LOS ANGELES — Twenty-four new porn BitTorrent piracy lawsuits targeting 304 defendants were filed in federal courts throughout the U.S. in the past week.
Malibu Media filed nine suits — all in Colorado — against 134; Elegant Angel filed four suits in Arizona and Colorado fingering 76; Evil Angel filed three suits in Colorado against 28; Raw Films sued 25 in three suits in Colorado; Corbin Fisher filed a pair of suits against three in California; and Wicked Pictures sued 38 in one suit in Arizona.
Each of the suits claim infringement damages of up to the statutory maximum of $150,000 per Doe or named individuals.
In other porn BitTorrent piracy news, a federal magistrate in Alexandria, Va., recommended this week severing all but John Doe No. 1 in each of nine cases.
The magistrate's report, if approved by the district court, would effectively terminate proceedings against 178 defendants while keeping nine individual suits against nine alive. With the exception of one Elegant Angel suit, all of the other suits were waged by Malibu Media.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rawles Jones Jr. questioned the joinder of mass plaintiffs in the cases, focusing on the relation of each defendant as it pertains to BitTorrent "swarms."
"Where, as here, a plaintiff seeks to join several defendants in an action based on filesharing activity, the magistrate judge finds that a plaintiff must allege facts that permit the court at least to infer some actual, concerted exchange of data between those defendants," Jones wrote.
"In these cases ... the spans of time shown in plaintiffs’ investigations make it difficult to draw the conclusion that there has been any actual exchange of data between and among the defendants in each case.
"There is nothing suggesting with any specificity that any defendant shared those pieces with another defendant."
XBIZ publishes a weekly report each Friday on porn BitTorrent piracy filings in the U.S.