The adult movie industry is lawyering up in a nationwide effort to inform pornography pirates that they will be found. And they will be sued.
Downloading porn is as old as the Internet itself, or at least seemingly for millions of users, such as the tens of thousands of Internet customers who received letters in their (snail) mailboxes this summer, informing them that they would face legal action for illegally downloading adult content, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
More than 200,000 people have been sued by adult filmmakers in recent years, according to the newspaper. These letters and legal actions represent a "torrent" (get it?) of legal battles involving Internet copyright violations. These legal actions are in federal court, too, meaning that adult filmmakers mean business. And not just sexy business.
Situated as it is near Silicon Valley and in an area with plenty of lawyers, the Bay Area has become a hub for these lawsuits, according to the newspaper. Yet the area's also a hub for online privacy, where advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and elsewhere say that the lawsuits are online exortion: rather than face the humiliation of defending one's consumption of "A Punk Rock Orgy in the Woods," most defendants simply cut a check.
