Dallas Buyers Club launches post-Oscar copyright salvo, sues 615 Does

Dallas Buyers Club launches post-Oscar copyright salvo, sues 615 Does

Studio that sued over The Hurt Locker ramps up, filing from Chicago to Houston.

Joe Mullin – Apr 24, 2014 1:52 pm | 108

Shotgun lawsuits over illegal online downloads used to happen all the time courtesy of US record labels. But the mainstream content industry has abandoned the money-losing litigation strategy. Most attempts at mass-copyright enforcement today involve accusations about downloading porn movies. (See Prenda Law and Malibu Media.)

But there's one small movie studio that still likes trying its hand at courtroom enforcement. Court records show that Voltage Pictures, which made the film Dallas Buyers Club, is happy to pursue lawsuits.

Voltage filed an initial case on Feb. 3, suing 31 users over illegal downloads.

On March 3, the film won three Oscars, including Best Actor for Matthew McConaughey—something the company's lawyers mention in every complaint.

Between March 10 and April 1, a review of federal court records shows that Dallas Buyers Club has filed 16 additional copyright lawsuits against 615 unnamed defendants. It's seeking expedited discovery so that it can get contact information for the accused subscribers. Several judges have already granted the discovery requests.

The complaints are similar in style. Each includes an affidavit from a forensics expert who performed a download of Dallas Buyers Club over BitTorrent. He then collected all the IP addresses involved in the "swarm," using geolocation tools to check which IP addresses match a particular judicial district.

Of the 17 lawsuits over this movie, most were filed in Chicago, but two were filed in Milwaukee, two in Houston, and one in Madison, Wisconsin.

What type of joinder, if any, is appropriate in these mass-copyright cases against John Doe defendants is under consideration right now, but the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit just heard argument in a case related to Prenda Law. Prenda shell AF Holdings had sought to sue more than 1,000 defendants in a single lawsuit. In that case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke up to fight against the theory of "swarm joinder."

The language of the Dallas Buyers Club complaints is similar. Here's the complaint filed in Milwaukee on 3/29:

Each time a Defendant unlawfully distributes a free copy of Plaintiff's copyrighted MOVIE to others over the Internet, each person who copies the MOVIE then distributes the unlawful copy to others without any significant degradation in sound and picture quality. Thus, a Defendant's distribution of even one unlawful copy of a motion picture can result in the nearly instantaneous worldwide distribution of that single copy to a limitless number of people. Plaintiff now seeks redress for this infringement of its exclusive rights.

The complaints go on to note the awards the movie has won. The newer lawsuits also showcase a Variety article about post-Oscar piracy, which includes the graph below.

Credit: CEG TEK International and Variety, via court documents

This isn't the first time at bat for Voltage Pictures. Last year it sued more than 2,300 individual defendants for illegally sharing the Steven Seagal flick Maximum Conviction. With Prenda-like schemes on the minds of many federal judges, some of Voltage's subpoenas were quashed. One judge wrote he was concerned that "the judicial authority of the United States may be used to wrest improvident settlements from pro se litigants under threat of huge statutory penalties."

Previously, Voltage sued over another Oscar-winning film, The Hurt Locker, as early as 2010, making the studio a pioneer in the mass-lawsuit field.

Voltage appears to have stopped filing the Maximum Conviction-related suits in April of 2013. Now, it seems to be hoping for better results from its copyright assault given the Oscar win under its belt.

In addition to the litigation over Dallas Buyers Club, Voltage has filed two lawsuits against 216 defendants over The Company You Keep, a film that came out last year starring Robert Redford. Those lawsuits include not just copyright claims, but claims under Oregon state trademark law.

Neither Voltage Pictures nor its attorneys responded to interview requests regarding the new lawsuits.