After their no-show Monday they will all have to appear in court on March 29 to face the music, but in the meantime the U.S. copyright troll epidemic continues, this time in California.

In a fresh lawsuit filed by attorney Boden Davidson on behalf of his client Contra Piracy, it is claimed that thousands of individuals downloaded and shared the 50 Cent movie All Things Fall Apart. The anti-piracy outfit said it obtained the “enforcement rights” from Los Angeles-based Hannibal Pictures.

Contra Piracy claim to have monitored 2,919 individuals infringing All Things Fall Apart on more than 280,000 occasions. They say they cannot identify these people without the help of ISPs, so they are seeking the court’s help in this respect.

Adding interest to the case is that Contra Piracy are based in Switzerland. They say they are a non-profit group that brings together ‘independent members’ such as technology companies, law firms and copyright owners in order to reduce piracy.

Of course, a lack of profit isn’t usually a feature of copyright trolling. In this case Contra want an absolute minimum of $5,000 from each target in the hope they will reclaim at least $7,500,000. That is $500,000 more than the movie cost to make.

To collect its evidence Contra Piracy used anti-piracy monitoring company Logistep, a company that became infamous in the UK for its connections to troll pioneer law firm Davenport Lyons. Logistep was later banned from monitoring alleged pirates in its home country.

Contra Piracy / Logistep have provided the court with a huge list of IP addresses allegedly used to share the movie and it’s quite the who’s-who of United States ISPs. America Online, AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Road Runner, Qwest, T-Mobile, Sprint – they’re all here. In fact, Contra want disclosure from a claimed 61 ISPs, which may well be a record in this type of case.

However, in addition to targeting thousands of regular domestic subscribers, Contra Piracy is revisiting the ‘bad old days’ of RIAA lawsuits by targeting educational establishments too.

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, private Roman Catholic arts college The College of Saint Elizabeth, the Francis Marion arts university, University of West Florida, Lamar University, Wilberforce University and Montclair State University are all listed.

Secured Servers LLC web hosting company also makes an appearance, which could possibly be down to a customer running a seedbox. The Ingersoll Rand company can also expect a call.

How the universities involved will respond to Contra Piracy remains to be seen, but they may have to be compliant in order to show that they are worthy of federal funding.

Finally, we ran a few checks on Contra Piracy and found a couple of interesting things with their domain owner “Thomas Zeeck”. Not only does he own the Contrapiracy.com domain, he also owns domains which trade on the names of the German and Swiss pirate parties – Piraten-Partei-Deutschland.com and Piratenpartei-Schweiz.org

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite its early release the film’s reception hasn’t been very positive. Some claim that the film is a waste of disk space while others complained about the mumbling and acting performance of 50 Cent.

Nevertheless, the film made it into our list of the 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent this week. ‘Watchmen’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘Knowing’ and ‘Streets of Blood’.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Then came disappointment. Dre announced he had ditched plans to release the album in 2008, citing work commitments he had with Eminem’s comeback album “Relapse”. All further work on his own album was delayed until this month.

However, just because he hasn’t finished the album, it doesn’t mean that Dr. Dre is immune to leaks – but perhaps he didn’t expect it to happen in this way.

An unfinished track from the album, entitled “Could Have Been You” has hit BitTorrent. The song, featuring R.Kelly, 50 Cent and upcoming artist Bishop Lamont (who is reportedly ‘missing’ from this version), has started doing the rounds on various sites. Downloads are relatively low at the moment – in their hundreds – but this situation is likely to change quickly. At just over four minutes and in high quality 320k, the track is rough around the edges but most of the vocals seem in place.

According to MTV, Dre’s label Interscope hasn’t yet made a comment, although a source close to the 43 year old producer says that he is furious the track leaked before being completed, with several sites hosting the track already ordered to remove it. With BitTorrent, things aren’t quite so easy. At the moment there are a handful of torrents, but by the end of today there will be dozens.

Chances of Dr. Dre plugging this leak? 0%

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.