In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning story. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that a Southern California maker of pornographic films named Strike 3 Holdings is also “a copyright troll,” according to U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth: Lamberth cwrote in 2018, “Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM.” He likened its litigation strategy to a “high-tech shakedown.” Lamberth was not speaking off the cuff. Since September 2017, Strike 3 has filed more than 12,440 lawsuits in federal courts alleging that defendants infringed its copyrights by downloading its movies via BitTorrent, an online service on which unauthorized content can be accessed by almost anyone with a computer and internet connection.
That includes 3,311 cases the firm filed this year, more than 550 in federal courts in California. On some days, scores of filings reach federal courthouses — on Nov. 17, to select a date at random, the firm filed 60 lawsuits nationwide… Typically, they are settled for what lawyers say are cash payments in the four or five figures or are dismissed outright…
It’s impossible to pinpoint the profits that can be made from this courthouse strategy. J. Curtis Edmondson, a Portland, Oregon, lawyer who is among the few who pushed back against a Strike 3 case and won, estimates that Strike 3 “pulls in about $15 million to $20 million a year from its lawsuits.” That would make the cases “way more profitable than selling their product….” If only one-third of its more than 12,000 lawsuits produced settlements averaging as little as $5,000 each, the yield would come to $20 million… The volume of Strike 3 cases has increased every year — from 1,932 in 2021 to 2,879 last year and 3,311 this year.
What’s really needed is a change in copyright law to bring the statutory damages down to a level that truly reflects the value of a film lost because of unauthorized downloading — not $750 or $150,000 but perhaps a few hundred dollars.
Anone of the lawsuits go to trial. Instead ISPs get a subpoena demanding the real-world address and name behind IP addresses “ostensibly used to download content from BitTorrent…” according to the article. Strike 3 will then “proceed by sending a letter implicitly threatening the subscriber with public exposure as a pornography viewer and explicitly with the statutory penalties for infringement written into federal copyright law — up to $150,000 for each example of willful infringement and from $750 to $30,0000 otherwise.”
A federal judge in Connecticut wrote last year that “Given the nature of the films at issue, defendants may feel coerced to settle these suits merely to prevent public disclosure of their identifying information, even if they believe they have been misidentified.”
Source: Copyright Troll’ Porn Company ‘Makes Millions By Shaming Porn Consumers’ (yahoo.com)
Robin Edgar
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