A rash of federal lawsuits filed by porn companies against thousands of “John Does” across the country might be nothing but legal XXX-tortion.
The producers of “Blondie in Trouble,” “Illegal Ass 2” and other adult movies have accused unknown defendants of downloading the raunchy movies illegally through the online file sharing network BitTorrent and are trying to force the Internet service providers to release their names.
The newest lawsuits from one of the companies, Third Degree Films, some filed as recently as Dec. 28, seek the names of more than 7,000 alleged porn thieves — identified only by their Internet addresses — from New York to California.
Defense lawyers and not-for-profit groups say most of the film producers have no intention of proceeding to trial. The movie companies want the names so that they can embarrass people to settle for as much as $4,500 each, the lawyers and others say. If the “John Does” don’t pay up, their names will become public.
“This is a shakedown of a huge magnitude,” said Robert Cashman, a Houston-based lawyer, who has been opposing the companies since August 2010. “It’s a huge extortion scheme. Just the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have been sued and not one person has gone to trial, that says something.”
Cashman is calling on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to bring a halt to the lawsuits.
One lawyer on the other side, D. Gill Sperlein, said people should be embarrassed about stealing material from the Internet, not watching pornography. Filing a lawsuit over copyright infringement is not extortion, he said.
“The content producers and their businesses are being destroyed through piracy,” said Sperlein, former general counsel to one movie company, Io Group. “They’re taking measures to enforce their rights and protect their intellectual property. The people who are stealing the intellectual property of course are not happy about that, but the truth remains that they are engaged in illegal behavior and these production companies are simply looking for a way to discourage the illegal reproduction and distribution of their content and to be reimbursed for some of the damages that they’ve suffered.”
Undoubtedly, many of the people sued did watch the adult flicks without paying — but swept up in the mass filings have been grandmothers, hotel operators and others who did not protect their Wi-Fi with a password.
One of those sued by Sperlein goes by the name Sophisticated Jane Doe and created a Web site called fightcopyrightrolls.com.
“I was just stunned,” Sophisticated Jane Doe said. “I couldn’t sleep. It was really shocking. I never had any problems with law, with courts, I didn’t know about this system at all.”
Jane Doe insists no one in the household was watching pornography and blames either an unsecured wireless connection or faulty Internet address collection.
Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending free speech and privacy on the Internet, said that for many people the cost of defending themselves in court — and risking fines of up to $150,000 — is prohibitive compared to simply paying the amounts demanded.
“It seems clear that this kind of copyright trolling is a business model,” she added.
Lawyers estimate that companies could be making $87,000 per 100 names.
“The problem with these style of suits is they effectively shoot first and ask questions later,” said Eric Menhart, a lawyer who founded the CyberLaw firm in Washington, D.C.
Other movie producers have filed similar lawsuits, most notably against those who downloaded movies such as “The Hurt Locker” and “The Expendables.”
In all, between January 2010 and August 2011, nearly 200,000 John Does have been sued across the country, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But the porn lawsuits add an element of shame that pressures people to settle even if they are innocent.
“You receive a letter that says you downloaded ‘Transsexual Dykes in Bondage.’ If you don’t send us the $1,500, we’ll file in court with your name on it,” said David Abrams of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “Even if you haven’t done it, it could be very upsetting to know that there’s going to be a court document … which says you are accused of downloading this file. And if you have done it, you have even more incentive.”
Some federal judges have begun dismissing the lawsuits. The new round of lawsuits from Third Degree Films involve a much smaller number of “John Does,” a reaction to jurisdiction and other problems of the initial cases, defense lawyers said.
“I think Third Degree is basically, they’re trying to fly a little bit under the radar, compared to some of the other cases” CyberLaw’s Menhart said. “Some of the others have been a little bit more magnificent in scale, where you’ve seen, 10, 15, 20,000 people named in a lawsuit. They’re following the same recipe so to speak, but they’re just doing it in smaller batches, across the country with different, smaller law firms.”
Third Degree Films did not respond to a request for an interview.
Sperlein said that if companies are forced to bring smaller lawsuits — and he said his suits have numbered hundreds of names — they also will have to seek larger settlements.
Noreen.Odonnell@thedaily.com