July 7th, 2010 
Cliff Riseborough A few months ago, the US Copyright Group launched massive lawsuits against thousands of Internet users it alleges downloaded illegal torrents of the movies Far Cry and The Steam Experiment in two separate suits. It sent the IP addresses it had to the respective Internet Service Providers and demanded to know the real identities of the users behind those addresses.
Time Warner Cable complained loudly that it doesn’t have the time or resources to immediately return thousands of IP trace requests as it was being asked to do. In turn, the US Copyright Group lawyers accused Time Warner of being a good ISP for copyright infringers.
I guess we’ll see if the lawyers in these cases now throw the same accusations at the US court system. Judge Rosemary Collyer, who is overseeing both cases, has ruled that Time Warner Cable is obligated to supply only a minimum of 28 IP address checks per month, and that’s a total of 28 across both cases.
Considering that Time Warner received 809 lookup requests in the Far Cry case alone, we’re likely looking at a period of years before they’re all completed. And this is likely to simply continue to snowball in to a bigger problem as new cases throw thousands more requests at ISPs. Meanwhile, the continuing high rate of downloads for The Hurt Locker, despite it being the center of another of these massive lawsuits, show that the cases have thus far had zero effect on curbing movie piracy.
(Thanks to Ars Technica).
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