Many may recall the recording industry’s massive campaign several years ago of suing thousands of people for illegally downloading music through file-sharing over the Internet. These suits generally took, in part, a deterrence approach to stopping file-sharing and were intended to raise public awareness of its illegality. Aside from incurring substantial expenses and bad press, however, this campaign has had no demonstrable deterrent effect. The recording industry has since shifted its strategy away from suing individuals to taking down the technology that enables illegal downloads (e.g., LimeWire); encouraging Internet service providers to seek ways to block illegal music downloads; and lobbying for laws such as the recent and unsuccessful Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.
In the past year, in a move that echoes the recording industry’s prior strategy, several companies in the pornography industry have initiated their own campaign against individual illegal downloaders of pornographic movies. Instead of pursuing this litigation as a public awareness campaign, however, this new breed of file-sharing litigation appears to be a purely profit-driven enterprise. To date, tens of thousands of people across the United States have been sued for copyright infringement for downloading adult and pornographic movies from Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Torrent websites. From Oct. 15, 2011, to April 19, 2012, 50 lawsuits cryptically known as “copyright troll lawsuits” have been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania alone, by five different adult film companies, against more than 480 different “John Doe” defendants. The five plaintiffs are all represented by the same attorney.
