DVTimes

By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com reporter
It's not fun, but all things considered, John Steele is OK with being a villain.

In recent months, Steele's Chicago law firm has filed almost 100 federal lawsuits seeking to identify thousands of "John Does" who downloaded pornographic videos in violation of their producers' copyright. Federal court records indicate that none of Steele's cases ? in fact, no case of this type ever ? has ended with a verdict at trial.

Sometimes, the cases run into roadblocks from skeptical judges over jurisdiction or whether the defendants have been appropriately identified. Others end in settlements for a few thousand dollars from defendants who are relieved that they get to remain anonymous.

Internet privacy advocates and technology writers call Steele a "copyright troll" and accuse his firm of scouring the Internet to track down computers that download pornographic videos, then forcing Internet service providers to identify the computer owners so it can shame those people into writing settlement checks.


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The incentive to settle is to keep from being named forever in court records as a porno fiend, which "seems to me like it's a good way to make an easy buck," said Julie Samuels, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, nonprofit advocate for what it calls "freedoms in the networked world."

"These plaintiffs are out to get a quick settlement," she said, because they know defendants ? even those who have been wrongly identified ? are eager to remain anonymous.

If you look at it as a matter of law, a lot of that is right, said Steele, who's fine with being called names as long as it doesn't cross the line into accusations of malfeasance.

Yes, Steele's firm goes looking for pornographic videos being accessed without permission ? the firm developed its own tracking software "to make sure it's done right," he said.

Yes, the goal is to bring in money for pornographers ? a letter from Steele's firm explicitly urges defendants to seize the "opportunity to avoid litigation by working out a settlement with us." One of the letters, a copy of which Steele verified, suggests writing a $2,900 check to the firm at its Chicago address.

? Read the Steele Hansmeier settlement letter (.PDF)

And yes, one of the goals is to "scare people," he said ? not primarily into writing checks, but to stop them from "stealing our clients' content."

That's not a bad thing, Steele said, because piracy today is so easy that "the industry's really on its knees right now."

(The economics of the pornography business are notoriously hard to nail down, but the industry commonly claims that illegal downloads have wiped out as much as 90 percent of producers' income since the advent of videocassettes made porn easy to watch in the privacy of the home.)

advertisementLots of people may think his firm's methods are unfair, but adult entertainment companies are legal businesses with valid claims, and "we believe it's completely ethical and important to recover more money than the cost of the litigation," Steele said.

And as for his critics, he accepted that "you can't control what people say."

"If we were doing anything unethical, after 95 cases I can assure you I wouldn't have a law license," he said.

? Read a representative recent suit (.PDF)

Studios have strong piracy case
Steele's opponents agree with him when he says that most of the anonymous defendants probably did break the law and that adult entertainment producers have a right to protect their interests in court.

Even as he criticized the methods of lawyers like Steele, Adam E. Urbanczyk, an attorney with Saper Law of Chicago ? which defends John Does sued by adult studios ? stressed that "it's almost incomprehensible the amount of material that's getting ripped off."

And Samuels, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it's "absolutely not the position of EFF that the industry should not be able to sue."

The distaste is with how the suits are filed. And this is where things get pretty technical.

The shorthand description of what plaintiffs' firms like Steele Hansmeier do is scour P2P networks to identify IP addresses that are downloading copyrighted material.

In non-tech, that translates to looking for videos that are being distributed across decentralized peer-to-peer (hence, P2P) file-sharing networks called "torrent sites." Then, using geotracking technology (like the GPS in your car or on your smartphone), investigators harvest the numeric Internet protocol addresses of the computers that are retrieving and sharing them.

That requires sophisticated programming, because the computers linked into the torrent "swarm" go on and offline from second to second ? and when they're plugged in, their IP addresses can also change second by second.

Similar cases target the addresses of computers that retrieve videos from so-called tube sites, which are underground YouTube-like operations that stream entire X-rated videos without permission.

In both instances, the lawsuits are meant to attach real people to the IP addresses. A dozen to a couple of hundred of them are then lumped together in a single lawsuit; this month alone, Steele Hansmeier has filed at least seven such suits seeking the identities of almost 700 John Does in California and Illinois, federal dockets show.

Urbanczyk likened that strategy to "throwing your lure out there" to see what you might catch.

"I wouldn't say bringing these cases is a scam because the claims are absolutely valid," Urbanczyk said. But "the whole situation reeks" because there are better remedies for copyright infringement, he said.

advertisementTargeting the pirates, not their customers
When mainstream music and movie studios pursued copyright suits against individual users a few years ago, the public backlash was severe. Only a handful of such cases are still being pursued, most notably involving downloads of the Academy Award-winning movie "The Hurt Locker."

But pornography is different, because "we're an industry that people may think is morally questionable, that we may deserve it," said Dominic Ford, a gay adult video performer who operates Porn Guardian, a company that tracks copyrighted material and helps producers pursue video pirates.



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sue them all

i dont download anything for free...no songs...no movies..tv shows...no porn

nothing
why should others get free, what they should have to pay for

thievery is thievery
you would all do well to remember who is supporting the thieves with their every post here

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