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from www.arstechnica.com – One of the nation’s most prolific P2P copyright trolls has raised the stakes in its ongoing fight with two leading ISPs, naming AT&T and Comcast as defendants in an Illinois lawsuit.

The law firms behind these mass lawsuits have accused ISPs of trying to profit from their customers’ infringing activity for years. But that’s often just talk. While disputes over subpoenas have led trolls and ISPs to regularly cross swords in the courtroom, we’re not aware of any cases of an ISP being named as a defendant in one of these lawsuits.

That changed last week in an Illinois case. Prenda Law [run by copyright attorney John Steele], representing the porn company Lightspeed Media, had issued subpoenas seeking the identity of 6,600 people. AT&T and Comcast objected to these subpoenas. In July, the Illinois Supreme Court sided with the ISPs and quashed the subpoenas.

Lightspeed’s response to this setback? It added AT&T and Comcast as defendants in its lawsuit. The ISPs now stand accused of “negligence, computer fraud and abuse, civil conspiracy, violations of the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Practice Act, and aiding and abetting.”

“The ISPs chose to interpose themselves in this litigation, interfere with the Court’s Orders, evade subpoenas, and prevent and obstruct Plaintiff from learning the identity of those ISP subscribers hacking into and stealing from its website,” Lightspeed writes. AT&T and Comcast has also failed to take “any actions to prevent their subscribers from committing criminal and tortious acts against Plaintiff even after being on actual notice of the criminal and tortious activity.”

Lightspeed says that the ISP defendants were “unjustly enriched because, while engaging in a dilatory legal strategy designed solely to prevent Plaintiff from learning the identities of their subscribers, they continued to collect subscriber fees from subscribers who did, and continued to, hack into and steal from Plaintiff’s website.”

Lightspeed also objects to the fact that AT&T and Comcast “acted as de facto counsel” for the alleged hackers “in exchange for continued receipt of subscriber fees.” As a result, they effectively “reached an agreement to allow and/or shelter the continued hacking into and theft from Plaintiff’s website.”

This argument seems unlikely to prevail. Even assuming that the underlying charges against the subscribers have merit, ISPs are generally neutral intermediaries who are not responsible for policing their users’ online activities. And it’s absurd to suggest that raising legal objections to Lightspeed’s tactics—objections that were ultimately upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court—could constitute “interference” with court orders, or any other kind of misconduct.

Naming Comcast and AT&T as defendants in the case also seems like a strategic blunder. The ISPs were sufficiently irritated by Lightspeed’s subpoenas to object to them, but the ISPs ultimately did not have a dog in the fight. They wouldn’t have suffered any great harm if ultimately ordered to hand over their subscribers’ information—indeed, they hand over such information to lawyers and police all the time.

But now, with the ISPs as named defendants, they will be strongly motivated to win the case and ensure that no one tries this tactic again. Lightspeed and Prenda will likely face the full force of Comcast and AT&T’s vast legal resources, and irritated AT&T and Comcast executives will now be even less inclined to give an inch when Prenda sends them subpoenas on behalf of future clients.

“We believe the lawsuit is without merit,” an AT&T spokesman told us by e-mail. “An appellate court has already ruled in AT&T’s favor in this matter.”

He noted that, at AT&T’s request, the case has been moved to federal court, taking it away from the plaintiff-friendly judge in downstate Illinois who has handled it so far.