In September 2010, West Coast Productions—maker of such films as Teen Anal Nightmare 2 and Juicy White Anal Booty 4—paired up with West Virginia lawyer Ken Ford to file a set of mass lawsuits against online file-sharers. Ford was the brains behind the Adult Copyright Company, which promised to help the porn industry cash in on the epidemic of piracy. His business model involved suing thousands of people at once in "Doe" copyright infringement lawsuits, even though the defendants lived all over the country, the film producer was in California, and the court was in West Virginia. After filing suit, Ford would try to turn lists of IP addresses collected from BitTorrent into real names and addresses, then attempted to settle each case for a few thousand dollars each.

It was a copycat business idea, already being worked on by other lawyers, but Ford hardly looked like a good candidate for executing on it well. He had recently been admonished by West Virginia's Office of Disciplinary Counsel for his dealings with clients, was the subject of 12 official complaints, and had his law license suspended five times by the state bar since 2006.

But none of that stopped Ford's West Coast Productions lawsuits. In the year that followed, the Teen Anal Nightmare 2 case spread outward from Ford's legal base, a dingy office in Charles Town, to three federal district courts. It engaged defense lawyers from states like Colorado, Texas, and Georgia. It targeted thousands of US residents from across the country in a scheme that reduced some to near-hysterics.

The lawyers bringing these sorts of cases across the country are a motley bunch. One in Illinois leaped from divorce cases (phone number: 1-800-DIVORCE) into federal porn copyright cases. Another in Texas has already been fined $10,000 for sending out subpoenas without judicial permission; the judge in that case blasted the "staggering chutzpah" involved. But Ford's strange story takes pride of place.

Severed



Between September and November 2010, Ford filed a set of mass lawsuits against 22,000 alleged porn file-swappers in West Virginia; the ride came to a quick end. West Virginia sees few copyright lawsuits—Ford's were the only such open cases in the state's Northern District at the time—and by December, Judge John Preston Bailey had gutted every one of them.

Bailey said it simply wasn't proper to "join" thousands of defendants into single cases. Each person targeted might well have a totally different defense. "Comcast subscriber John Doe 1 could be an innocent parent whose internet access was abused by her minor child, while John Doe 2 might share a computer with a roommate who infringed Plaintiffs’ works," wrote Bailey. "John Does 3 through 203 could be thieves, just as Plaintiffs believe, inexcusably pilfering Plaintiffs’ property and depriving them, and their artists, of the royalties they are rightly owed."

Bailey cut every case down to a single anonymous defendant. If Ford wanted to proceed, he could file thousands of individual cases at $350 (and mounds of paperwork) each. When targeting thousands of defendants at one, this approach could get pricey. Instead, Ford dismissed the single remaining defendant in his cases, killing them off. But he didn't go away. He went down the road.

The march on Washington



On January 10, 2011, Ford resurfaced in Washington, DC with a new lawsuit. Teen Anal Nightmare 2 was back—though the real nightmare this time was for the 5,829 Doe defendants in the case.

Ford wasn't admitted to practice law in DC—indeed, he had numerous official complaints back in West Virginia for his manner of lawyering. But he partnered up with Dunlap Grubb & Weaver, a small Virginia law firm who specialized in this kind of work and whose lawyers were admitted to practice in DC. Every filing in the new case was therefore signed by a lawyer from Dunlap Grubb & Weaver "on behalf of" the "not admitted" Kenneth J. Ford.

Why did Ford think his mass porn suits would fare better in a DC than West Virginia? Because previous cases in DC were still alive. After the death of the RIAA's mass litigation campaign, Dunlap Grubb & Weaver was one of the first US firms to revive the mass sue-and-settle model for online copyright infringement. It filed cases in DC involving films like The Hurt Locker and Far Cry; judges, while not generally appearing sympathetic, nevertheless allowed the cases to proceed for quite some time before administering their own Preston-style kneecappings.

So long as Ford had two things—time and subpoena power—this posed little problem. Suing thousands of people actually gave him more time to squeeze people for settlements, since lawyers ordinarily have to name defendants within 120 days of filing a case like this. But because Internet providers routinely object to looking up so many IP addresses at once, they are usually granted months to provide all of the names. This gave Ford a ready excuse for not naming anyone as a defendant, who might then have a lawyer show up to court on their behalf.

This basic issue with an initial lack of representation for the anonymous defendants has led at least one judge to recruit counsel from Public Citizen and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to defend their interests. As EFF's Corynne McSherry explained at the time, "When adult film companies launch these cases, there is the added pressure of embarrassment associated with pornography, which can convince those ensnared in the suits to quickly pay what's demanded of them, whether or not they have legitimate defenses."

But the DC judges have not been following the same course, leaving Ford plenty of time to settle with those defendants as they are identified. In the Teen Anal Nightmare 2 case, for instance, Ford filed more than 70 separate voluntary dismissals of specific IP addresses as the case progressed. These were dismissed "with prejudice," meaning they cannot be brought again, and appear to represent defendants who have settled for a few thousand dollars before their names could become public. The first such dismissal came on March 23, when Doe 1087 was released. Two days later, Doe 580 was cleared, then Doe 838, Doe 1148, Doe 1172

But even as the ISPs provided names, and Ford contacted them for settlement, he refused to name any specific defendant in the case. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was losing patience as the summer wore on. Though she continued to sign extensions of time, she pressed the lawyers for status updates and demanded they start naming defendants as soon as possible.

By August 9, Kollar-Kotelly sounded downright cranky. When Ford asked for yet another extension of time, the judge warned that "the Court would not permit this case to languish on its docket indefinitely In this case, Plaintiff has had over six months in which to serve subpoenas and gather information from ISPs. Although the Court recognizes that there are a large number of defendants involved in this action, the Court cannot allow the slow pace of some ISPs’ response to subpoenas to dictate the progress of this litigation."

No more extensions—the lawyers had until September 8 to name at least one specific defendant or "risk mandatory dismissal." When September 8 arrived, Ford simply dismissed everyone from the lawsuit. Not that he was done settling; in the days that followed the complete dismissal of the case, numerous specific Does were dismissed with prejudice.

But the nightmare wasn't over; it was spreading to yet another district.