THR reports that more than 20,000 individuals have been sued for downloading movies via BitTorrent in recent weeks. The suits may be part of a larger strategy that could see another 30,000 hit with lawsuits in the coming days.
Thousands of New File Sharing Lawsuits Launched in the U.S.
March 31, 2010
Share this post
4 Comments

Law Bytes
Episode 278: Ben Waldman on Gander Social and the Challenges of Building a Sovereign Social Network
byMichael Geist

August 10, 2026
Michael Geist
Search Results placeholder
Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Named to Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers
Be Careful What You Wish For: Why Asking Google Maps to Defy the U.S. on Lake Ontario Would Undermine Canadian Digital Sovereignty
Big Money, Bigger Design Changes: What the Meta Settlement Means for Canada, Bill C-34, and the Age Verification and Privacy Risks That Remain
Unleashing the Trolls: Ontario Court Opens the Door to Liability for Influencers Who Weaponize Their Audiences
Why Ottawa Will Likely Join the U.S. in Opposing the Quebec Online Streaming Law at the Centre of the Trade Battle

It’s lawyers like these…..
From TFA:
“We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,” says Weaver.
This is what this is about. These kind of comments are mind boggling and show such a lack of respect for the actual judicial process all these law suits should be thrown out and these lawyer fools disbarred for wasting everyone’s time.
Note also that the IP represented by these lawsuits are movies that all bombed: it disgusts me that these people expect to use courts to break-even on their own product failures.
A comment about this on Slashdot went “How long do you suppose it will be until we find out that they are actually seeding the torrents themselves?”
A new alternative revenue stream indeed.
Guardley IT ramifications
With BMG_Canada v. John Doe (2004), how does this announcement affect Canadians, if at all?
In the music cases brought by the RIAA, they used Media Sentry (a practice they no longer endorse or use), which spied upon users shared folders and used decoy files to identify IP addresses – the MPAA is now using Guardley IT as the third party company to identify IP addresses inside the various torrents…
What are the Canadian laws, the copyright laws, concerning downloading movies?
How does ACTA affect that or how do the proposed changes that ACTA suggests affect canadian legislation?
Sooner or later the courts south of the border are going to get fed up and blow their corks.