Warning to pirates: you're no longer safe downloading movies that nobody ever heard of.
A consortium of independent filmmakers has launched an RIAA-style mass-litigation campaign, suing thousands of individual BitTorrent users whose IP addresses were detected feeding and seeding films like Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D.
"There's two-way liability here with BitTorrrent," said Thomas Dunlap, the lawyer who brought the cases for the U.S. Copyright Group. "Everybody with BitTorrent is an uploader and a downloader."
The cases seek to unmask about 10,000 users, and Dunlap said lawsuits against another 30,000 torrenters are in the pipeline. That means the independent filmmakers are officially more litigious than the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued about 30,000 people in the entire life of its six-year litigation campaign.
The indie filmmakers are taking a different tactic than their commercial counterparts. The MPAA, for the most part, has limited its lawsuits to BitTorrent sites themselves – like The Pirate Bay, TorrentSpy, Isohunt.
Targeting BitTorrent downloaders is also uncommon in the United States.
The RIAA's lawsuits against alleged music pirates were focused on old-school file sharing systems like Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent file sharing is more complicated, with downloaders and uploaders collecting in transient swarms of so-called feeders and seeders. "Bits and pieces are contributed by many users of the swarm," said said Ira Rothken, a California lawyer who is representing TorrentSpy and Isohunt in lawsuits brought by the MPAA. "To me, that seems like a harder case for content owners to bring. But it's still doable."
He said the judges in the case are ordering the ISPs to hand over the identities of the account holders whose IP address were sniffed out by Guardaley IT, a German peer-to-peer–surveillance firm. Dunlap said about 15 individuals have already settled for undisclosed sums in the cases, which he began filing in January.
Dunlap said he is hoping to capitalize on the RIAA's litigation success. Almost every single case the RIAA brought in its 6-year litigation campaign against individuals has been settled out of court.
"People," he said, "are calling us proactively to settle."
See Also:
- RIAA, MPAA Converging on Political Conventions
- MPAA Waffling on Piracy Costs; RIAA Says Illicit CDs Worth $13.74 Each
- Imagine RIAA, MPAA in Control of Handbag Industry
- MPAA Negotiates With ISPs to Disconnect or Penalize Copyright Offenders
- Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept.
- Judge Finalizes $675000 RIAA Piracy Verdict, Won't Gag Defendant
- Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
- Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict
