Gay Porn Company Sues BitTorrent Users

As part of the industry's continuing crackdown on piracy, gay porn outfit Lucas Entertainment has filed lawsuits against 53 users of the peer-to-peer file-swapping network BitTorrent. Lucas is asking the users' ISPs to disclose their names and addresses.

The time between the alleged infringement and the filing of the federal lawsuit was amazingly short: three or four days. The infringements were detected on August 5-6, and the Lucas lawsuit was filed on August 9. In addition, the company has already asked the judge to force ISPs to respond to subpoenas in 15 days or less. Clearly, speed is an issue. The suit also claims the copyright infringement here was "intentional," which opens the door to much higher statutory damages that top out at $150,000 per infringement. More defendants will be added to the case before it's over. Lucas suggests that "information obtained in discovery will lead to the identification of additional infringing parties," and its ongoing "monitoring" may contribute more names, too. These sorts of schemes generally rely more on settlement letters than actual trials to collect the cash, however; something that may be doubly true when gay porn is the issue.

JMG tipper Davecool notes that the final sentence of the story implies that Lucas feels that "gay porn shame" may force faster settlements.

Sam Seder On Net Neutrality

What do we have to fear from Google and Verizon?

TENNESSEE: Basil Marceaux Loses

Internet idol Basil Marceaux lost his bid for governor of Tennessee on Thurday when he scored less than 1% of the vote in the state GOP primary (an event overlooked here due to the Prop 8 hubbub). Today the Washington Post analyzes Marceaux's web popularity.

Basil Marceaux was one step further. For a public exhausted by politics-as-usual, he offered not only an outlandish ad but an outlandish persona, so beyond reason that he demanded attention. His popularity happened at lightning speed, taking just days rather than the years most political candidates require -- and those are the fortunate ones who rise from obscurity at all. Like "Napoleon Dynamite's" Vote for Pedro campaign, like every high school that has jokingly nominated the band geek for prom king, Marceaux's Internet success was based on the principle of ironic support. How hilarious would it be to pretend to love him? How hilarious would it be to actually love him? Brandishing Marceaux as an ideal candidate -- for realz or no -- was a one-fingered salute to mainstream politicians everywhere. We would rather fake-support this guy than real-support you.

Google Wave Goes Bye-Bye

Google has announced that they are giving up on Google Wave, one of the few products from the internet giant ever to fail.

Wave, a real time messaging platform, was unveiled in May 2009 to an enthusiastic crowd of developers at the Google I/O event in San Francisco. It would “set a new benchmark for interactivity,” said Sergey Brin. The product is part email, part Twitter and part instant messaging. Users can drag files from the desktop to a discussion. Wave even showed character-by-character live typing. It fully launched this last May. And while the service has many, or at least some, passionate users (including TechCrunchers), it “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” says Google.

Google Buzz will probably be next, I'm guessing.

Tweet Of The Day - Bill Cosby

The supposed death of Bill Cosby is the top trending topic on Twitter for the fourth time in about a year. Others celebrities who have suffered hoaxed Twitter deaths recently include Rick Astley, Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, and Britney Spears.