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ISPs, EFF Defeat Porn Copyright Trolls in Appeals Court

For the last few years Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Cox have done battle against select copyright trolls, provided said trolls are focused on areas of media these companies don't care much about (like porn and e-books). Most of these copyright trolls fire off pre-settlement letters and file suit against anonymous file traders en masse -- in the hopes of scaring users into paying cash without a trial.

In a significant win, the The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has granted the ISPs a win in their appeal against AF Holdings, one such porn copyright troll that had wanted to file broad lawsuits against porn downloaders. The opinion notes that AF Holdings failed to support their argument that they should be able to include 1,000 plus people in the same lawsuit, because they were connected to the same BitTorrent swarm:
quote:
AF Holdings has provided no reason to think that the Doe defendants it named in this lawsuit were ever participating in the same swarm at the same time. Instead, it has simply set forth snapshots of a precise moment in which each of these 1,058 Does allegedly shared the copyrighted work—snapshots that span a period of nearly five months. Two individuals who downloaded the same file five months apart are exceedingly unlikely to have had any interaction with one another whatsoever. Their only relationship is that they used the same protocol to access the same work.
The EFF, who was allowed to argue some of the points in the case, called the victory a crushing blow for copyright trolls.
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InvalidError
join:2008-02-03

InvalidError

Member

Humm...

The decision clearly acknowledges that torrent IDs quite uniquely identify participation in a torrent but denies joining partly on the basis that people downloading the same file from the same torrent at different times might not have interacted with each other. Sounds like a silly argument to me since the download method and time changes nothing to the fact that some of the data belonging to one of their videos was downloaded.

In any case, most of the arguments are about how joining is not possible due to jurisdiction since the bulk of those 1000+ Does are outside the district court's jurisdiction and AF failed to convince the judge that anything discovered would be used only within the lawsuit's scope.

Courts refusing to get used as an accessory for copyright blackmail is the best part of this ruling IMO.

David
Premium Member
join:2002-05-30
Granite City, IL

David

Premium Member

consumerist

had a pretty in-depth writeup on what the courts thought.

»consumerist.com/2014/05/ ··· 10164613

This part had my interest a bit

taken from above article link- credit to consumerist

The court said that two individuals who downloaded the same file five months apart are “exceedingly unlikely to have had any interaction with one another whatsoever,” and that “Their only relationship is that they used the same protocol to access the same work.”

An analogy was made to two individuals who play at the same blackjack table at different times.

“They may have won the same amount of money, employed the same strategy, and perhaps even played with the same dealer, but they have still engaged in entirely separate transactions,” writes the court, which vacated the lower court’s order.

The court also wasn’t convinced that AF Holdings had any intent to actually pursue legal actions against each of the individuals for which it sought account information.
“We think it quite obvious that AF Holdings could not possibly have had a good faith belief that it could successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John Doe defendants in this district,” explains the court. “In seeking such information, AF Holdings clearly abused the discovery process.”