14 DAY TRIAL // American Internet Service Providers have stepped up in defense of their customers and won an appeal against a court decision ordering them to reveal the identities of over 1,000 pirates.
Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox have won the appeal, which means that they won’t have to reveal the names of 1,058 subscribers accused of pirating movies via BitTorrent, documents reveal.
A former RIAA lobbyist turned district court judge granted AF Holdings, an adult movie company, the right to gain access to personal details of over 1,000 Internet users they suspected of downloading their works off torrent sites. This happened two years ago, and it was a big win for the movie studio, which has since been dubbed a copyright troll.
The new decision, however, doesn’t just liberate all these people from lawsuits, but it also puts a stop to other future similar actions, where movie studios of all kinds sue large groups of “pirates” who may or may not even live in the district they were being sued in based on their IP addresses.
Obviously unhappy with all the implications of the decision, ISPs decided to side with their customers. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox, alongside several rights groups such as the EFF or the American Civil Liberties Union, argued against the ruling, saying that the mass lawsuits should simply be struck down.
“Generally speaking, our federal judicial system and the procedural rules that govern it work well, allowing parties to resolve their disputes with one another fairly and efficiently. But sometimes individuals seek to manipulate judicial procedures to serve their own improper ends. This case calls upon us to evaluate – and put a stop to – one litigant’s attempt to do just that,” said Judge David Tatel.
He added that it should be quite obvious that AF Holdings couldn’t possibly have had a good faith belief that it could successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John Doe defendants in his district.
Furthermore, Tatel states that looking over the evidence provided by AF Holdings, there’s no reason to believe that the unidentified defendants named in the 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.”
He likened this issue to two people playing at the same blackjack table at different times, winning the same amount of money, employing the same strategy and even playing with the same dealer. Despite all these coincidences, there’s still no connection between the two.