Gay Porn Company Sues BitTorrent Users

As part of the industry's continuing crackdown on piracy, gay porn outfit Lucas Entertainment has filed lawsuits against 53 users of the peer-to-peer file-swapping network BitTorrent. Lucas is asking the users' ISPs to disclose their names and addresses.

The time between the alleged infringement and the filing of the federal lawsuit was amazingly short: three or four days. The infringements were detected on August 5-6, and the Lucas lawsuit was filed on August 9. In addition, the company has already asked the judge to force ISPs to respond to subpoenas in 15 days or less. Clearly, speed is an issue. The suit also claims the copyright infringement here was "intentional," which opens the door to much higher statutory damages that top out at $150,000 per infringement. More defendants will be added to the case before it's over. Lucas suggests that "information obtained in discovery will lead to the identification of additional infringing parties," and its ongoing "monitoring" may contribute more names, too. These sorts of schemes generally rely more on settlement letters than actual trials to collect the cash, however; something that may be doubly true when gay porn is the issue.

JMG tipper Davecool notes that the final sentence of the story implies that Lucas feels that "gay porn shame" may force faster settlements.