Numerous copyright infringement cases have been filed in federal courts here and elsewhere by the alleged owners of various (mostly pornographic) motion pictures, alleging that each of many “John Doe” defendants—identified only by their Internet Protocol addresses—infringed their copyrights by distributing or downloading pirated copies of their movies over the Internet. We filed amicus briefs in several such cases, together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, arguing that plaintiffs’ litigation tactics are an abuse of the courts: suing thousands of John Does (few if any of whom live in the jurisdictions where the cases are filed), serving subpoenas on their Internet Service Providers for their true names and addresses, and essentially forcing them to settle even if they have good defenses (such as lack of personal jurisdiction, or even innocence), because settling is less expensive than hiring a lawyer in a distant jurisdiction. District judges have ruled in various ways on the legitimacy of these tactics, but the plaintiffs never appealed adverse rulings, simply filing new lawsuits against more defendants and obtaining many thousands of dollars in settlements without ever having to litigate.
In March 2012, we and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief supporting motions filed by several Internet Service Providers to quash the subpoenas in the A.F. Holdings case, which involved alleged pirating of a porn film. We also supported the ISPs’ request that if their motions to quash were denied, the ruling should be certified for an immediate appeal because of the importance of the issue and the conflicting decisions of judges within this district.
The district court denied the motion to quash, and the ISPs appealed. We, EFF and Public Citizen Litigation Group then filed an amicus brief in the appeal, which was the first of these cases to reach an appellate court. The appeal was argued in April 2014 and decided just six weeks later. The court noted that “sometimes individuals seek to manipulate judicial procedures to serve their own improper ends. This case calls upon us to evaluate—and put a stop to—one litigant’s attempt to do just that.” The opinion characterized the plaintiff’s lawyers as a “porno-trolling collective” whose “general approach was to identify certain unknown persons whose IP addresses were used to download pornographic films, sue them in gigantic multi-defendant suits that minimized filing fees, discover the identities of the persons to whom these IP address were assigned by serving subpoenas on the Internet service providers to which the addresses pertained, then negotiate settlements with the underlying subscribers.” The court held that the discovery order to the ISPs was improper, because the plaintiff had no good faith basis for believing that the court had personal jurisdiction over the 1,058 “John Doe” defendants (most of whom apparently lived far from D.C.), and no good faith basis for joining them all in a single lawsuit when their alleged file-sharing activities had taken place at various different times during a five-month period.
On remand, the plaintiff dismissed the case. The decision appears to have put an end to the “porno-trolling” practice.
