District Court Denies Subpoena in Downloading Case

You may have read the reports about an attorney filing suit against illegal downloaders recently on behalf of Century Media, that on the back of Nuclear Blast doing the same thing a month earlier, now it appears  U.S. District Judge Faith S. Hochberg has handed down a new development in the case throwing out 943 defendants in the case surrounding the two albums  Lacuna Coil’s Dark Adrenaline and Iced Earth’s Dystopia. 

Judge Hochberg (pictured below) concluded in order for all of the defendants to be lumped together "there must be a connection between defendants beyond the copyrighted work and method of distribution, namely that defendants were involved in the same transaction with the same downloader at the same time." The net result is one downloader, John Doe number one, will remain as the sole defendant.

Now this does not appear to absolve the defendants, if Jay R. McDaniel the lawyer representing the case for Century Media chooses to file them individually he can, and when I read the last report, I recall from the previous story there were 14,000 defendants listed in this case, and these were just defendants in the Lacuna Coil portion of the suit. There will definitely be more news on this in the future, but the courts are making it a little bit tougher, and labels might be less haphazardly suing in the future.

You can read the initial report on Blabbermouth.