You know it's tough out there for a P2P lawyer when even some random, anonymous, non-lawyer defendant is the more convincing party. That strange scenario unfolded yesterday in Illinois, where divorce-attorney-turned-porn-copyright-lawyer John Steele had his entire case against 300 defendants thrown out completely.

The case involved CP Productions, "a leading producer of adult entertainment content within the amateur Latina niche." The company ran a site called "Chica's Place" from which a bit of material referred to as "Cowgirl Creampie" was allegedly downloaded illegally by 300 people. Though based in Arizona, CP Productions signed up with Steele, a Chicago lawyer, to bring the case.

Judge Milton Shadur was clearly annoyed that the litigation has been taking up his docket space. Back on February 7, he issued a memo saying, "It is an understatement to characterize [this case] as problematic in nature." Four months after filing, Steele had still not contacted all of the case's defendants. The judge wanted to toss the case.

Steele objected in a filing the next day, saying the delay was all the fault of ISPs, who were so backed up filling IP address lookup requests for other P2P lawyers that they just hadn't had time to get around to Steele's.

The judge let the case creak along for another two weeks, until one of the anonymous defendants in the case wrote in with an amateur "motion to quash" Steele's subpoenas. The judge immediately used that amateur motion as the ground for a total dismissal of the case, saying that it reminded him of why "the court was correct the first time around."

On the cheap

"Among other things, the newest motion demonstrates that there is no justification for dragging into an Illinois federal court, on a wholesale basis, a host of unnamed defendants over whom personal jurisdiction clearly does not exist and—more importantly—as to whom CP’s counsel could readily have ascertained that fact," the judge said, apparently referring to the fact the IP lookup services would have shown the lawyers that most defendants were unlikely to be Illinois residents.

In addition, the judge saw the joinder of 300 defendants as little more than a ploy for saving cash. "No predicate has been shown for thus combining 300 separate actions on the cheap," he added. "If CP had sued the 300 claimed infringers separately for their discrete infringements, the filing fees alone would have aggregated $105,000 rather than $350."

In addition, the judge took aim at Steele's next-day response to his first ruling. "Counsel’s filing of that motion on the very next day after the Order was entered suggests that counsel was well aware of the action’s problematic nature and had already marshaled arguments intended to meet the obvious problems that it appeared to present," he wrote.

The case was dismissed, the subpoenas were quashed, and CP Productions has to notify everyone targeted by a subpoena of the dismissal. After quoting from Shakespeare's play King John, the judge concluded that all defendants were now "free to ignore the matter."

This sort of wholesale judicial destruction of mass file-sharing lawsuits has now taken place across the country, including West Virginia, Texas, and Illinois. Individual lawsuits will still be allowed, though they are unlikely to be as lucrative.

A few such lawsuits have been filed. But even if these cases are pursued to the end, courts in previous music-sharing lawsuits have not let juries make massive damage awards, capping the fines at a few thousand dollars per infringement. After years of litigation at the federal level, this is hardly a way to earn revenue. Some new approach to enforcing rights on the Internet will likely have to be found.