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Judge Ends Massive Porn Lawsuit
eldavojohn writes "A recent offensive of porn producers using copyright law against many anonymous P2P users has been terminated by a West Virginian judge. Initially, Ken Ford of Adult Copyright Company planned out nine lawsuits against some 22,000 file sharers, starting with 7,000-person and 9,000-person suits in the first wave. Unimpressed, the judge reduced everything down to one lawsuit against one file sharer, telling the Adult Copyright Company that they are to prosecute each individual separately, as the accused neither participated in the same transaction nor collaborated in these offenses. So, if you're looking to hit 22,000 people with such a lawsuit, the $350 court filing fee will require an investment of $7.7 million ($1.8 million for the individuals listed so far). Ars points out the hilarious fact that 'Ford has sued enough people that lawyers are taking out ads on his company name,' providing an image of an advertisement for such a search. This is separate from a similar showdown in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois."
Artisis are making the same as they always have.
The actual numbers disagree.
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Look at the article, it has examples. I had the same initial reaction. The Google Adword ads read something to the effect of "Being Sued by Ken Ford? Call us for your defense!!!!!"
And that's EXACTLY his point
It means so many people are getting sued by him, that his name/company is being looked up often by people being sued by him. Defense attorneys have realized that fact and have posted their own ads on search engines for when people look him up.
Wedding photographers already went through this. They used to charge a nominal amount or nothing for shooting the wedding, but would charge you big bucks to order prints of the photos. Naturally, when scanners and photo printers became cheap, people would just scan the prints they had already bought (or sometimes even scan the ordering contact sheets), and print out their own copies.
Today, wedding photographers charge big bucks to shoot your wedding. But the prints are usually free or at-cost. Some of them will even give you the raw files (digital "negatives") of the shoot so you can process the photos on your own in the future if you wish.
When reality meets an outdated business model, there's a lot of inertia on the side of reality.