The company is just starting to sue people “hiding” behind an IP address

Feb 7, 2014 15:39 GMT  ·  By
Downloading “Dallas Buyers Club” may get you a front-row seat to a lawsuit
   Downloading “Dallas Buyers Club” may get you a front-row seat to a lawsuit

If you’ve downloaded Dallas Buyers Club, you may be in a heap of trouble. Voltage Pictures, the company behind the movie, has filed a lawsuit against individuals who downloaded the leaked DVD screener copy of the movie.

The production company doesn’t really release many wonder movies, but it does have a habit of suing people over the films that become famous. Several years ago, the company was suing tens of thousands of BitTorrent users for downloading “The Hurt Locker,” an Oscar-winning movie.

The current lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of Texas, The Hollywood Reporter writes.

“Each time a Defendant unlawfully distributes a free copy of Plaintiff’s copyrighted movie to others over the Internet, each person who copies the movie then distributes the unlawful copy to others without any significant degradation in sound and picture quality. Thus, a Defendant’s distribution of even one unlawful copy of a motion picture can result in the nearly instantaneous worldwide distribution of that single copy to a limitless number of people,” the complaint reads.

Basically, the company has absolutely no idea who the targets are, aside from an IP address. They’re going to start involving Internet Service Providers to help identify the individuals behind the numbers.

Voltage is currently only going for 31 individuals, but the number could grow soon.

It should be pointed out, however, that a recent copyright case in Washington ended with a ruling that could be quite helpful for the defendants.

A federal judge came to the conclusion that IP addresses cannot be used as evidence of copyright infringement. As the makers of “Elf-Man” sued hundreds of people for pirating the movie by using torrent sites, the judge cut them short. He said that the IP address assigned to each individual was not proof enough that they were the ones guilty of downloading the file.

“Simply identifying the account holder associated with an IP address tells us very little about who actually downloaded ‘Elf-Man’ using that IP address,” the judge said.