JUDGE THROWS OUT SUIT AGAINST ALLEGED PIRATES

Efforts by movie studios to join thousands of cases of alleged piracy have suffered a setback after a federal judge in Texas tossed out a case brought by Larry Flynt Productions against several thousand John Does, whom it accused of illegally downloading its movie This Ain’t Avatar XXX, the website TorrentFreak reported on Wednesday. Judge Royal Furgeson ruled that LFP had failed to show that the defendants were acting in concert or that they were connected to one another in any way. “Merely committing the same type of violation in the same way does not link defendants together for purposes of joinder,” he said in his ruling. All of which means that if a studio wants to go after pirates, it must do so one at a time, something that could be prohibitively expensive, an attorney who has handled such cases told TorrentFreak.