Multi-state litigant Dallas Buyers Club, LLC continues its BitTorrent copyright assault, this time filing three lawsuits against 30 Doe parties in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
Troll Defense was somewhat surprised to see another multi-Doe pleading filed by the owner of copyrights in the film Dallas Buyers Club, given at least a few different decisions by multiple courts in the recent months on grounds of improper joinder. Most notably, as earlier reported, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in May that the joinder of many different “John Doe” parties into a single action, for purposes of obtaining early discovery of the Does’ identities, is improper when the only basis for joinder is their common participation in a BitTorrent swarm. Closer to the venue, the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon also determined that joiner of 50 different Does in a single action–incidentally, a case involving Dallas Buyers Club producer Voltage Pictures, LLC–was improper.
This time, as if to ward off anticipated joinder challenges, Dallas Buyers Club has dedicated several pages of its form of complaints to a discussion of permissive joinder. Specifically, it alleges that:
The temporal proximity of the observed acts of each Defendant, together with the known propensity of BitTorrent participants to actively exchange files continuously for hours and even days, makes it possible that Defendants either directly exchanged the motion picture with each other, or did so through intermediaries and each shared in the distribution of the motion picture to others. Therefore, Defendants each conspired with other infringers on the BitTorrent network to copy and/or distribute Dallas Buyers Club, either in the same transaction or occurrence or a series of transactions or occurrences.
The cases were filed by attorney David A. Lowe of Lowe Graham Jones PLLC. The case names, together with links to complaints, are as follows:
Dallas Buyers Club, LLC v. Does 1-10, No. 2:14-cv-01402 (W.D. Wash)
Dallas Buyers Club, LLC v. Does 1-10, No. 2:14-cv-01153 (W.D. Wash)
Dallas Buyers Club, LLC v. Does 1-10, No. 2:14-cv-01136 (W.D. Wash)