As it promised that it would, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its members have filed hundreds of lawsuits this week against people who have downloaded, traded, or otherwise pirated commercial movies.

Like its brethren in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who filed hundreds of lawsuits against file-sharing users who had downloaded music in MP3 format using services such as Napster and Grokster, the MPAA has filed what are known as “John Doe” lawsuits, which allow them to file the lawsuit without knowing who it actually was who did the dirty deed (hence the “John Doe” - the universal name for someone whose name you don’t know), and then subpoena the information associated with the IP address used to download the file, to find out who actually did the downloading.

Where the similarity ends, however, is that the RIAA for the most part only went after people who had downloaded hundreds, if not thousands, of songs. The MPAA and friends are suing people even if they have downloaded only one movie ever. One. Ever.

The odds are pretty good that if somebody has only ever downloaded one movie, a) they did it for their own personal use rather than to traffic in pirated movies, or they did it to experiment (in which case they probably didn’t even inhale), b) they probably discovered that for the time it takes to download a movie… [Continued]