“The envelope, please”, that trite phrase used to announce the winner of an Oscar, took on a new meaning when some five thousand individuals received notices that they were being sued for illegally downloading the Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker, Ethan Smith reports in the Wall Street Journal.  The recipients had copped the film using BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol.

Unlike the lawsuit brought against music downloaders by the Recording Industry Association of America, this action was brought by one producer, Voltage Pictures LLC. In fact – and mystifyingly – the Motion Picture Association of America distanced itself from Voltage’s action. A spokesperson wrote that “The MPAA and our member companies have absolutely nothing to do with these lawsuits.”

Suing end users is fraught with dangers and imponderables.  For one thing, it’s bad public relations. Smith cites that RIAA subpoenas were served to “very young children, old people who said they didn’t own computers, even a dead person.”

Nevertheless, such actions are a sign of how outraged copyright owners are about having their work robbed. The RIAA was willing to incur a PR black eye in exchange for intimidating would-be thieves.  And perhaps they did, especially when those would-be’s learned that it had cost one defendant $675,000 (see File Share This for details).

Suing file-sharers is not like suing your neighbor for running his lawn mower into your car. “The process of suing people for downloading can be complicated and costly,” Smith reminds us. “After the relatively straightforward task of recording the Internet protocol, or IP, address of each person offering a piece of media, the plaintiff must learn who that numerical address belongs to, generally by sending a subpoena to the Internet service provider associated with it.”

We’ve had lawsuits against music downloaders and now we have one against film downloaders.  Are e-book downloaders next?

If victims of piracy have any say about it, the answer will be a resounding Yes. And there are a lot of victims. Are you one of them? Does your blood boil when you see yourself ripped off and your mugger laughing at you? Maybe you will take heart from the Wall Street Journal‘s account, which you can read in full here.

Richard Curtis