NEW YORK—Lucas Entertainment has filed a federal lawsuit against 65 unnamed individuals the company claims used a gay BitTorrent index to share illicit copies of one of its movies.
Filed July 19 in United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, the suit seeks monetary damages and a permanent injunction barring defendants from infringing any of Lucas’ copyrights.
According to documents filed with the court, each of the defendants, who are known only by their internet protocol addresses, participated in round-robin sharing of the Lucas title Missing after logging on to the BitTorrent index Gay-Torrents.net. The site is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
The piracy lawsuit is Lucas Entertainment’s first. President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Lucas said his company departed from other gay studios’ anti-piracy tactic—suing the websites involved or ganging several individual defendants in smaller actions—in favor of an approach that has worked for Hollywood and the recording industry: broad-based litigation against individuals. Lucas said mainstream lawsuits targeting hundreds or thousands of individual defendants at once have proved more efficient than repeatedly pursuing several smaller cases.
“While many sites are responsive and take down content once notified of a copyright violation, some are not and we have decided to take a more forceful approach with the more difficult sites and their users,” Lucas said. “Too many people assume the internet provides them with unlimited access to our content at no cost. Instead, it gives us exactly the tools and information we need for lawsuits like this one. I will be ruthless with those who are stealing my films.
“You only have to conduct a quick Google search to see the rampant piracy all over the internet,” he added. “I am always surprised that users would deal with torrent sites and all the hassle that requires instead of streaming through LucasEntertainment.com, but I guess there are many people out there who have endless patience. We appreciate our fans wherever they are, but business is business and we have to make some money off our content.”
The complaint is here.
