100,000 American P2P surfers sued last year by Porn industry!

February 8, 2011 at 4:21 am · Filed under Assclowns, Bullshit, Capitalizm, Consumption, Feedback, Internet, LOW Tech, Musicians, Politickz, Propaganda, U.S.A. and tagged: Copyright infringement, Filesharing, Intellectual property, Peer-to-peer, United States

Although not a new occurrence, intellectual property pirates are being sued at a faster rate than ever.

Over the past year, over 100,000 peer-to-peer users have been sued in the U.S.A. They are mainly users of the popular BitTorrent protocol, and the plaintiffs are a variety of copyright holders, but mainly comprise adult film studios.

Film and music studios have long been quick to claim that the ease of piracy that the Internet allows cuts into their profits, so it seems that these sorts of organizations have now made copyright-violation lawsuits a part of their everyday business.

In the United States, the judicial system is being overloaded with these cases. An anonymous individual has compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet over the last several months detailing the number of P2P lawsuits that have been filed in the US, and the number is staggering — it has now exceeded 100,000!

Judges and Internet service providers are now getting fed up with the endless subpoenas from porn companies. Each of these requires the ISP to take time and money to look up information from their subscribers. Despite the fact that judges are beginning to lose their patience and are dismissing many of these cases, the practice is incredibly profitable for the porn companies.

In most of the lawsuits, the companies can settle out of court in advance for an average of $1,000 — effectively by scaring the would-be defendants with the threat of even larger fines and a troublesome and potentially quite embarrassing stint in court. Multiply that by the tens of thousands of these cases that are filed, and that’s a hell of a lot of money.

(I guess one could say that there’s never been a worse time to steal porn on the Internet — at least in the US 🙂

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