More Than 23,000 Sued Over ‘Expendables’ Downloads
12 May, 2011 By: Chris Tribbey
'The Expendables'
More than 23,300 individuals accused of downloading Lionsgate’s The Expendables are being sued in what’s believed to be the single-largest illegal BitTorrent download case ever.
The case was first filed on behalf of Los Angeles-based production company Nu Image in February, and on May 4 the IP addresses of 23,322 defendants were submitted to a federal judge, according to court documents.
Wired News May 10 reported that the closest comparable case involves more than 15,500 BitTorrent users who downloaded porn films.
“Defendant’s infringements allow them and others unlawfully to obtain and distribute for free unauthorized copyrighted works that the plaintiff spends millions of dollars to create and/or distribute,” the suit reads. “Each time a defendant unlawfully distributes a free copy of the plaintiff’s copyrighted motion picture to others over the Internet, each person who copies that motion picture can then distribute that unlawful copy to others without any significant degradation in sound and picture quality.”
The suit seeks damages from every person accused of illegally downloading the film and demands that every illegal copy of the film be deleted. The U.S. Copyright Act allows for damages of up to $150,000 for each infringement.
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