The law firm of Evan Stone, the legal team representing Hustler in their mass peer-to-peer porn film file sharing lawsuits, has run into a bit of a stumbling block while trying to obtain the identities of 4,000+ John Doe defendants involved in the cases.
Time Warner Cable (TWC), one of the largest internet service providers (ISP) in the US, will only agree to turn over 10 names per month to allow the firm to match defendant identities to IP addresses, which is the only identifying information they currently possess.
"If you're a pirate in these times, TWC is the ISP to have," Stone told CNET this week.
Stone apparently wanted to challenge the ISP’s drastic limitation, which would make the process to obtain all the identities take more than 30 years, however Hustler’s parent company, Larry Flynt Publishing (LFP), asked him to stand down because of business ties between the two corporations.
Also problematic, could be issues of jurisdiction, which caused the dismissal of several thousand similar cases handled by Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, the law firm behind the US Copyright Group, and over a thousand porn file-sharing cases being handled by attorney Kenneth Ford. Stone, however, seems to believe that he possesses the skills and knowledge to succeed in mass piracy litigation where others have failed.
"I was born for [these kind of cases]," Stone said. "I put myself through school doing database programming and I earned a film degree before my law degree. I honestly think it's my tech background that has saved me from making the same mistakes [Dunlap and Ford] made. Either way, this trend of BitTorrent litigation is a long way from over."
One small issue that Stone seems to be overlooking at this point is the amount of money that it’s going to take to continue to pursue these cases. Attorney Thomas Dunlap of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver also vowed to pursue the file-sharing cases he represented – until he crunched the numbers, that is.
The bottom line is that these types of cases are neither good for the plaintiffs or the defendants, and the film industry is finally starting to realize it. Stone may want to start looking for the next line of work that he was “born to do”.
