An individual falsely accused of pirating the Elf-Man movie was recently granted $101,000 in attorney fees, after the producers of the film decided to drop the lawsuit. The reason was because the court criticized their evidence gathering method, but the decision didn’t help the movie makers to escape a hefty bill.
As you know, there have been lots of mass-piracy lawsuits in the United States within the last few years, which targeted hundreds of thousands of alleged pirates. Those who started such lawsuits were often called “copyright trolls”, because all they wanted was only to collect settlement payments from the alleged downloaders. The case between the makers of the “Elf-Man” film and an individual from Washington started exactly like this.
As usual, the plaintiffs presented an IP address as the main piece of evidence, which was collected by a file-sharing “investigator”. Such services normally operate by using software to connect to the BitTorrent swarm that shares the copyrighted content. The problem was that courts couldn’t understand why such evidence can be taken as solid and how the plaintiffs could prove any alleged wrongdoings. Indeed, the tracking software could not really prove that the defendant had downloaded the movie in question. Besides, the makers of “Elf-Man” weren’t entirely forthcoming about the identity, employer, or location of its investigators.
As a result, the movie studio decided to pull out of the lawsuit, but still had to pick up the bill, because the judge awarded attorney fees of $101,000 to the alleged copyright infringer. However, the movie studio wasn’t sanctioned for its trolling and for the use of unlicensed investigators.
Many interesting ideas in this article. And many more that were brought up. They have to prove someone knows what they are downloading is illegal and they have to prove the item was stolen. They also have to prove who is doing the downloading.
