Each suit was pretty much the same, but with a new set of IP addresses and a different title—670 Does for sharing Der Gute Önkel in one suit, 739 for sharing Young Harlots Foreign Exchange in the next. With the judge's go-ahead, Stone sent subpoenas to Internet providers, asking for names and addresses for the account-holder at each IP address, then sent letters to each of them, notifying them they'd been sued and offering to settle—an opportunity about 40 percent of the people he writes take him up on.
It was roughly the same formula followed by the US Copyright Group in D.C. that first inspired Stone. Rob Cashman, a Houston lawyer who represents Doe defendants, including some in Stone's cases, says there have been five lawyers really going after BitTorrent piracy around the country, in remarkably similar ways. "The joke is that they're plagiarizing each other," he says. "It's a cash machine for them. The goal for them is not to move to trial.
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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"When I first heard about it, I didn't think it was a real case. Think about it—you're suing 500 people for downloading. In federal court, you have to put the person accused at the keyboard at the time of infringement," he says, if you're going to win at trial.
Since none of these cases has made it that far, there's no sense in anyone paying a "settlement ransom," Cashman says—except, of course, to avoid being named in public.
Kamal Rowe, an IT worker who lives just outside Boston, had been reading about cases like this in a story on CNet.com when he got the letter from his Internet company, RCN, saying he'd been sued. Suddenly, Rowe found himself in a common predicament, trying to prove he wasn't a pirate at all, that his router had just been hijacked.
It took him a while to figure out just what he'd been accused of—which, according to court records, was illegally serving up a piece of Axel Braun's Barely Legal Schoolgirls No. 6.
"It was definitely embarrassing, to say the least," Rowe says. He's from Barbados originally, raised in a strongly Anglican household, where, he says, "pornography is a very taboo subject." His friends and family believed him when he reasoned that the problem was his new router, which wasn't password-protected.
Rowe decided to call Stone directly and recalls being impressed with how polite and easygoing the attorney was. "He seemed like a really cool guy," Rowe says.
Rowe bought a boilerplate "Motion to Quash" form, specifically for anonymously responding to Doe cases like his, for $20. He took it to the bank to have it notarized and mailed it off to the federal courthouse in Dallas. It became a moot point when Stone dropped the suit against Rowe and the other 634 John Does.
Though he hadn't been getting porn illegally, Rowe says the whole thing made him think twice about how he acquired new games and movies online—now, he says, he always pays for games. He even signed up for Netflix. "This time it wasn't me, but you don't ever want it to be you," he says.
In recognition of his zeal for pirate-hunting, the industry publication XBiz named Stone one of its "Newsmakers of 2010" and invited him to its annual convention in L.A. That's where he saw first-hand just how torn the industry was about going after pirates. He recalls getting a cold reception from industry lawyers, especially on the legal panel where he spoke.
"I realized that the whole legal community in the porn industry had soured the audience against me," Stone says. "Not really having any affinity for the porn business anyway, I saw no reason to stick around."
Back in Dallas, Stone's cases faced a trio of threats—first, the Internet providers began to balk at the long list of subpoenas generated by the Doe suits. They claimed it was too labor-intensive to look up who was using each of the addresses at a given time and started capping the number of look-ups they'd perform. "I know what's involved, and it's such horseshit for them to say they can't get this stuff," Stone says.
Time Warner Cable was one of the stingiest, offering to look up just three defendants' names per month, per lawyer—even though Stone had, for instance, 6,845 defendants to look up for Hustler's This Ain't Avatar XXX alone. Just when Stone was gearing up to tussle, Hustler pulled him back. "They wouldn't let me fight 'em," Stone says. Hustler, he says, was worried about its affiliate relationship with Time Warner Cable. "If you're gonna tie my hands that badly," Stone says, "I don't need you as a client."
Second, First Amendment groups argued against the suits on the ground that people who haven't been proven to break any laws are entitled to privacy online. One judge in Dallas even brought in a pair of lawyers to defend the Does in his court before Stone could send his subpoenas to Internet providers—an "unprecedented step," Stone complained in one court filing, saying the judge had passed up local lawyers and hand-picked a couple of groups that were "renowned for defending pirates."
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