic Frontier Foundation, acting as lawyers for those being sued, discovered that Stone had sent subpoenas to ISPs seeking the identity of file sharers even though the judge in the case had not yet determined if such subpoenas would be allowed and if the overall lawsuit was appropriate.

While the court was still considering these questions of legitimacy, Stone apparently just went ahead and sent subpoenas to various ISPs demanding the identity of those accused of file sharing. After this was discovered, Stone received a letter from Paul Levy the opposing attorney with Public Citizen pointing out a very serious ethical breach.

In addition, Stone apparently concealed from Comcast the fact that Judge Godbey in the case had never granted him permission to serve subpoenas. Perhaps realizing he was in a bit of trouble, Stone responded by dismissing the lawsuits but doing do “petulantly” according to all news reports.

“Stone’s a relatively junior lawyer, and junior lawyers make mistakes,” said Levy. Which is like saying after a massacre that junior army officers make mistakes.

Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, estimates that the adult industry has sued about 80,000 people over the past year.

“They sue hundreds or thousands of people at once, and the ways they are doing it is a misuse of the law,” she contends.

Attorney Michael Fattorosi who represents Xpays in the Paris Hilton Sex Tape case has had one of the few victories in court so far.

On March 4 Xpays got permission from a judge to seek the names of 843 “John Does” who’ve allegedly downloaded a pirated version of the Hilton tape and could be fined $500 for doing so, thus bringing in a potential $420,000 to the company.

That’s decent money if a sympathetic judge sides with you. So far, in most porn cases they haven’t.

But that’s what happens when, with very few exceptions, you bring a slip & fall personal injury mentality into a legal fight you’re not really equipped for.