BitTorrent: Copyright lawyers' favourite target reaches 200,000 lawsuits

How many web users are currently being sued for alleged online copyright infringement in the US? The folk at TorrentFreak, who have been obsessively logging these cases, claim 200,000 BitTorrent users are now involved in some stage of lawsuit, and claim settling with a relatively small fee on a large number of cases is fast becoming a way that rightsholders can profit from piracy.

Nearly all the 201,828 cases have been filed against BitTorrent users who allegedly shared music online, with a small number using eD2k. Once lawyers for the rightsholders have identified individuals, they generally offer to settle for a typical penalty of $2,500 which means no further legal costs or risking larger $150,000 infringement fines. TorrentFreak claims that many of the people targeted by the lawsuits aren't the actual infringers but the person who pays for the connection; facing a massive fine and a long case, they opt to pay a small fine and be done with it. 

And by charging an average $2,500 fee, this group of lawyers and rightsholders could be generating as much as a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue. Far less than they would make from traditional sales of this material, but still - if this could be seen as a growing revenue stream for them, what's to stop them repeatedly charging consumers in this indirect way?

• Incidentally, more progressive content creators have chosen to explore how they could work with existing, popular and comprehensive online content distribution platforms. At the end of June, BitTorrent announced that the first part of the indie spy thriller A Lonely Place for Dying; executive producer was James Cromwell of The Green Mile and LA Confidential. Convenient, certainly, in demonstrating legitimate uses of BitTorrent, but an intelligent use of a popular delivery tool that deserves credit. The producers also used Vodo, a kind of 'Kickstarter for films', to get funding. The film has been downloaded more than 1m times.

"We've received a dozen offers to release the film through traditional methods," said writer and director Justin Eugene Evans when the film was released on BitTorrent. "However, none of the offers made sense to us financially or artistically. Every producer's rep, sales agent and independent distributor presented us with a draconian contract. Between BitTorrent's technology and VODO's ability to deliver an audience we decided this was the superior path. This gives our motion picture global reach. And, VODO's donation model is at the tipping point; with their help we'll earn our investors just as much as we'd have received from a Los Angeles sales agent.

"While these experiments still raise inevitable questions about business models, one thing is sure. The platform is ready and BitTorrent has proven their intention to help."