TorrentFreak

A lawyer who threatened countless individuals in copyright troll-style lawsuits has been slammed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The highly colorful Evan Stone sent subpoenas to ISPs without permission of the court in order to extract payments from alleged BitTorrent users, but will now take a huge hit to his reputation. On top of a fine and paying costs to the EFF and Public Citizen, he will have to inform all clients and judges he currently has cases with about this ruling against him.

A prominent lawyer involved in the ever-growing pay-up-or-else anti-filesharing schemes in the United States has been admonished and punished by a judge. Evan Stone had asked the whether he could contact ISPs in order to discover the identities of alleged file-sharers, but the court said he’d have to wait. Stone ignored the court but was ultimately found out, which resulted in him picking up a $10,000 fine.

Over the last year a handful of lawyers have sued well over one hundred thousand alleged BitTorrent users in the United States. Usually, when these lawyers respond to the press, if they even choose to do so at all, we are given only generic comments. Until now. In a quite revealing interview, Texas lawyer Evan Stone becomes the first of his kind to open the book on the motivations which see him going after “smarmy entitled little brats.”

Last year, Larry Flynt Publications filed lawsuits against several thousand “John Does” the company accused of illegally sharing its movie “This Ain’t Avatar XXX”. Now, following on from problems it had gaining identities of Does from ISP Time Warner, thousands of cases have been dismissed by a senior judge. The road to gaining settlements from allegedly infringing individuals has just become massively more costly, and the profitable future for these type of projects in general now appears to be in serious doubt.

Last year, an adult movie producer filed suit against 670 individuals who it claimed had infringed copyright on an obscure title. Now the entire case, which was presented by lawyer Evan Stone, has been dismissed. The plaintiffs were scathing about the court-appointed EFF attorneys, describing them as defenders of piracy. The case was dismissed with prejudice, which means that each of the John Doe defendants are completely off the hook.

The avalanche of lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States continues. Several adult producers joined in on the profitable pay-up-or-else scheme recently, but one of them made a costly mistake. Adult producer Mick Haig filed suits against 670 BitTorrent users this week. However, he forgot to register the copyright for his film.