EFF Lines Up Lawyers to Help Fight Mass P2P Lawsuit

[nsane.forums]

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) makes good on its promise to compile a nationwide list of lawyers willing to assist BitTorrent users caught up in the US Copyright Group’s mass “spam-igation” dragnet.

Late last month the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put out the word that it was looking for a few good lawyers willing to help the more than 50,000 BitTorrent users the US Copyright Group (USCG) has said it plans to sue for illegal file-sharing.

That call to arms has been heeded by dozens of attorneys around the country willing to offer their assistance in the fight.

READ THE LIST OF ATTORNEYS HERE

“Because so many people need legal help, and usually on a very short time frame, the following attorneys have offered to assist those targeted to understand their options and may, if necessary, file a motion to quash or litigate on their behalf,” says the EFF. “The attorneys on this list are not affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in any way and by offering their names EFF does not intend to give any individual endorsement of them. Fees are negotiable on a case by case basis.”

The EFF has been critical of the USCG’s new business model of mass extortion from the very beginning, calling the organization a “copyright troll” involved in “shaking down individuals for fast settlements a thousand at a time.”

“News reports suggest that the attorneys bringing these suits are not affiliated with any major entertainment companies, but are instead intent on building a lucrative business model built from collecting settlements from the largest possible set of individual defendants,” it warns.

It even teamed up with the ACLU and Public Citizen to file briefs with judges in Washington DC asking them to quash subpoenas submitted by the USCG to identify the accused.

“If USCG wants to sue thousands of people, it needs to give each defendant a fair chance to fight the accusations,” added EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. “Instead, USCG is taking shortcuts that will result in innocent people getting tangled up in the dragnet.”

With the EFF managing to round up lawyers willing to fight back on behalf of those caught up in this mass extortion effort the USCG may finally be forced to give each person that “fair chance” to fight back.

With ISPs like Time Warner also fighting back by rightly limiting the number of IP addresses it will process to just 28 p/mo, despite receiving more than 1400 so far, the USCG will start to realize that suing tens of thousands of people at once won’t be the cake walk it had likely hoped it would be.

Stay tuned.

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