The scary letters started coming for Alex last fall, at his childhood home on a quiet suburban street about an hour north of San Francisco. He'd been sued in federal court, the letters said—in Dallas, of all places—for illegally sharing a pornographic film on a website called gay-torrents.net.
Danny Fulgencio
When it comes to fighting pirates, all's fair for Denton attorney Evan Stone.
Danny Fulgencio
"I hate hardly anybody, but when I think about pirates, I do tend to think about a lot of them as smarmy entitled little brats."
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Just a year out of high school, still living at home, he'd been taking community college classes and, among other extracurriculars, had been quietly sharing gay porn online. Specifically, a copyrighted film called Missing—a frequently all-nude thriller featuring tanned topless dudes running through Barcelona's criminal underworld followed by dark strangers whose shirts cling shut by a single button.
It's the sort of thing you generally hope to keep private, and the sort of thing Alex probably didn't expect his parents, his friends or a federal court to know was on his computer.
But the film's producers had mounted a new fight against people stealing their work, rounding up the unique Internet protocol (IP) addresses for computers that were sharing copies of their films, and tracking those to the people registered to those accounts. Alex was one of the first to get stung.
The letters—first from his Internet provider, then from the Denton, Texas, Law Offices of Evan Stone—said that with a prompt reply, he could remain anonymous in the lawsuit. For a $1,500 settlement, however, he could make the case disappear altogether.
Evan Stone, an obscure North Texas junior attorney, had sent similar threat letters to dozens of other Alexes around the country, and the foreboding language made you think twice about tossing it with the junk mail. "If you choose not to respond at all," reads one follow-up letter, "we will have no choice but to name you as a defendant in these proceedings, serve you with a federal summons, and seek the maximum monetary judgment under the applicable laws."
Alex, who declined an interview for this story, probably would have preferred keeping his private life to himself. But he suffered a worse fate than being outed as a porn thief: The letters came to his mom. She was the household's account holder of record, and she refused to pay up.
Just before 8 on the morning of July 17, a computer at Remove Your Content, LLC in Irving was busy downloading Missing, piecing it together with BitTorrent, a file-sharing technology that grabs chunks of a file, in whatever order it can, from computers around the world. Chase scene after sex scene, bits of the movie file streamed in, and the computer in Texas logged addresses for everyone it downloaded from.
It logged 19 computers delivering the movie that morning—including Alex's—bundled them with 46 IP addresses collected two days earlier, and tossed them all into a suit that Evan Stone filed that very day in Dallas federal court: Lucas Entertainment, Inc. v. [John] Does 1-65.
It was the first of many suits filed by Stone, against thousands of anonymous defendants listed only by their IP addresses—because that's all the attorney knew about them—for pirating porn. Not just any pornography, either, but big-budget and name-brand titles, spoofs like This Ain't Avatar XXX and the classic Debbie Does Dallas.
It was a novel approach, suing thousands of anonymous defendants at a time, a strategy used by just a handful of lawyers around the country. Quicker than he could add defendants to his mailing list, though, Stone attracted enemies: Internet freedom advocates, technology lawyers, the ACLU and even lawyers for the porn industry, each with their own complaints.
They must have wondered, who is this Evan Stone? For a lawyer, he brought an awfully playful quality to his work, like his choice to name exactly 1,337 defendants in one of his most recent cases—an insidery nod to "LEET"-speak, the secret-handshake hacker language where numbers stand in for letters every now and then (1,337 translates to "LEET," "n00b" means "noob," etc.).
Defendants and lawyers who tried to research Stone online would find he shared a name with a legendary porn star, also from Dallas. Some were even convinced the Evan Stone suing pirates over the original Debbie Does Dallas was the same Evan Stone who starred in 2007's Debbie Does Dallas...Again.
To many, though, there was nothing mysterious about Stone's cases. For threatening to unmask his anonymous defendants in court, Stone was nothing more than a blackmail artist. Defense attorneys derided the 34-year-old's practice as a half-baked get-rich-quick-scheme. Others found a single word to cut down Stone and the handful of others like him—a term as pejorative and dismissive among lawyers as it is among bloggers. Stone, they said, was a troll.
Below a piece about Stone on the tech blog ArsTechnica, one commenter says, "Mr. Stone, bite my shiny metal ass."
"I hope some wacko puts a .308 round through this guys head..." another writes.
Years after squads of copyright enforcement lawyers shut down Napster, sued grandmothers for downloading pop music and threw the book at The Pirate Bay (the world's biggest Torrent search site), these John Doe suits opened a new front in the anti-pirate battle. It was a strategy heretofore untested in court, largely because suing thousands of anonymous individuals—who might have just left their wireless network unprotected, or let somebody else use their computer—could look like a real dick move.
