Copyright Trolling, An Empirical Study

Copyright Trolling, An Empirical Study Matthew Sag  ABSTRACT: This detailed empirical and doctrinal study of copyright trolling presents new data showing the astonishing rate of growth of multi-defendant John Doe litigation in United States district courts over the past decade. It also presents new evidence of the association between this form of litigation and allegations of infringement concerning pornographic films. Multi-defendant John Doe lawsuits have become the most common form of copyright litigation in several U.S. districts, and in districts such as the Northern District of Illinois, copyright litigation involving pornography accounts for more than half of new cases. This Article highlights a fundamental oversight in the literature on copyright trolls. Paralleling discussions in patent law, scholars addressing the troll issue in copyright have applied status-based definitions to determine who is, and is not, a troll. This Article argues that the definition should be conduct-based. Multi-defendant John Doe litigation should be considered copyright trolling whenever it is motivated by a desire to turn litigation into an independent revenue stream. Such litigation, when initiated with the aim of turning a profit in the courthouse as opposed to seeking compensation or deterring illegal activity, reflects a kind of systematic opportunism that fits squarely within the concept of litigation trolling. This Article shows that existing status-based definitions of copyright trolls do not account for what is now arguably the most prevalent form of trolling. In addition to these empirical and theoretical contributions, this Article shows how statutory damages and permissive joinder make multi-defendant John Doe litigation possible and why allegations of infringement concerning pornographic films are particularly well-suited to this model.  Professor, Loyola University Chicago School of Law and Associate Director for Intellectual Property of the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies. Thanks to Tonja Jacobi, Glynn Lunney, Jonathan Phillips, David Schwartz, and Spencer Waller, and the participants at the Internet Law Works in Progress Conference, Law and Society, and the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference for their comments and suggestions. Replication code in Stata12 available upon request. Raw data available at http://matthewsag.com/?page_id=19. 1106 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:1105 I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 1107 II. THE RISE OF THE COPYRIGHT TROLL ......................................... 1110 A. C OPYRIGHT T ROLLS AND C OPYRIGHT T ROLLING .................... 1111 1. Righthaven ................................................................... 1111 2. Beyond Righthaven ..................................................... 1113 B. W HEN D O M ULTI -D EFENDANT J OHN D OE L AWSUITS A MOUNT TO C OPYRIGHT T ROLLING ? ........................................................ 1114 C. T HE E CONOMICS OF M ULTI -D EFENDANT J OHN D OE L AWSUITS ............................................................................. 1115 D. T HE R ISE OF M ULTI -D EFENDANT J OHN D OE L AWSUITS ............ 1116 III. STATUTORY DAMAGES, JOINDER, & PORNOGRAPHY .................... 1119 A. S TATUTORY D AMAGES ........................................................... 1119 B. J OINDER ................................................................................ 1121 C. T HE C OPYRIGHT T ROLLING -P ORNOGRAPHY N EXUS ................ 1127 IV. REFORMS ..................................................................................... 1133 A. T HE N ORMATIVE F OUNDATIONS FOR R EFORM ......................... 1133 B. R EFORM P ROPOSALS .............................................................. 1135 1. Reasonable Statutory Damages .................................. 1135 2. Denying Joinder, Severing Cases ............................... 1141 3. Conditional Joinder and Other Safeguards .............. 1144 V. CONCLUSION .............................................................................. 1145 APPENDIX A: COPYRIGHT LAWSUITS FILED IN U.S. FEDERAL COURTS: 2001–2014 ................................................................................. 1146 APPENDIX B: COPYRIGHT SUITS FILED IN U.S. DISTRICT COURTS: 2001 TO JUNE 30, 2014 .............................................................. 1146 2015] COPYRIGHT TROLLING, AN EMPIRICAL STUDY 1107 I. INTRODUCTION Patent trolls are in the news, 1 and they have been high on the agenda of intellectual property policy makers and academics for over a decade now. 2 Those targeted by patent aggregators and patent holding companies accounted for nearly 38% of all patent defendants. 3 Depending on your definition of a patent troll, the incidence of patent troll litigation may be increasing. 4 The President has condemned patent trolls, 5 and new legislation targets patent trolls. 6 While patent trolls hog the limelight, a particular type of copyright troll has been taking over the dockets of several United States district courts, and yet copyright trolls have received comparatively little attention in policy and academic circles. District court judges have commented on how copyright litigation is changing, 7 but this is the first systematic in-depth analysis of the data. 8 1. See, e.g. , Edgar Walters, Tech Companies Fight Back Against Patent Lawsuits , N.Y. TIMES (Jan. 23, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/us/tech-companies-fight-back-against-patent-lawsuits.html. 2. See, e.g. , FED. TRADE COMM’N, THE EVOLVING IP MARKETPLACE: ALIGNING PATENT NOTICE AND REMEDIES WITH COMPETITION (2011), available at http://www.ftc.gov/sites/ default/files/documents/reports/evolving-ip-marketplace-aligning-patent-notice-and-remedies-competition-report-federal-trade/110307patentreport.pdf; FED. TRADE COMM’N, TO PROMOTE INNOVATION: THE PROPER BALANCE OF COMPETITION AND PATENT LAW AND POLICY (2003), available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/10/innovationrpt.pdf. See generally Mark A. Lemley & A. Douglas Melamed, Missing the Forest for the Trolls , 113 COLUM. L. REV. 2117 (2013). 3. Christopher A. Cotropia et al., Unpacking Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) , 99 MINN. L. REV. 649, 678 fig. 3 (2014) (using statistics from 2010 and 2012). 4. Colleen Chien reports that patent trolls filed 29% of patent lawsuits in 2010 and 62% in 2012. Colleen Chien, Patent Trolls by the Numbers , PATENTLYO (Mar. 14, 2013), http://www. patentlyo.com/patent/2013/03/chien-patent-trolls.html. However, new research using more transparent data finds that, based on the total number of patent litigants, there is almost no difference between 2010 and 2012. See Cotropia et al., supra note 3. 5. President Obama recently stated “[patent trolls] don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.” Gene Sperling, Taking on Patent Trolls to Protect American Innovation , WHITE HOUSE BLOG (June 4, 2013, 1:55 PM), http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/ 06/04/taking-patent-trolls-protect-american-innovation; see also EXEC. OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, PATENT ASSERTION AND U.S. INNOVATION 2 (2013), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/ default/files/docs/patent_report.pdf. 6. Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), Pub. L. No. 112-29, 125 Stat. 284 (2011) (codified in scattered sections of 35 U.S.C.). The AIA included a revision to the joinder rules for patent litigation, which required lawsuits filed against multiple unrelated parties to be filed separately, a provision squarely aimed at patent trolls. See 35 U.S.C. § 299 (2012). 7. See, e.g. , In re BitTorrent Adult Film Copyright Infringement Cases, 296 F.R.D. 80, 82 (E.D.N.Y. 2012) (“These actions are part of a nationwide blizzard of civil actions brought by purveyors of pornographic films alleging copyright infringement by individuals utilizing a computer protocol known as BitTorrent.”). 8. The Copyright Office has never addressed the issue of copyright trolls, nor does the Copyright Office’s recent report on Copyright Small Claims even mention them. See generally MARIA A. PALLANTE, U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, COPYRIGHT SMALL CLAIMS (2013), available at http://www.copyright.gov/docs/smallclaims/usco-smallcopyrightclaims.pdf. For non-empirical 1108 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:1105 This empirical study of copyright trolling presents new data that reveals the astonishing growth of a particular kind of copyright trolling—the multi-defendant John Doe (“MDJD”) lawsuit that alleges copyright violation through the file sharing software known as BitTorrent. Generally, these suits take the form of “Copyright Owner v. John Does 1–N” where N is a large number. 9 MDJD suits are not just any form of copyright trolling, they are the dominant form. In 2013, these MDJD suits were the majority of copyright cases filed in 19 of the 92 federal districts. 10 Defining exactly what makes an individual or an organization a troll is inevitably controversial. 11 The essence of trolling is that the plaintiff is more focused on the business of litigation than on selling a product or service or licensing their IP to third parties to sell a product or a service. The paradigmatic troll plays a numbers game in which it targets hundreds or thousands of defendants, seeking quick settlements priced just low enough that it is less expensive for the defendant to pay the troll rather than defend the claim. This is a familiar pattern in patent law where trolls thrive by opportunistically taking advantage of the uncertain scope of patent claims, the poor quality of patent examination, the high cost of litigation, and the asymmetric stakes faced by the patent assertion entities and the businesses they target. 12 As this Article demonstrates, a similar numbers game increasingly dominates copyright litigation. Of the 3817 copyright law suits filed...