Titan Media has won its bid to be removed from a peer-to-peer subpoena lawsuit by Pacific Bell Internet against the Recording Industry Association of America.
Federal judge Susan Illston handed down an order in the final week of November removing Titan's parent, IO Group, from the lawsuit, as well as co-defendant Media Sentry. Illston also moved the case to D.C. District Court, where PacBell and the RIAA are fighting over the same issue before a judge who recently ruled for the music industry in a similar case involving Verizon Online.
“We believe PacBell named Titan Media in this lawsuit in order to get a foothold in a Court where they hoped to get a more favorable ruling," said Titan general counsel Gill Sperlein in a formal statement. "We are pleased that the Court was able to see through Pacific Bell’s smoke-and-mirror attempts to create a controversy where none existed."
Sperlein told AVN.com Titan thought above all that PacBell likely included them in the California filing to show they needed the original case to be decided in California and not Washington.
"PacBell wanted a different judge to look at the issues, because they know they're going to lose in D.C.," Sperlein said. "I think what made the difference is the court recognized that's what they were trying to do, and that these issues were able to be decided in the D.C. court. I think they tacked us on just so they could say they needed to be here in Northern California."
He called the Illston ruling a big win, not just for the RIAA, but for all small copyright holders like Titan, "who are being severely damaged by illegal file trading. We are a small company, we are not trying to change the world; we are just trying to protect our property and to protect children from being exposed to adult materials on file trading networks like KaZaA.”
"There is no 'substantial controversy' between either [PacBell] and MediaSentry or [PacBell] and Titan of sufficient immediacy and reality to warrant the issuance of a declaratory judgment," Illston wrote in her ruling.
Titan vice president for marketing Keith Webb said in his own statement that PacBell "makes more money from adult material in a single month than we could ever hope to make in a lifetime of our business ... Let's be honest, most of [PacBell/]SBC's customers are not using DSL broadband service to download recipes or trade home movies; they are using it to illegally distribute and trade copyright-protected property, including adult materials."
