Time Warner To Courts: Do We Really Have To Fight Pirates?

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File under “Inexplicable legal actions seemingly born of laziness”: Time Warner Cable is asking a US court to quash legal action against online piracy, because it doesn’t have the bandwidth to look up more than 28 IP addresses a month.

According to the Hollywood Reporter’s THR, Esq. blog, TWC has filed a third party motion to quash a subpoena it received for information about 809 IP addresses in a case involving Uwe Boll’s Far Cry because, according to the motion, “the subpoena violates an agreement reached between TWC and plaintiff’s counsel to limit discovery, and because compliance with the subpoena would be excessively burdensome and expensive.”

If the court doesn’t want to quash the subpoena, the motion provides an alternative suggestion: The request for 809 IP addresses gets limited to 28 a month, and the plaintiff pays for all 809 addresses and TWC’s costs to recover them, in advance. It may not be the blow for internet freedom that some would hope for – and, for that matter, it may make TWC look embarrassingly small scale and lazy – but it’s a complication in the fight against online piracy that few could’ve seen coming.

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