P2P-Zone - Federal Court Blocks Movie Industry "John Doe" suits

From EFF:
Court Blocks Movie Studios' Bulldozer Legal Strategy

Northern California - A federal judge in California has put
a roadblock in front of the movie studios' lawsuits
targeting filesharers.

Last week, members of the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) filed 11 lawsuits against hundreds of
people they accused of using file-sharing networks to share
infringing copies of movies. They sued groups of "Does"
identified by numerical IP address and requested discovery
of names from the users' Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
A Northern District of California judge found this
bulldozer approach improper, ordering that the case
for Does 1-12 should be put on hold for all but one of
the defendants.

Judge William Alsup ruled that because claims against the
12 defendants were unrelated, yoking the defendants
together into one big case was improper. "Such joinder may
be an attempt to circumvent the filing fees by grouping
defendants into arbitrarily-joined actions but it could
nonetheless appear improper under Rule 20," the order
states. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed
friend-of-the-court briefs objecting to similar misjoinder
in many of the cases filed by the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) against alleged infringers.

"This decision helps to give due process rights to the
Internet users accused of infringement," said EFF Staff
Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "Lumping them together makes it
more difficult for everyone to defend against these
claims." EFF is also concerned about the movie studios'
failure to produce evidence of infringement against even
Doe #1 in this case.

For this release:
<http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_11.php#002147>

Court order in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. v.
Does 1-12:
<http://www.eff.org/cgi/tiny?urlID=339>