from www.theinquirer.net. -Downloading pornography over Bittorrent looks to be the easiest way of finding yourself fingered by lawyers for filesharing.
A chap who wants to remain anonymous has collated publically available data on US cases against alleged filesharers during the period from 8 January 2010 through 21 January 2011. Some of the plaintiffs include such silver screen luminaries as Dogfart Productions, New Sensations and Hard Drive Productions.
The figures show that almost 100,000 US peer-to-peer (P2P) users were sued in the past 12 months. The findings also highlight that the adult entertainment business has gotten excited by the mass litigation model of revenue generation, with most of the recent cases having been initiated by X-rated movie studios.
Out of the 99,924 individuals sued, the vast majority are alleged to have used Bittorrent to disseminate copyrighted content.
As each case typically contains many defendants, the 68 cases that are still active list over 70,000 defendants. The data shows that there was a sharp spike in number of individual defendants sued during the last three months of 2010.
While film studios and their lawyers might think that threatening to haul filesharers into court is an easy way to make boatloads of cash, the US law firms gunning for alleged so-called ‘pirates’ only need to look at what happened to ACS:Law and its principal, Andrew Crossley, has a warning that things might not go all their own way.
That UK law firm found itself the target of distributed denial of service attacks by the online vigilante group Anonymous. After one such attack, Crossley’s personal email archive was mistakenly made available for public downloading, leading to his considerable public embarrassment.
The lawyer later decided to shut up shop entirely, apparently abandoning all of his lawsuits against alleged filesharers and meanwhile claiming that he had suffered criminal attacks and bomb threats.
Regardless of the possible pitfalls that might still lie ahead of it, for the time being the US adult entertainment business has thrust itself into pursuing stiff penalties against those it believes have illegally seeded its copyrighted content.