SAN DIEGO — Corbin Fisher on Monday filed a copyright infringement and civil conspiracy suit against 95 BitTorrent users who are alleged to have pirated one video over a one-day span.
The suit outlines how the alleged Corbin Fisher uploaders and downloaders traded the video, whose title wasn't named in the suit.
The defendants in the suit are named as a group — Swarm of Nov. 16, 2010, Sharing Hash File A3E6F65F2E3D67200A5908F64ED55 B66A080B8 — as well as unnamed John Does.
Corbin Fisher claims defendant Doe No. 1 was the first who uploaded the filed on Nov. 16 at 12:08 a.m., while the last defendant, named Doe No. 95, infringed on Nov. 16. at 11:30 p.m.
The suit describes the length of time between each of the 95 defendants' transactions on a BitTorrent network, typically ranging from seconds to 45 minutes.
"The life cycle of a file shared using BitTorrent begins with just one individual — the initial propogator, sometimes called a 'seed' user or 'seeder,'" the suit says. "The initial propogator intentionally elects to share a file with a torrent swarm. The original file, in this case, contains [Corbin Fisher] copyrighted work."
The suit goes on to call the users in the swarm thieves and that "in the BitTorrent world, there is honor among thieves," who ultimately are rewarded with preserved network speeds.
"Because of the nature of the collective swarm downloads, every infringer is — and by necessity together — simultaneously both stealing [Corbin Fisher's] copyrighted material an redistributing it," the suit said.
The suit was filed at U.S. District Court in San Diego by attorney Marc Randazza.