The movie studio behind the popular movie wants to interrogate alleged copyright infringers in the US. The company explained the measures taken to identify the true pirates in a court filing. The movie producers want the court to grant 2-hour depositions of Internet users whose connections were used to pirate Dallas Buyers Club.

Over the past 12 months, the makers of Dallas Buyers Club have sued hundreds of BitTorrent users, many of whom settled for an undisclosed amount. The settlement offer is usually made after the moviemakers obtain the identity of the Internet subscriber believed to have pirated the film. However, not all alleged downloaders agree to pay up – many simply ignored the settlement letters they received or claimed that their connection was misused by someone else.

The moviemakers explained the measures taken to ensure that the right person is accused. The efforts included collecting data from Facebook, LinkedIn and even Google Maps, as well as data of the router security settings and download history of a specific connection.

As you can understand, the methods mentioned above are quite invasive, but moviemakers now aim to take it up a notch: in order to identify the true pirates, the studio wants to depose 15 account holders, which means that they will have to testify under oath for up to two hours and face a grilling from the Dallas Buyers Club legal team. Of course, a testimony under oath can be quite intimidating and is highly unusual in movie infringing cases. Although the subscribers using IP-addresses linked to the pirated downloads have already been identified by the Internet service providers, they failed to respond to the studio or denied their infringing activity. Apparently, the movie studio hopes that a testimony under oath would help it to identify the true pirates and name them in the lawsuit.

Dallas Buyers Club producers suspect that some of the subscribers are real infringers, but they admit that they might be covering for someone else, like a roommate or spouse. They believe that the depositions will result in a reduction of legal expenses while guaranteeing the anonymity of the defendants.

Nevertheless, more critical industry experts note that it is just an optimal way to pressure subscribers who choose to ignore settlement requests and other threats.
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