Lawyer Switches Tactics To Identify BitTorrent Users

Readers will be familiar with the somewhat unorthodox Texas lawyer Evan Stone.

“I eat, sleep, breathe, shit this stuff,” he said in a recent interview, referring to his relentless pursuit of alleged BitTorrent users and, crucially, payments from them to avoid costly court appearances.

Stone hasn’t doing so well lately. A judge in Dallas left his 14 porn-related BitTorrent in tatters by severing most of the defendants. But he won’t be giving up and is apparently using a new technique to move forward.

According to a report in adult-industry publication XBIZ, last month Stone filed 49 subpoenas in Texas using a subpoena provision in the Copyright Act. This provision apparently allows copyright holders to ask federal clerks to issue a subpoena in order to discover the identity of the alleged copyright infringer.

Matching real-life people to rather less useful IP addresses is crucial to Stone’s money making scheme.

“This is what I should have been doing from the beginning,” Stone told XBIZ.

However, as outlined by Techdirt, this may not prove successful either.

“I imagine that [using the technique outlined above] would be news to the RIAA who already tried that and got shot down handily in court in the famous RIAA v. Verizon case,” Mike Masnick writes.

“Of course, given his other mistakes, I guess it’s no surprise that Stone apparently is unfamiliar with the case law on the matter.”

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