Cindy Cohn seems to be a woman who knows what she’s doing. The porn industry may have some problems.
Los Angeles, California, United States from www.allheadlinenews.com – Being accused in court of sharing pornography has the potential of being more stigmatizing and stigmatizing than being accused of sharing a non-porno film such as “The Hurt Locker.”
This is, at least, the theory behind copyright infringement suits filed by Los Angeles-based adult film studio Third World Media against more than 1,000 unauthorized movie downloaders of its X-rated films on the Internet.
Cindy Cohn [pictured], legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for tech companies and Internet users, sees the suits as a “shakedown” that could result in collateral damage as it could unduly implicate innocent persons.
“People have a very good interest in not being sued but also in not having their name associated here if they’ve been wrongly accused,” said Cohn, who has led opposition to the porn studios’ suits.
She added that, “The leverage to get people to pay to make it go away when what they are accused of having done, in cases of hard-core porn or gay porn, is much higher.”
Presently, TMW has sued 1,568 unnamed defendants as “John Does” in a 64 page criminal information filed by the company’s attorneys before the U.S. District Court of California, accusing them of using peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully share copies of its porn film, “Miss Big Ass Brazil #4.”
The suit listed each of the unknown defendants’ IP addresses, names of their Internet service providers as well as dates and times the defendants allegedly shared the downloaded files.
The defendants are represented by a wide swath of ISPs, including all the majors and a score of smaller regional players, as well as service providers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, the University of Central Florida, the University of California at Riverside, and the Tennessee Board of Regents.
The California suit was preceded by another TMW suit against 1,243 unnamed defendants filed two weeks before the U.S. District Court of West Virginia, involving another TMW X-rated film.