Judge Understands BitTorrent, Kills Mass Piracy Lawsuits

gavelIn the U.S. roughly half a million people have been sued for sharing copyrighted files in recent years, but filing of mass-lawsuits is not getting easier. A federal judge in Iowa has just issued a key order which makes mass-BitTorrent piracy lawsuits virtually impossible. The judge ruled that copyright holders can’t join multiple defendants in one suit, since there is no proof that they shared files with each other.

In order to join multiple defendants in one lawsuit a copyright holder has to make it clear that they were involved in the same series of transactions. In other words, it has to be likely that the alleged pirates traded files with each other.

In the cases in question, there were weeks or even months between the time the first and last defendant was spotted sharing the film. This makes it very unlikely that all defendants did in fact share files with each other.

“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,” the Judge writes.

Read the full article @ TorrentFreak.com.

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