[x-pubpol] US judge rules against mass claims in copyright cases

[Joly MacFie]

http://the1709blog.blogspot.com/2014/02/killer-joe-can-sue-john-does-us-judge.html




<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OuqZQL1ub9o/UuuBzplyYjI/AAAAAAAAHFQ/YnZVQDzezAw/s1600/killeroeposter2.jpg>
A federal judge has ruled that copyright holders seeking to file suit
against online pirates may not join multiple defendants into one suit,
which might cause some headaches for the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who
have widely used this tactic against filesharers.  In a December ruling in
Iowa, Judge Stephanie Rose decided that copyright holders should no longer
be permitted to file a single piracy case against so many defendants at
once.

Judge Rose, in a series of rulings regarding the movies "*Killer Joe*", "
*Sibling*" and "*The Company You Keep*",  found that a perceived link
between multiple defendants was not justified saying "In the *'Killer Joe*'
cases the January defendants would have to be connected to the internet and
still actively distributing data through the BitTorrent client
approximately three months later to be involved in the same transaction as
the April defendants, which is implausible at best" adding "Although each
plaintiff has alleged that the defendants in each case were in the same
swarm based on the same hash value, participation in a specific swarm is
too imprecise a factor absent additional information relating to the
alleged copyright infringement to support joinder". She ruled that each
case should be limited to one defendant because the plaintiffs have failed
prove any guilt under the terms set out by the judge's ruling as "Any
'pieces' of the work copied or uploaded by any individual [John] Doe may
have gone to any other Doe, but may instead have gone to any of the
potentially thousands of others who participated in a given swarm and are
not in this case," she wrote according to TorrentFreak.

Earlier this month we noted that a US federal judge in Washington, Robert
Lasnick, ruled an individual's IP address was not sufficient to actually
implicate any particular person in copyright infringement - and that that
IP address-only evidence fails to meet the pleading standards required to
pursue for copyright infringement.

<https://www.blogger.com/goog_46287391>
http://rt.com/usa/broad-piracy-lawsuits-judge-rule-437/




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