Hollywood studios filed a new round of lawsuits against file swappers on Thursday, for the first time using peer-to-peer companies’ own data to track down individuals accused of trading movies online.
The Motion Picture Association of America said it filed 286 lawsuits against people around the United States based on information acquired from file-trading sites shut down earlier in the year. Most of those sites were hubs connecting people using the BitTorrent technology, a peer-to-peer application designed for speeding downloads of large files.
The group previously said in February that a Texas court had ordered that the server logs of one big site, called LokiTorrent, be turned over to Hollywood investigators. Hollywood lawyers are hoping that the fear of exposure will dissuade more people from trying to download movies for free online.
“Internet movie thieves be warned: You have no friends in the online community when you are engaging in copyright theft,” MPAA Senior Vice President John Malcom said in a statement.
Studios launched an aggressive new campaign against individual file swappers and peer-to-peer services last December, in particular targeting the BitTorrent hubs that served as jumping-off points for downloading a wide array of software and movies.
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