A Utah investment company late Friday dropped its copyright-infringement lawsuit against 5,865 BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the movie Nude Nuns with Big Guns between January and March of this year.
Incentive Capital, which is embroiled in litigation with another company called Camelot Distribution over who actually owns the B-rated flick, notified the Los Angeles federal judge presiding over the copyright action that it was dropping the case. (.pdf) An identical Nude Nuns lawsuit brought by Camelot Distribution, a California company, was voluntarily dismissed three weeks ago.
Neither company stated a reason, but the dismissals come after the April 22 order by a federal judge demanding the plaintiffs to explain why it was suing so many people at once. The judge also appointed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to defend the rights of the 5,865 IP addresses.
The copyright infringement lawsuits are part of a nationwide surge of suits collectively targeting more than 130,000 BitTorrent users for pilfering indie films, porn and exploitation flicks from the internet. Unlike the Recoding Industry Association of America’s former litigation campaign, which targeted only a handful of defendants at a time, the BitTorrent film lawsuits are targeting thousands of defendants by internet IP address, and then asking federal judges to order ISPs to identify the subscribers by name.
The Nude Nuns lawsuit, first reported by Threat Level in March, was among the largest of its type. But after our report, it emerged that Camelot’s claim to the film was in dispute. One of the company’s creditors, Incentive Capital, claimed it had legal ownership over Nude Nuns and filed its own mass lawsuit against the same 5,865 IP addresses — a lawsuit it dropped Friday.
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