

Court permits joinder in BitTorrent filesharing case - anigbrowl
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/huvelle-opinion-voltage.pdf

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anigbrowl
This is a rather technical decision in a content piracy lawsuit. Distributors
of _The Hurt Locker_ and other films have accused BitTorrent filesharers of
copyright infringement, and added a long list of potential defendants ('Does
1-1000,' as in 'John/Jane Doe') based on IP addresses.

A large number of people have filed motions to have themselves dismissed from
the case or for protective orders that would prevent their future involvement,
on a variety of legal grounds. These have been denied by the court, on the
basis that the filers have yet to be named as defendants; although it's
possible that that will happen in the future should the IP addresses in the
plaintiff's complaint match up with the ISP customer accounts of the filers,
the court decided that pre-emptive dismissal hearings would likely result in a
colossal waste of time.

Most of the material in the linked opinion is civil procedure legalese that
will only be of interest to lawyers. On pages 14-16, however, the court
considers BitTorrent's method of operation, and specifically the plaintiff's
claim that the nature of seeding is such that any downloader of a specific
file via BitTorrent is by definition engaged in sharing that file for as long
as the BitTorrent client remains connected to the network and the file has not
been deleted. If I understand the court correctly, previous attempts to join
large numbers of defendants this way failed because the plaintiffs were
claiming that multiple copyrights were being infringed by all defendants - who
reasonably argued that such a shotgun approach risked penalizing individuals
for all possible crimes committed by everyone in a group. It was unreasonable
for plaintiffs in those cases to join defendants _en masse_ by pointing to the
availability of multiple torrents of copyrighted works, because there was no
basis to think that every defendant would necessarily have downloaded the same
movies, and thus they could not be said to be acting in concert.

Here, by contrast, there's a good chance that people who downloaded a torrent
for a specific movie went ahead and downloaded the movie, and if they were
ever a seed peer, then they must by definition have been acting in concert
with other seed peers to infringe upon the plaintiff's copyright. On that
basis, the judge rejected the procedural argument for dropping defendants from
the case at this stage and refused to guarantee immunity from future joinder.
So the case will go ahead for the time being, and seems as if it will be based
on a realistic description of how BitTorrent actually functions which is well
understood by the presiding judge - a small victory for the plaintiffs.

IANAL, plus I have only read it through once - so some or all of the above may
turn out to be incorrect. Don't construe anything I say as legal advice! Also,
I'm highlighting the particular issue that interests me, so don't mistake this
for a comprehensive summary either. In fact, don't read any of the above, and
if you did read it just forget about it :-)

