The Illinois Supreme Court has rejected a pornography vendor's efforts to unmask thousands of non-Illinois Internet users who allegedly accessed the vendor's website without permission. The order came after a coalition of ISPs objected to the subpoenas. The decision is another sign of the growing judicial resistance to pornographic copyright trolling.

Lightspeed Media operates a group of pornographic websites. It came up with a clever twist on the basic copyright trolling business model. Rather than suing people for copyright infringement, which must be done in federal court, Lightspeed alleged that thousands of people "belong to a hacking community where hacked passwords are passed back and forth among the members." Lightspeed "hired" a company called Arcadia Data Security Consultants (which, conveniently, shares an address with Lightspeed and its owner, Steve Jones) to identify the culprits.

Bringing computer hacking charges rather than copyright charges allowed Lightspeed to file the lawsuit in Illinois state courts. It named one anonymous resident of St. Clair County, IL, as the defendant. It then subpoenaed ISPs around the country for the identity of thousands of others who had allegedly "hacked into" Lightspeed's website. The company argued that all of these users were part of a single password-sharing conspiracy. The Illinois state judge who heard the case approved the subpoenas.

Several ISPs, including AT&T and Verizon, chose to fight the subpoenas. "Lightspeed and its lawyers aren't really interested in pursuing their claims against a single individual in St. Clair County, nor are they interested in any discovery pertinent to those claims," the ISPs argued in a court filing. "They actually want to harvest settlements of several thousand dollars each from individual Internet service subscribers to be identified from a list of approximately 6600 IP addresses located across the nation that are said to have accessed Lightspeed's website wrongfully."

However, the ISPs pointed out, Lightspeed doesn't have any evidence of a conspiracy involving the 6600 IP addresses. Rather, they allege, the conspiracy accusation is a pretext to force ISPs to hand over contact information for thousands of subscribers without having to file thousands of separate lawsuits. Lightspeed will then presumably use the threat of an expensive and embarrassing lawsuit to obtain settlement money from as many of the targets as possible.

On April 12, the judge denied an ISP request to quash the subpoenas. So the ISPs appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court. In a terse Wednesday ruling, the state's highest court sided with the ISPs, ordering the judge to quash the subpoenas.

Pornographic copyright (and "hacking") trolls have had a growing number of decisions going against them as judges have become more skeptical of their arguments. This has forced the trolls to find more and more obscure venues in which to file these lawsuits and increasingly creative legal arguments to get around prior precedents. But there are only so many jurisdictions and judges in the country. Before too long, the trolls will run out of places to hide.