Last month the producers of the academy award winning film “Hurt Locker” filed suit against file sharers who illegally downloaded the film from file sharing sites. The letters that he down loaders received provides an option, pay the producers $1,500 or get sued for as much as 150,000.
However, the law firm representing Voltage Pictures, the producers of the Iraq war film, is being delayed by two watchdog groups, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), which is a pro-technology advocacy group, and the American Civil Liberties Union have challenged Dunlap Grubb’s attempt to file a single lawsuit against thousands of people caught up in the download.
The law firm originally picked up thousands of IP addresses from the file sharing sources. They found the downloading sites, subpoenad records to find the names and IP addresses of the down loaders. Then they matched the IP address to the address on the ISP server, and they had their down loaders.
But, the EFF and the ACLU argue there is nothing that binds these people together. So by making them all defendants in a single suit isn’t proper. (What about the downloading?)
Did the down loaders actually affect the movie revenue? After all, if the movie made boatloads of money, then one can argue, what’s the harm? Well, “The Hurt Locker” was leaked to the Web months before its theatrical release, and it was the lowest-grossing Oscar winner for Best Picture ever. So apparently it did hurt.
The judge in the case has issues. One is the concern about piracy, and the other is whether her court has jurisdiction to handle a case involving defendants from around the country. That said, she ordered the producers law firm to work with the ACLU and the EFF on notifying the defendants about their rights. But she let the law suit stand in so far as saying that the case could be brought as a class action, and not one that would involve the producers suing each individual defendant. The costs would be a lot more in that case.
For now, the producers are at least not going after more downloaders, but that doesn’t let the current one’s identified off the hook.
Source: cnet
