It’s an ugly little secret that the MPAA and, more importantly, the legal firms behind downloading lawsuits want you not to know, but it’s true: the only pirating lawsuits that get anywhere are porn movies. This has been pretty dramatically demonstrated in Washington D.C. where a judge just terminated all 23,000 subpeonas on a case surrounding “The Expendables”, chewed out the lawyers for not serving them, and told them to come up with every last name, address, and download in the case, and they had better be in his jurisdiction (they won’t be).
So, why do porn movies win while legit movies fail? Simple: going up in front of your neighbors and announcing you downloaded a sweet romantic comedy strikes absolutely nobody as a big deal, but going up in front of your neighbors and announcing you downloaded a bunch of porno is humiliating. People pay the judgement rather than go to court.
In other words, the only copyright protection lawsuits currently doing well or collecting any damages are actually nothing more than large law firms engaging in legally sanctioned extortion. That’s…that’s just great.