Shlockmeister Uwe Boll sues 2,000 “Far Cry” P2P downloaders

German director Uwe Boll has made something of of specialty out of producing terrible movies based on video games. Back in 2006, Ars Gaming Editor Ben Kuchera summed up Boll’s problem: “After he watched the final cut of Alone in the Dark, he actually decided to release it. This guy is pure evil, distilled in an untalented director’s body.”

Boll went on to make such films as Postal and Far Cry, taking advantage of German film tax credits to obtain continued financing for his work, and he wasn’t above actually punching out his critics in the ring. The man is… not universally loved.

This month, Boll found a new revenue source: mass lawsuits against P2P downloaders in US federal court. The first suit from Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteiligungs GmbH targets “Does 1-2,094” over their alleged sharing of Far Cry on BitTorrent networks.

Going postal

The move is part of a new international approach to recouping some of the money believed lost to online piracy. It is spearheaded in the US by a new entity calling itself the US Copyright Group, which has filed a host of such lawsuits in recent weeks against P2P users, mostly involving smaller independent films. The Hollywood Reporter first noted the lawsuit campaign, which isn’t designed so much to stop piracy as to monetize it.

The original article is full of odd statements, such as this one that describes how the P2P detection technology in question works: “The program captures IP addresses based on the time stamp that a download has occurred and then checks against a spreadsheet to make sure the downloading content is the copyright protected film and not a misnamed film or trailer.” Say what?

After reading through the court documents related to the Far Cry case, a much clearer picture emerges. Boll’s German film company has signed on with the US Copyright Group, which coordinates the campaign. The group is owned by IP lawyers, is based in Washington, DC, and has a website with the grandiose title of SaveCinema.org. US Copyright Group charges nothing to take cases; it takes a percentage of all revenues earned on a contingency basis. “We are here to recover losses for copyright holders and to stop film piracy,” it says. “We are here to SAVE CINEMA.”

The lawyers in the Boll case come from DC firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, with partner Thomas Dunlap signing several of the key documents.

The tech comes from GuardaLey, a company registered in England and Wales. According to a declaration from GuardaLey’s Director of Data Services, Patrick Achache, the company identifies BitTorrent users sharing Far Cry in two ways. First, it simply searches P2P networks for Far Cry, then connects to the swarms and logs the IP addresses of those sharing the file—not subtle, but it works. Second, it reviews “server logs obtained from P2P networks to determine the users who were offering the files of this copyrighted movie.”

Just a second—it does what now? How did GuardaLey get access to P2P server logs? The company doesn’t say; perhaps it runs its own honeypot trackers in order to obtain IP addresses.

In any event, the company ends up with IP addresses of users with bits of some file called “Far Cry.” It then downloads the bits of the picture it can get and logs the file metadata. From the IP address, it figures out which ISP is responsible and e-mails them, asking the ISP to retain all logs on the IP address in question at the time in question. Next, Achache must verify the content in the file. “I or one of my assistants have watched a DVD or VHS copy of the motion picture provided by Plaintiff,” he writes. The team then accesses the downloaded files and confirms “that they contain a substantial portion of the motion picture identified in the Complaint.”

That’s when the lawyers take over, filing federal cases against Does and seeking the court’s permission to send subpoenas to the ISPs. If allowed, the ISPs would then turn over subscriber information belonging to the user who was assigned the IP address at the time in question. Defendants are apparently then given a chance to settle; if not, the case could proceed as a named lawsuit.