Liberty Media Holdings, LLC v. Bittorrent Swarm
United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida
277 F.R.D. 672 (2011)
Relevant factsFree
Liberty Media Holdings, LLC (plaintiff), which owned a movie's copyright, sued 38 unidentified individuals (John Does 1-38) (defendants) who each used a BitTorrent swarm — a decentralized file-sharing system where users download small portions of a file from multiple other users before a program reassembles the complete file — to download the movie at different times over a two-month period. Liberty sought to join all 38 John Does in a single lawsuit.
IssueFree
Whether committing the same type of violation in the same way, without more, sufficiently links defendants together for the purposes of joinder.