Hustler continues filing new lawsuits despite DDoS attacks

It seems that the threat of an attack by Anonymous isn’t enough to intimidate Hustler (LFP). Anonymous hasn’t prevented them from filing more lawsuits accusing people of illegally sharing their films online.

The law firm of Evan Stone, the legal team representing Hustler in their current P2P file sharing cases, filed an additional 2,619 new lawsuits in the Dallas District Court last Friday. This brings the total number of cases filed on Hustler’s behalf to over 6,000, all but 1,500 of them for the movie “This Ain’t Avatar XXX”.

Hustler became a target of a DDoS attack, coincidentally also last Friday, by the group Anonymous in response to the P2P cases that the company had already filed. The company was unprepared to defend against the attack and their website was down for several hours as a result.

“We are surprised by this announcement by this group. Obviously our legal actions against the individuals who have stolen our content are valid. Theft of content takes away from the company, performers, studio personnel and make-up artists,” said LFP President Michael Klein.

Though Klein claims his company’s allegations are valid, the lawsuits have been criticized by advocacy groups for the number of wrongly accused individuals turning up in the reports accompanying the filings. Some of the defendants named in a case filed by Hustler inexplicably include Amazon.com, Maine Libraries/Dept. of Education, Clarksville Department of Electricity, and the Ohio Public Library Information Network.

Whether the Anonymous attack will deter Hustler from future legal filings remains to be seen, but I would bet that this first attack won’t slow them down at all. However, Anonymous also doesn’t back down easily and we could end up with another Gene Simmons type of situation. Stay tuned.