Recently the Chancery Division of the British High Court ordered British ISP O2 to give up customer details related to a slew of IP addresses. Those IP addresses reportedly used BitTorrent clients to download porn created by the British Ben Dover Productions in addition to 12 smaller copyright holders.
The total number of IP addresses involved in this claim is 9,124 but O2 will only need to provide details on a portion of that number. Golden Eye International Ltd, a copyright holding company, made the claim on behalf of the 13 production companies. The defendants, currently just a list of IP addresses, were represented by a consumer rights group called Consumer Focus.
Golden Eye International exists explicitly for situations like this. The company seeks litigation against peer-to-peer file sharing networks. They make their intentions very clear from the text on their homepage which reads, "If you are reading this, then more than likely you have infringed our rights already."
Originally the Honourable Mr Justice Arnold threw out the claim made by the 12 smaller production companies. The reasoning in that rejection was that those companies in conjunction with Golden Eye International existed only to make money off High Court litigation. Arnold said accepting that partnership "would be tantamount to the court sanctioning the sale of the Intended Defendants' privacy and data protection rights to the highest bidder."
The original list of 9,124 IP addresses included those who supposedly infringed on the copyrights of the 12 smaller production companies. Since the claims made by those companies have been thrown out Golden Eye will only be sending out letters to O2 customers being accused of illegally downloading copyrighted content owned by Ben Dover Productions. That will be a considerably smaller number of people.
Golden Eye wanted to demand £700 per illegal downloader but the High Court rejected that idea. The High Court determined that those accused of illegally downloading material owned by Ben Dover should have the ability to prove they did not commit copyright infringement. If copyright infringement was shown to have happened the amount to be paid will be figured out on a defendant by defendant basis.
It seems everyone is going after ISPs to demand customer information in cases of copyright infringement these days. Probably best to keep an eye on whether your ISP is being forced to provide customer information before you pull something off the web uses BitTorrent.
