Voltage Pirates has officially failed in its quest to sue 24,583 people who illegally downloaded the movie The Hurt Locker.

Judge Beryl Howell killed the case, refusing to grant an extension to the trial when the studio asked for more time to track down specific defendants from Internet service providers.

Back in October, around 20,000 defendants were dismissed from the case when Voltage Pictures was having trouble tracking them down.

Eventually, the lawsuit was cut down to 2,300 people. But in the end, even that number was just too much for the studio to handle. Because many of the John and Jane Doe defendants were filing documents of their own with the ISPs, identifying all the defendants was taking more than the allotted 120 days that Voltage Pictures had to serve them with papers.

When the judge denied Voltage’s request for another extension to track down the defendants, he effectively killed the case.

However, TorrentFreak reports that Voltage’s lawyers are still trying to get thousands of dollars from each of the pirates, even the ones who had already been dismissed from the case, regardless of the fact that the case has been closed by the judge.

Voltage’s law firm for this matter is Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, and these tactics are apparently nothing new for them. In a similar torrenting case last year, the lawyers were served with a class-action lawsuit for racketeering, extortion and committing fraud on the U.S. Copyright Office. The attorneys had been sending letters demanding payments between $1,500 and $2,500 from people who had downloaded the film Far Cry.