Porn industry files largest copyright infringement case yet

The Adult Copyright Company has filed another new BitTorrent copyright infringement complaint, and this one happens to have the largest number of John Doe defendants of any of the industry’s infringement claims filed so far this year.

Kenneth Ford, attorney for the Adult Copyright Company, filed the complaint Thursday at the U.S. District Court in Martinsburg, WV. It targets 9,729 John Does suspected of illegally downloading West Coast Productions’ adult film “Teen Anal Nightmare 2” from BitTorrent sites.

This is obviously what Ford must have been talking about last month when he stated in an interview that, “My intention is to file suit against several thousand more illegal downloaders in the next week or two. The coming lawsuits will name in the neighborhood of 10,000 Doe defendants.”

The new filing brings the total number of recent defendants targeted by the Adult Copyright Company to nearly 17,000. When added to the US Copyright Groups similar litigation, there are currently over 30,000 pending John Doe cases in the US court system right now.

Of course, the only thing the courts have right now to identify the defendants is the names of their ISPs, IP addresses, and the date and time at which the alleged illegal activity occurred. By now, you’re likely familiar with the next step, which is to subpoena the ISPs to reveal the personal information for their subscribers who are associated with the IP addresses in question.

The porn industry began this campaign against BitTorrent piracy two months ago, and chances are good that they won’t stop anytime soon.

Things should really begin to get interesting once the ISPs are involved and people begin to receive notification that they’ve been accused in the case. It’s more likely that people will request anonymity since pornography is involved, but if the precedence set in the Far Cry case is any indication, people aren’t going to get much sympathy from the judge regarding their reputations.