The actual ruling[1] has some interesting stuff besides what is covered in the article summary:
- Discussion about a time when it WAS possible to associate an IP address with a specific device and that, for the purposes of allowing discovery, it was REASONABLE to assume that the traffic from that device was initiated by the owner of that device. This has important implications for the future, as IPv6 may make "one ISP IP per actual end device" common again
- Some hilarious footnotes describing the hypocritical nature of the claims of this and plaintiffs in previous cases. In one case, a plaintiff made a claim that part of the reason for vigorous copyright claims was to "protect minors", when the very plaintiff had a teen porn website. Another footnote was about this plaintiff (K-beech) attempting to claim the moral high ground when in fact the person behind the company was the same who previously tried to extort adult book store owners with violence and bomb threats.
- A VERY interesting footnote which points out that it is still somewhat of an open question whether pornographic works are copyrightable at ALL
- The fact that, in the case of pornography, plaintiffs often rely on defendants settling even though they are innocent, simply because they don't want their name published in association with a video called "My Little Panties #2"
- Abusive tactics by the plaintiff to use information provided by discovery to harass defendants to settle. This includes asking for phone numbers and email addresses which, the judge observes, aren't necessary for servicing defendants and are mostly used to further the plaintiff's aggressive settlement tactics
- The hilarity of seeing things like "Maryjane Young Love
and
Gangbanged" in an official court filing
- And a whole section that's arguable more important than the IP address opinion...
Plaintiffs in these cases usually file a joinder[2] of claims and combine 10s, 100s, and sometimes 1000s of defendants in a single suit. However, the judge argues that even if he were to grant discovery on all the John Does in the case, he still might sever the joinder because:
- It is transparently an attempt to avoid paying the ~$350 filing fee for each claim. The courts, he says, don't take kindly on losing that much revenue simply because the fees don't fit the plaintiff's business model
- Joinder rules require, among other things, that the group of defendants must be related by the action “arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences” and “any
question of law or fact common to all defendants will arise in the action.”. In a wonderful display of deeply understanding the technical matters here, the judge argues that the technical nature of BitTorrent (to wit: that multiple parties seed the same file at the same time) does not alone satisfy the joinder requirement, simply because the user is not usually aware of these technical details.
- That, in any event, these co-defendants are only related by technical protocol and not case fact. Because of this, each defendant would still get to retain counsel, call witnesses, and defend him- or herself separately. In addition, the rules of joinder require certain actions that would involve n*(n-1) separate filings and would complicate the discovery process. This, the judge points out, turns an otherwise simple case into a massively complex one and thereby goes against the very reason why joinder was created in the first place.
In my opinion, this has the potential to be an even bigger setback to the copyright owners' tactics than the IP address opinion. If joinders like these are routinely severed because of these reasons, it would certainly make the "mass lawsuits against thousands of unnamed defendants" tactic a losing business model.
[1] http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/92215098 [scribd fullscreen]
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joinder