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By Nate Anderson | 08/11/10 | Ars Technica
It's not just the game plan of the RIAA and the new US Copyright Group—numerous rightsholders have resorted to mass federal lawsuits against P2P users, including those in the gay porn industry. On Monday, Lucas Entertainment filed its first such lawsuit targeting 53 BitTorrent users alleged to have shared its pornographic film Kings of New York.
The complaint is brief. Lucas says nothing about why it thinks that these users downloaded its film except to note that "monitoring of online infringement of Plaintiff's motion picture is ongoing." Instead, it has simply presented the judge with a list of 53 IP addresses, all of which are said to have visited gay-torrents.net ("a private website known for its vast index of videos depicting gay pornography") and then shared the film in question.
In a separate sworn declaration filed yesterday, however, Lucas shed some light on its information collection practices. What does a porn producer know about tracking BitTorrent users? Little, so Lucas hired the Copyright Defense Agency, a new firm with an almost nonfunctional website.
You too can become a BitTorrent detective!
According to Eric Green, CDA's chief operating officer and a former Verizon mid-level manager, he took over CDA's operation in July of this year and operates from Las Colinas, Texas. On August 5, under contract from Lucas, Green "searched for the film on public and private torrent sites," then downloaded what he found on gay-torrents.net. He then recorded the IP address of every computer serving him pieces of the file. Sophisticated, this was not.
While some companies have custom software and carefully documented processes, Green "recorded what I observed both as plain text in a spreadsheet and through a series of screenshots executed through the Windows Operating System, which captured exactly what was being displayed on my computer screen at the time the screenshots were taken. The time of these observations was duly noted in my spreadsheet."
Next, he took his 53 IP addresses and sent each one to MaxMind, an IP lookup service, which told him which service provider controlled the block of addresses that included his target. Green then "manually" did his own reverse DNS lookup "to confirm that the IP addresses were not faked and that they properly corresponded with their internet routing assignments, as designated by the listed service provider."
When his torrent download completed, Green took a look. He "opened the file and watched enough of the film, at varying intervals, to determine it was indeed the film for which it was named, Plaintiff’s film, Kings of New York. It was indeed a perfect and unauthorized copy of said film. I then saved copies of my logs and screenshots to a secure and private web server for archival purposes."
Moving quickly
The time between the alleged infringement and the filing of the federal lawsuit was amazingly short: three or four days. The infringements were detected on August 5-6, and the Lucas lawsuit was filed on August 9.
In addition, the company has already asked the judge to force ISPs to respond to subpoenas in 15 days or less. Clearly, speed is an issue.
The suit also claims the copyright infringement here was "intentional," which opens the door to much higher statutory damages that top out at $150,000 per infringement.
More defendants will be added to the case before it's over. Lucas suggests that "information obtained in discovery will lead to the identification of additional infringing parties," and its ongoing "monitoring" may contribute more names, too. These sorts of schemes generally rely more on settlement letters than actual trials to collect the cash, however; something that may be doubly true when gay porn is the issue.
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