"Maximum Conviction” Pirates Won’t Get Maximum Conviction

Mass lawsuits, launched by numerous copyright trolls, seem to be consigned to the dustbin of legal history soon. The idea of the so-called “commercial invoicing” is that the copyright owners find a potential pirate from a file-sharing service, get the broadband provider to identify them and extort money by threatening to take them to court. In most cases (especially if it is about porn video), the victims prefer to settle in order to avoid expensive court litigation. The scheme of copyright trolls has worked quite well until judges started to understand that it’s simply abusing the legal system for extortion.

For example, recently a federal judge slammed “reverse class action lawsuits” while dismissing an LA-based movie company’s case which claimed dozens of unidentified defendants had pirated its film off the web. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Voltage Pictures to the US District Court in Medford. The plaintiffs were seeking up to $180,000 in damages from each of three dozen defendants alleged of pirating the 2012 film “Maximum Conviction”.

Voltage Pictures demanded $30,000 for the alleged copyright violation and an additional $150,000 from each “John Doe” in statutory damages in case of willful conduct. However, the US district court judge Ann Aiken refused the plaintiffs, pointing out that the movie company had unfairly lumped the plaintiffs together in a “reverse class action suit” with the purpose of saving over $200,000 in court costs. In addition, they demanded $7,500 for allegedly illegally viewing a $10 video.

The movie company wanted a jury trial, accusing the unnamed defendants of using their PCs to illegally copy and distribute its movie “Maximum Conviction”. However, at the time of the initial filing, the defendants weren’t identified by name – the plaintiffs had only their IP addresses. The judge claimed that the manner in which the movie company was pursuing the Doe defendants led to $123,850 savings in filing fees only, at the expense of the fairness to the defendants. Although the judge agreed that such technologies as BitTorrent allow for large-scale copyright violation, it turned out that some of the defendants had unsecured IP addresses, the others prohibited uploading, and the rest were associated with institutional accounts like businesses and schools.