Attorney Evan Stone Prevented From Filing Mass Lawsuits in Texas
There will be no more mass lawsuits in Texas for Internet file-sharing after the mass lawsuits of attorney Evan Stone. Stone, a Texas attorney from Denton, filed individual subpoenas for each individual violating anti-piracy law. After convincing the anime distributor FUNimation to use the same technique he was using with Lucas Entertainment on gay pornography torrent cases, Texas has now decided to deny multiple filings of lawsuits.
With the 16 pending cases filed in the Northern District of Texas, 13 of them have anonymous defendants and have been acquitted. Stone is now faced with re-filing “individual complaints” against them within 30 days, adding up to $4,550 worth of filing fees, apart from the time spent putting together the paperwork for each of them.
Judge Ferguson states that the cases filed for animation company FUNimation cannot be proved to be related to each other or that they were done as a group in the infringement suit. They were done individually and therefore should be filed individually.
This meant that for Stone, only 1 from the 1,337 filed was left.
Judge Ferguson goes on to say that there is not enough evidence to prove that just because the individuals all used BitTorrent, in other words utilizing a common tool for file sharing, this does not necessarily bind them together. The judge justifies further that each defendant would most likely have a different defense strategy against the charges.
After much success for Stone, this new development has become a huge problem for his business. In fact, the only case that was not dismissed by a judge was one that Stone himself dismissed. This was the very case where he issued subpoenas without approval.
In a personal e-mail to Paul Levy of Public Citizen, Evan Stone assures him that despite the roadblocks recently put up in his way, he will continue to help his clients to seek justice against online piracy of their products.
Evan Stone’s Battle Against Gay Porn Movie Piracy on Torrent Sites
Evan Stone, an anti-piracy lawyer from Texas, has started his campaign against P2P users illegally sharing gay porn via torrents. He has filed over 4,500 cases against gay porn sharers and studios, possibly filing every case in Texas.
Stone gives judges IP address lists for them to write subpoenas to Internet provider, who then have to provide the names and addresses of the subscribers owning these IP addresses. Once the lists are acquired, settlement letters are sent to the file sharers to indicate the amount needed to prevent Stone from filing a named lawsuit against them. These lawsuits could cost around $150,000 per copyright infringement count.
Stone claims that his crusade is aimed to protect the artists. His crusade began with gay pornographic movies – it has now spread to the anime community.
Evan Stone Begins His Crusade
Stone’s crusade began when he started a small record label that was Internet-based and artist-focused. He aimed at having a 50-50 split with his artist, but the label soon failed. They were overcome by the Napster file sharing program and had to close down the business.
Having a degree in film and five years experience as an app developer, his skills were more than adequate to trace and be in pursuit of net-based illegal users. When he later attended law school, he specialized in entertainment law and soon became the in-house counsel for FUNimation. As his duties as legal counsel, he sent take down notices to anime distributors and moved forward with legal actions against some. Usually, just flooding the file sharing websites with fake files posing as real anime movies was their way of ensuring that the copyrights were not violated.
The downside of this was, for torrent sites, they are mostly overseas and cannot be prosecuted due to jurisdictional problems.
Stone then also joined Locas Entertainment in 2010, who aimed to stop piracy of their gay-porn materials. This venture showed significant results.
In September 2010, client Mick Haig Productions filed a lawsuit against 670 file-swappers, but the identities of these file-swappers are yet to be identified. The only thing they held were ISPs of violators.
Evan Stone Pushes Forward
Stone made a mistake of sending out unapproved subpoenas to users. The cases were dismissed, but Stone made grudging comments about how the judge, as well as the defense attorneys who opted to represent the unknown users, were “…renowned for defending Internet piracy and renowned for their general disregard for intellectual property law.”
Stone considers himself as different from the rest of the lawyers in his field. His vast knowledge of the entertainment industry, as well as the Internet and specifically of BitTorrent, allows him inside knowledge in filing separate lawsuits to those specific people who are working together, as well as in isolating users who have been violating the intellectual property law.
After trolling sites like isohunt.com, kickasstorrents.com, and nyaatorrents.org, Stone’s investigator found 1,337 IP addresses to use in the case. The work paid off in favor of FUNimation. Each user with the One Piece episode having the file “b305c19f8e8bdab5e39b33a4ffc364a12beb110b” was sued.
As an interesting twist, Stone’s logo for his Copyright Defense Agency is similar to the East India Company Crest – which hired “mercenaries” which seafaring pirates were deathly scared of. For Evan Stone, his logo is a symbol of the anti-piracy movement he’s spearheading.
Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist Joins Morgan & Morgan Law Firm
After Charlie Crist’s stint as Florida’s Governor, he is now a member of the Morgan and Morgan Law Firm.
Crist considers it a privilege to be working with John Morgan where he believes he would be able to continue fighting for people, being the public servant that he was. He will be focusing on mass action lawsuits as he deals with being a trial lawyer in Florida.
After several offers and other options presented to him by South Florida and Washington D.C., Crist felt that fighting alongside Morgan was a natural choice for him.
Based in St. Petersburg, apart from being with Morgan and Morgan, he will also be working with the School of Law at Stetson University.
Charlie Crist Goes Back to Law
Although his political career has ended, and he has returned to the private sector, Morgan believes that Crist may still go back to politics in the future. This conclusion may have rooted from the fact that he spent most of his career in politics rather than practicing in the legal arena. He was first elected as the education commissioner by the Florida State Senate, attorney general before becoming governor.
Although speculations are floating around regarding his intention to run for office in 2012, Crist claims that he has not as yet thought about the matter and would like to focus on his legal career.
About Morgan & Morgan and Charlie Crist
The firm Morgan & Morgan started in 1988 as an office housing three attorneys, eventually growing into the one of the biggest southeast law firms composed of 13 offices and more than 170 lawyers onboard, excluding regular staff of about 500 heads.
Charlie Crist began his political career in 2000 serving as the Florida Education Commissioner until 2003, and Attorney General from 2003 until 2007 before becoming Governor until 2011. Crist furthers that, “Having had the privilege of being Attorney General and working ‘for people, against the powerful,’ as John [Morgan] would say, I think is certainly going to bode well for the future.”
