Judge kills massive P2P porn lawsuit, kneecaps copyright troll
Only 10 days after a federal judge in Washington, DC sharply limited the US Copyright Group's mass file-sharing lawsuits there, a federal judge in West Virginia has come down even harder on another set of mass lawsuits.
Context & Ripple Effects
The US Copyright Group's mass-litigation model — suing thousands of anonymous BitTorrent users at once to force settlements — has hit a wall of skeptical judges this month. On December 7 a federal judge in Washington, DC sharply limited its mass file-sharing lawsuits there, and now a West Virginia judge has gone further by dismissing one outright. The pattern echoes earlier judicial resistance to aggressive copyright enforcement tactics, from the 2007 decision refusing to entertain RIAA conspiracy theories against Lime Wire to TorrentSpy's loss in California that same year — but this is the first time courts are attacking the structure of the mass suit itself rather than just one defendant's conduct.
First-order effects
- Defendants in the dismissed West Virginia case escape the settlement-or-default pressure that mass joinder creates, since they no longer face a single suit naming hundreds or thousands of alleged downloaders.
- The film studio plaintiffs behind the case lose the leverage model where one filing generates thousands of demand letters priced below the cost of defending.
Second-order effects
- Judges in other jurisdictions handling comparable mass suits — including the DC court already limiting the US Copyright Group's dockets — have fresh precedent for severing improperly joined defendants, forcing trolls to refile claims individually at far higher cost per name.
- The economics of pay-up-or-be-sued enforcement weaken: if courts keep rejecting mass joinder, the settlement-per-dollar ratio that funds these campaigns collapses.
Third-order effects
- If district courts broadly adopt this reading of joinder rules, mass-Doe copyright litigation gets structurally repriced toward one-suit-per-infringer, favoring rights holders who litigate selectively over firms built on volume subpoena campaigns.
The trend: Federal courts are dismantling the mass-joinder business model of BitTorrent copyright trolling, case by case, throughout late 2010.