Consumer Alert! The Porn Trolls Are After You

Suppose you went to your snail-mail box one day and opened up a letter from a lawyer you never heard of, demanding $3,500 for illegally downloading a movie you’d never seen. And now imagine that the movie was XXX-rated and the letter contained an implicit threat to sue you for much more and to embarrass you by publicizing your porn habit.

That’s not a hypothetical story. It’s something that’s actually happened to some 250,000 people over the last few years. And because going to court is so expensive, many — maybe most — of those innocent folks have paid up, Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.

If you want to put a human face on this outrageous scam, here’s a news clip from a TV station in Tucson, Ariz. — KGUN-TV — that investigated the story of a young woman named Jenny Phan. Phan, a mother of two who runs a nail salon, has been hit with a claim by lawyers for a porn movie outfit called Elegant Angel Productions.

Phan told the lawyer she’d never downloaded the movie in question. The attorney replied that because they had associated an illegal download with her IP address, she had to pay. No matter that someone else may have hijacked her Wi-Fi network, or even used her computer without permission.

There’s so much wrong with what happened to Phan (I have yet to hear how her case turned out) that it’s hard to know where to start. But aside from the obviously sleazy effort to strong arm an innocent consumer, there’s an important lesson here: Conventional wisdom tells us that if someone uses your Wi-Fi network, you are responsible for what that person does. But like much conventional wisdom, it’s not true, says Stoltz. Your accuser would have to prove that you knew what the other person planned to do and approved it.  

“People don’t know the law and it’s cheaper to pay than to fight it in court,” he says.

Elegant Angel and other movie makers — many, but not all, in the adult film industry — have found these suits a cheap way to make money. The companies have apparently hired security experts to troll for IP addresses that seem to be associated with pirated downloads, usually via BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer software for distributing large amounts of copyrighted material.

Once they have those addresses, attorneys for the companies ask for a court order forcing the ISPs to give them the names of the owners of those addresses. Since the standard of proof is so low, they generally get the order, says Stoltz.

Not every demand to compensate the owner of pirated intellectual property is a scam, of course. When you download content without paying for it, you’ve stepped on the toes of the people who created it, and they have a right to come after you. But that’s an entirely different discussion.

It’s not likely that you’ll be named by a porn scammer or some other copyright troll. But if that does happen, remember your rights and don’t settle without talking to a lawyer who knows something about intellectual property law.