EFF Fighting Mass Litigation in Court

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) continues its effort to protect thousands of file-sharers accused of copyright infringement by asking judge to split up mass lawsuits so that the defenders can be ensured to have fair right to individual justice, claiming that each case has no connection with the others.
A federal D.C. court is about to hear oral argument from the EFF about splitting up the mass lawsuits on copyright violation brought up by the USCG (US Copyright Group), arguing that it’s inappropriate and unfairly to target so many BitTorrent users at once.

Over three months ago, the USCG began its mass litigation by targeting over 20,000 BitTorrent file-sharers that are accused of distributing an unauthorized copy of either of the indie movies “Call of the Wild 3D,” “Far Cry,” “Steam Experiment,” or the others. In addition, last month the USCG succeeded in convincing the creators of the Academy Award-winning film “The Hurt Locker,” who were very sad about dismal box office ticket sales, to enter the same type of litigation, offering the accused quick settlements worth up to $2500 if they preferred to avoid much larger penalties for copyright violation that could occur at the court.

Since then the EFF and ACLU joined their forces to fight these mass lawsuits. The ventures argue that D.C. courts even have no right to hear such mass violation cases, as the plaintiffs has yet to prove the fact that the courts have jurisdiction over the unknown defendants, whose identities are only determined by IPs. On this issue even the US Copyright Group admits that IPs can only provide a general geographic area for targeted users, but yet still wants to gather them all in one D.C. courtroom. The reason they name for it is the BitTorrent’s architecture, due to which each BitTorrent user is a part of a swarm, or a single transaction liable for exchanging copyrighted content.

Nevertheless, the EFF and ACLU still think it is unfair to demand thousands of users from all over the U.S. to bear the cost in money and time to arrive to a D.C. courtroom just for answering charges for a crime which most likely took place far away. Meanwhile, that might be the main reason for the USCG to hope that most of the accused will decide to settle out of the court instead of spending the same money for travelling. Not so fair either, is it?



By:
SaM
July 5th, 2010