Tom (not his real name, due to concerns about retribution) was accused earlier this year of downloading and then sharing two films over the Internet. But Tom retired a few years back and has never heard of either Far Cry—a bad film based on a decent video game—or The Steam Experiment—a bad film featuring Val Kilmer and a sauna. So when he finally figured out what he was accused of doing, and saw the $300,000 in potential fines that could bankrupt him, he was aghast.

It's "just an outrageous scam," he told me this morning when we talked. The US Copyright Group lawyers behind the cases "know dang good and well this is a scam it's organized crime on their part."

A "stressful, aggravating burden"

Tom lives in a rural area far from the DC District Court where these copyright cases have so far been brought; when I called him, he had not yet heard the news that all non-DC residents identified by US Copyright Group were dismissed from these two lawsuits yesterday. For the moment, Tom is off the hook, but his case could be refiled at any time in his local federal court, and that $300,000 maximum verdict could once more haunt his days.

An engineer by training, Tom has a couple of computers that he and his wife use, but the machines are just for bookkeeping, word processing, e-mail—light duty. He heard about the lawsuits when his ISP forwarded notices that his information was being sought by a subpoena, and he wasn't clear on how or why he had been targeted. There was "nobody else in the house but my wife and I" on one of the alleged infringement dates, which took place in the wee hours of the night. I asked him about family or visitors, but he was adamant that "no guests and no family members [were] on the premises during that period of time."

It's possible, of course, that someone else installed a peer-to-peer program during a visit, and that the program continued to run surreptitiously in the background, sharing files, but Tom knows nothing about it. His own suspicion centers on his router. When a cable company tech came in a few year ago to install it, the tech used a wireless router and left it on and without a password. Tom found this out only recently, saying that he has no need for wireless Internet at home, when he tried to figure out why he had been targeted.

"Unbeknowst to us, this router had a wireless feature," he said, and he suspects that it could have been accessed by someone driving past on the highway 200 feet from the house. "Maybe a 12-year old can figure it out, but at [my age] it's not that easy."

Whatever happened, Tom only knew that when he received the first notice, "We never heard of [this film], hadn't seen it, had no knowledge of it." But each lawsuit carried a potential maximum of $150,000 in fines, "enough to wipe out practically all the assets of the family."

Tom wasn't sure what to do, so he dashed off a personal letter to the DC court. This joined the many other similar pleas to Judge Rosemary Collyer, though nearly all were rejected on legal grounds (Collyer did allow all these early filings to become part of the record, however.)

When that produced no results, and when his Internet provider refused to intervene on his behalf, he just decided to wait. Hiring a DC lawyer would be too expensive, and Tom certainly didn't want to settle, but if a real, named court case against him materialized, he might have no choice. "I was inclined to defend it to the last straw," he told me, "but when it comes down to a cardboard box under the bridge or maintaining your modest lifestyle "

The threat of such massive fines has been a "stressful, aggravating burden" these last few months, and it's one that's over—for now. Though Tom's case has been dismissed in DC, the US Copyright Group has always insisted that it plans to file named lawsuits against those who don't settle. Tom's current reprieve might only be a lull in the fighting.

As for the lawyers who have decided on settlement letters and P2P litigation as a business model, Tom has nothing but contempt for them. It only takes "one or two bad apples to really make the barrel smell," he said.