The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) is going back to their Hurt Locker lawsuit, and is adding 20,000 new IP addresses to the lawsuit.
The mass copyright litigation firm, who became well known thanks to the Hurt Locker lawsuit, is eager to expand the lawsuit to now cover almost 25,000 IP addresses, with the goal being to extract settlement money from each and every accused.
This makes the Hurt Locker lawsuit the largest ever in terms of mass copyright lawsuits, breaking an earlier record set by The Expendables lawsuit of more than 23,000 IP addresses, also filled by USCG.
Firms like the USCG make money by threatening users with lawsuits, if they do not pay a settlement fee of several thousand dollars, while the firm itself has no real intention of taking matters to court.
USCG relies upon ISPs to provide names and physical addresses of subscribers based on the IP address, and the firm has deals with the largest ISPs in the U.S. to limit the number of "IP lookups" to a couple of hundred per week. This seems to suggest it would take an awful long time to find the details of all of the "defendants", which includes more than 10,000 Comcast subscribers, but a steady trickle of user details still allows the USCG to send out letters demanding settlement fees.
The Oscar winning The Hurt Locker only made $17 million at the box office in the United States, but if half of the sued do pay a settlement fee of on average $2,000, then the movie is set to make more money via litigation than from actual screenings.
The judge handling the case, Judge Beryl Howell, will now decide on the merit of the lawsuit. Howell is a former RIAA lobbyist.
You can view the 406 page court document below, which includes a searchable list of all "offending" IP addresses:
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