A federal judge in Trenton is the latest to ban porn producers’ copyright suits against multiple John Doe defendants over allegedly illegal downloads using BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer protocol for anonymous file sharing.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Douglas Arpert, who allowed such a suit to go forward last year, said on March 28 in a separate case that he had been persuaded by other rulings in the district in the past six months that joinder was improper.