This month, the firm behind Academy Award-nominated film "Dallas Buyers Club" filed a lawsuit against 31 individuals in a Texas district court over the alleged download of the movie using file-sharing service BitTorrent.
Independent news organization Mother Jones said in a report that the latest court filing was just one of the thousands of cases brought against users of BitTorrent in the past few years in their attempts to stave off theft of movies, music, porn, books, and software by Americans. However, the investigative blog said companies seeking legal means to do will be facing a steep battle as several federal judges had already ruled that computer Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which is currently used by companies and others to target alleged thefts are not enough proof for the lawsuits they have filed to proceed. Moreover, Mother Jones also quoted copyright pundits, who have observed a slowdown of firms going after people at once as compared to their lawsuits a few years ago, insinuating that the court ruling in IP addresses had hampered companies to pursue massive piracy claims.
Staff attorney Mitch Stoltz at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, "I think the trend is towards judges looking at [piracy] cases more carefully than they used to, requiring more upfront investigation. There may always be some judges who will simply rubber-stamp these cases...but there are fewer of those judges than before."
Law professor R. Polk Wagner at the University of Pennsylvania, who specializes in intellectual property law, deduced that the court ruling was due to the fact that the name connected to an IP address is usually the one who pays the Internet bill and not the actual person who had downloaded the creative content illegally.
Still, Chicago attorney Jeffrey Antonelli said that some of the companies took a different approach to avoid federal judges into invoking this specific reasoning to dismiss piracy claims. He told Mother Jones, "It's possible companies think that if they sue fewer people who are doing more significant activities, that's a more defensible public relations approach."
