Nate Anderson discusses two strategies being used (so far unsuccessfully) by defendants in P2P lawsuits: joinder and jurisdiction:
Last week, one of the 14,000 defendants in the US Copyright Group’s anti-P2P litigation campaign filed a document with the DC District Court, hoping to quash the subpoena that would reveal his name and address. The letter was sent anonymously, identifying itself only with an IP address. The case concerned a small film called The Steam Experiment, but the anonymous Doe insisted to the court that “he has never used a file-sharing service and does not know what this case is about.”
[…]
Last week, South Dakota ISP Midcontinent Communications was fed up with a subpoena demanding that it look up the names and addresses of several dozen users for a P2P lawsuit over the film The Hurt Locker.
Instead of replying to the DC District Court, however, Micontinent’s lawyers went directly to South Dakota’s federal court and argued that the DC court had no jurisdiction over the company. If US Copyright Group wanted the information, it would need to file its request with a court in the Eighth Circuit, where Midcontinent does all of its business.
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