The Illinois Supreme Court has rejected a pornography vendor’s efforts to unmask thousands of non-Illinois Internet users who allegedly accessed the vendor’s website without permission. The order came after a coalition of ISPs objected to the subpoenas. The decision is another sign of the growing judicial resistance to pornographic copyright trolling.
Lightspeed Media operates a group of pornographic websites. It came up with a clever twist on the basic copyright trolling business model. Rather than suing people for copyright infringement, which must be done in federal court, Lightspeed alleged that thousands of people “belong to a hacking community where hacked passwords are passed back and forth among the members.” Lightspeed “hired” a company called Arcadia Data Security Consultants (which, conveniently, shares an address with Lightspeed and its owner, Steve Jones) to identify the culprits.
Bringing computer hacking charges rather than copyright charges allowed Lightspeed to file the lawsuit in Illinois state courts. It named one anonymous resident of St. Clair County, IL, as the defendant. It then subpoenaed ISPs around the country for the identity of thousands of others who had allegedly “hacked into” Lightspeed’s website. The company argued that all of these users were part of a single password-sharing conspiracy. The Illinois state judge who heard the case approved the subpoenas.
Several ISPs, including AT&T and Verizon, chose to fight the subpoenas. “Lightspeed and its lawyers aren’t really interested in pursuing their claims against a single individual in St. Clair County, nor are they interested in any discovery pertinent to those claims,” the ISPs argued in a court filing. “They actually want to harvest settlements of several thousand dollars each from individual Internet service subscribers to be identified from a list of approximately 6600 IP addresses located across the nation that are said to have accessed Lightspeed’s website wrongfully.”
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