Hasta La Gadget!

If you thought that the era of copyright holders suing individuals for huge sums of money because they shared or downloaded copyrighted material on the Internet were over, think again. The US Copyright Group recently won a court ruling by a federal judge in Washington DC that will allow the group to, on behalf of their clients, subpoena ISPs across the country to turn over the identities of users who have used BitTorrent to trade in copyrighted material at any point in time. 

The federal judge ruled only that the US Copyright Group had the legal right to query ISPs for the information and that the ISPs were legally obligated to turn over the material in compliance with a subpoena. He left plenty of room for individuals who are identified in the process to offer their own defenses, have their cases disjoined from the thousands of other users the Group wants to bundle them in with, or have their cases move to the jurisdiction in which they live. 

Civil liberties and privacy groups like the ACLU have battled the lawsuit for years and are likely to protest the ruling, but for the time being, the ruling stands and there’s little to stand between the group obtaining file sharers’ personal information, mailing them a letter threatening them with legal action and offering an out-of-court settlement for some sum of money, and eventually scaring those users into submission and out of their money. 

[via Ars Technica]