Yes, filesharing is appearing in the courts once again. This time the situation is almost comical, and we sincerely hope that the courts will treat it as such.
The stupidity that we’re talking about is that of the claimant, US Copyright Group. The Group wants to sue 15,000 people for downloading new(ish) movies through BitTorrent. Rather than going to all the work and effort of actually suing all these people, the Group wants to lump all of them together and do it in one swift case… well guys, it just doesn’t work like that.
Each of these individuals needs the opportunity to represent his or her case. For this, each person would need to be allowed to attend the trial. Then there’s the location: US Copyright Group want all this to happen in D.C. Because (and I’m not making this up) the nature of Bittorrent is such that the data for the films is most likely to have passed through D.C. at some point. Never mind that this is thousands of miles away from some of the defendants.
Hopefully this latest bout of filesharing craziness is going to be thrown in the trash just like the similar RIAA request of some years back. If it’s not, then we just despair.