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The US Copyright Group (USCG) is upping the ante against alleged BitTorrent copyright infringers. In an amended complaint filed yesterday, Maverick Entertainment listed 4,350 unnamed John Does in the ongoing effort to identify those users. Once the ISPs receive this information, providing there is no opposition, identifiably information will be divulged and the USCG will begin sending monetary demands to these alleged infringers. This news comes after 944 lawsuits were dropped in two other BitTorrent cases yesterday.
Maverick Entertainment is a Florida based company that joined up with the USCG and filed its initial complaint back in April of this year. When their complaint was first filed, there were only 1,000 unnamed defendants and no IP addresses listed. Fast forward to August, and we can see that the USCG and its agents have been busy. It seems that Maverick Entertainment has removed some of the original movie tiles off their complaint, while adding others. As of the latest amended complaint, the copyrights of the following movies were allegedly violated via BitTorrent:
13 Hours in a Warehouse
A Numbers Game
Border Town 2009
Deceitful Storm
Fast Track No Limits
He Who Finds a Wife
Hellbinders
Locator 2
Smile Pretty (aka Nasty)
Stripper Academy
The Casino Job
The Clique (aka Death Clique)
Trunk
The movies Army of the Dead, Buds for Life, Demons at the Door, Holy Hustler, Jack Squad, Too Saved, and Treasure Raiders were removed from the original complaint. But what was added is much more important: 4,350 unnamed defendants. What's distinctly different between this amended complaint and West Bay One’s (The Steam Experiment) amended complaint is the time line of IP data collected.
West Bay One's IP address data runs generally from November 2009 to March 2010. However, Maverick Entertainment's IP data was collected from February 2010 to June 2010. This tells us that the USCG and its agents are still very much involved in the IP data collection process - as recently as June of this year.
It’s now onto the discovery phase of the trail, where the USCG group will try to obtain the names of these defendants. This of course requires ISP cooperation, and what we can tell from the current court docket related to this case, there hasn’t been much opposition in the form of motions to quash from the ISPs. This could change, however, as the legal process moves forward.
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Date: 2010-08-11 |