14 DAY TRIAL // It turns out that a judge believed Comcast representatives when they said that a rights holder was trying to obtain their customers’ identities just to convince them to accept settlements. As a result, he quashed the subpoenas and closed the case, FightCopyrightTrolls reports.
Initially, Prenda Law filed a law suit against Comcast after the ISP refused to hand over the names that hid behind IPs appointed as being used to download copyrighted materials from BitTorrent websites.
Comcast stated that the court didn't have jurisdiction over many of the defendants. Furthermore, the company argued that the plaintiff shouldn’t be allowed to join a large number of Does in one single suit.
However, the argument that was the “real kicker,” as TorrentFreak puts it, was that the rights holder was simply trying to shake down the defendants.
We’ll have to wait and see if other judges will follow on the footsteps of Honorable Gary Feinerman, but if they do, this may be the beginning of the end for copyright trolls.