I'm in the news!
My commentary in italics and in [].
Amesbury lawyer [not me] takes on porn file-sharing suit
Published: 9:55 am Thu, April 14, 2011
By Mass. Lawyers Weekly Staff
Suing college students for illegally sharing music files online is so yesterday. [Love the casual language!] Now it’s all the rage to target people who upload X-rated videos on peer-to-peer file sharing websites like BitTorrent.
Hired by adult video companies, copyright attorneys go online and round up hundreds, or even thousands, of IP addresses that are sharing certain adult movies and file suit against them as a class.
There’s one problem: The attorneys have only IP addresses, a unique series of numbers that act as a Web surfer’s fingerprint, but not each user’s identity. To get those names, they have to subpoena the Internet Service Providers, which typically fight to keep their clients’ info secret.
“The ISPs don’t want to release the information because that’s a good way to lose a customer for life,” says Amesbury attorney Kristofer Munroe, who recently was initiated into the world of porn file-sharing litigation when “John Doe” walked into his office.
Doe, a resident of Massachusetts, was in the crosshairs of a Chicago attorney named John Steele, who is building a reputation as a relentless porn-sharing litigator. And Doe had just received a letter telling him that his ISP lost its fight to shield his identity from Steele.
Doe did not return a message seeking comment.
ISPs often fail to quash subpoenas demanding the names behind IP addresses in file-sharing suits, says Stephen D. Karpf, a Brookline attorney who has followed the evolution of online copyright infringement cases. [There is a real dispute over whether the federal statute actually prohibits disclosure even by subpoena, but generally, because there is otherwise no standard-issue privilege otherwise protecting the information, motions to quash based on protection of anonymity are generally denied. Also, there is very little (albeit some) precedent for filing anonymous motions in court - generally, a person has to at least offer facts demonstrating a right to relief, but how do you do that without surrendering the very anonymity you seek to protect?]
“There is a clear problem in our electronic era with maintaining privacy,” says Karpf of Smyth Law Offices. “It certainly is concerning. … I think most of us have an interest in preserving confidentiality in our online activities.”
As soon as Doe discovered his identity was going to be released, he made it clear he wanted to settle the case.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t get my hands dirty on this,” Munroe says. “I would have liked the opportunity to have fought this. There’s really a lot that’s wrong about doing cases this way.”
Munroe believes he had legitimate challenges on improper venue or jurisdiction; a federal judge in Illinois recently tossed one of Steele’s suits because he thought it was a “fishing expedition.” But in order to fight the case, Munroe’s client had to be willing to step out of the shadows and walk into court.
Porn-sharing suits call people out for viewing raunchy films with vulgar titles like “Vacuuming the Cat,” “Massive Asses 5” and “Relax He’s My Stepdad 2,” all films that were at the center of recent copyright infringement cases.
So it’s no wonder that Munroe’s client and others like him are eager to settle and avoid being embarrassed in court and in front of their families.
“The whole purpose of these cases hasn’t been to run them through the courts; it’s to settle them out for relatively low amounts,” Munroe says. “For lack of a better word, it’s to shake people down for small amounts of money.”
Munroe won’t say how much his client paid to settle, only that the amount was less than $5,000. He adds that a typical settlement in such a case is between $2,000 and $3,000, which adds up to a goldmine when you have a long list of defendants who are willing to pay to make a suit go away.
“This is capitalism at work,” Karpf says. [He used my favorite quote from the whole interview, too! But I have should have said 'unregulated capitalism'. Oh well.]
Though he reached out to the bar for guidance in his case, Munroe says he knows of no other local attorneys who have defended clients named in porn file-sharing suits. But he expects that will change soon.
“It’s a probability thing,” he says. “As Mr. Steele’s firm is able to continue filing these cases, it’s inevitable that more of these defendants are going to be from Massachusetts.”
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You can see more on this issue at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/issues/file-sharing/subpoena-defense.
I can't seem to get a link to embed - sorry. Cut-and-paste as desired.