‘Troll’ tops US list of litigious copyright companies
The music industry has accounted for the most ‘traditional’ US copyright cases filed over the past six years, but online video company Malibu Media topped the list of most litigious plaintiffs, a report has showed.
Malibu Media, which runs an erotic website, has filed 4,332 cases—nearly 16 times more than second-placed Dallas Buyers Club, a US-based business that owns the copyright to the film of the same name, which filed 274 cases.
The figures were revealed in a report produced by legal analytics company LexMachina that studied US copyright litigation.
The “ Copyright Litigation Report”, released yesterday, August 11, assesses copyright cases filed at US district courts from January 1, 2009 to June 30, 2015.
Malibu Media, which has recently faced accusations of being a “copyright troll”, was split into a specific category for the purposes of the report. File-sharing disputes, which made up a “large proportion” of all cases, were incorporated into their own section of the report.
“These file sharing cases differ substantially from other, more traditional copyright litigation: they are often brought against large numbers of defendants, are distributed across districts differently, and have vastly different dynamics around settlement and damages,” the report said.
The report added that “separating these two different kinds of cases” allows practitioners to focus on the set they care about and avoids a skewed analysis.
In the list of “traditional” copyright cases music rights group Broadcast Music topped the pile for lawsuits filed. The company filed 968 cases in the given time period, almost double that of second-placed Sony/ATV Songs, which initiated 528.
Litigation is heavily concentrated in the US District Court for the Central District of California, the report showed. The court has received 2,496 cases, 26.2% of all those filed.
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York was second with 1,061 lawsuits.
The top defendants named in the report were companies in the publishing, software and fashion industries, including Amazon and John Wiley & Sons.
