Today’s Lesson: Don’t Steal Internet Porn

Most people think that when they’re sitting at home in front of the laptop, surfing the Internet, they are hiding under a cloak of anonymity. But the truth is that if somebody really wants to know who you are, they can find you, as is the case with one pornography company whose skin flicks have landed on dozens of computers in the Philadelphia area.

Harleysville attorney Christopher Fiore, on behalf of his client K-Beech, a 25-year-old porn producer based in California, has brought multiple lawsuits in Philadelphia’s Federal Court against many individuals in the region who have allegedly downloaded the company’s films using BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that boasts upwards of 100 million users. And while the Founding Fathers probably didn’t have K-Beech’s Virgins 4 (starring Aurora and Dick Delaware) in mind when they added the copyright clause to the U.S. Constitution in 1787, K-Beech is entitled to the same protection for its property that Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou, er, enjoy. K-Beech is seeking up to $150,000 per incident in statutory damages.

The mass suits are of a growing type, which some refer to as “copyright trolls.” Opponents of the lawsuits, who feel that the legal actions are predatory and designed to elicit large settlements from defendants, operate a large network of legal aid sites, such as this one, that include so-called “cut-and-paste motions” to quash the subpoenas that could force Internet service providers to identify the end users.

All I know is that $150,000 is a lot to pay for a dirty movie, especially with all of the truly free porn out there.