The American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed briefs in support of Time Warner Cable's motion to quash subpoenas to ISPs, including TWC, for information on thousands of Internet users who allegedly illegally downloaded copyrighted content--movies--using BitTorrent's file-sharing application.
"Members of the movie industry have the right to challenge alleged copyright infringement, but they must do so in a way that upholds the law and individuals' due process rights," said Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
The subpoenas are part of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in a D.C. U.S. District Court on behalf of a number of plaintiffs.
ACLU and company argue that the subpoenas should be quashed because the suit "improperly" links thousands of unrelated defendants and that few if any of them are in Washington, where the suit was filed. They also argue that the plaintiffs did not establish that the defendants had done anything wrong before attempting to get the identifying info.
