lawsuits

A few weeks ago TorrentFreak unraveled a tangled web of copyright trolls who had sued hundreds of BitTorrent users under the name MCGIP.

The article revealed the tight connections between the various parties involved in the scheme and the mistakes they made.

Interestingly enough, soon after these findings were published MCGIP dropped their lawsuits for reasons unknown.

The Winklevii really are working extra hard to make sure that their names are synonymous with "losers" aren't they?

A new dimension was just added to the ongoing stream of BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. A Canadian BitTorrent user has been ordered to pay $60,000 by a U.S.

District Court judge. The Calgary resident, who did not defend himself, was ordered to pay the damages for sharing two films on an adult-oriented BitTorrent tracker.

Hiring managers walk a fine line between vetting candidates online and putting themselves at risk for lawsuits from passed-over candidates, say employment law experts.

Facebook, HP, Rackspace, Juniper, Fujitsu and dozens of other organizations have joined a group building a defensive patent portfolio to protect Linux-using members from potential lawsuits.

A federal appeals court tossed out two phone-company lawsuits challenging the FCC's new net neutrality rules, saying that the suits were filed too early.

There was some news last week about copyright trolls, US Copyright Group (really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver), dropping thousands of lawsuits it had filed against people for file sharing.

While some are declaring victory, I'd wait and see. It may simply be setting up to refile those lawsuits in the proper venues, as the firm has done in the past.

Last year, Larry Flynt Publications filed lawsuits against several thousand “John Does” the company accused of illegally sharing its movie “This Ain’t Avatar XXX”.

Now, following on from problems it had gaining identities of Does from ISP Time Warner, thousands of cases have been dismissed by a senior judge.

The road to gaining settlements from allegedly infringing individuals has just become massively more costly, and the profitable future for these type of projects in general now appears to be in serious doubt.

Thousands of file sharers have been sued in recent months for downloading movies like The Hurt Locker and Avatar XXX.

U.S. rights holders model these lawsuits after similar litigation in Germany, where P2P piracy has led to hundreds of thousands of cases in recent years.

The goal of this type of persecution isn’t so much to stop piracy, but to profit from it — and new statistics from Germany show that the strategy could be working, with P2P litigation becoming a multimillion dollar business.

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When Hadopi first started sending out "you're an infringer!" first strike notices last month, we noted that it was initially sending out 10,000 per day with plans to ramp up to 50,000.

It isn't taking long. The latest reports show that it's already sending out 25,000 notices per day.

That seems like an awful lot.