Risk of Embarrassment Pressures Defendants to Settle, Regardless of Merit.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked judges in Texas and West Virginia to block requests to unmask accused file sharers in several predatory copyright troll lawsuits involving the alleged illegal downloading of pornography.
The cases were filed by two different companies and involve different copyrighted adult material. However, the tactics are the same. In both cases, the owners of the adult movies filed mass lawsuits based on single counts of copyright infringement stemming from the downloading of a pornographic film, and improperly lump hundreds of defendants together regardless of where the IP addresses indicate the defendants live. Consistent with a recent spike in similar "copyright troll" lawsuits, the motivation behind these cases appears to be to leverage the risk of embarrassment associated with pornography to coerce settlement payments despite serious problems with the underlying claims.
"Suing hundreds or even thousands of people together en masse, in states in which the vast majority of the accused downloaders appear to have no connection, amounts to a deliberate end-run around their due process rights," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "The suits seem designed to ensure that few, if any, defendants will fight back, given the risk of shame from being publicly identified."
Read the rest @ EFF.
