A patent troll company failed to convince the D.C. federal appeals court that it should gain access to over 1000 names and addressed of alleged porn downloaders. The company, AF Holdings, was suing to protect its rights to a porno movie that they claimed was illegally downloaded on the Internet. In its decision, the Court called the request for the names and addresses an abuse of the discovery process. (Courthouse News Service, May 28, 2014, by Jack Bouboushian)
The Court installed a limit on the number of defendants who could be named in a single suit and ruled that AF Holdings could not sue people from all over the country in one court. “After this decision…people who try to use copyright litigation as a money-making machine will have to limit the defendants in each suit by geographic region and by the time of their alleged copyright infringement. This gives each defendant a better chance to defend him- or herself, and will also discourage some of the most abusive lawsuits from ever being filed,” wrote Mitch Stoltz for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, May 27, 2014.