A Chicagoan’s yen for Spider-Man 2 has put him in the legal crosshairs of movie industry giant Columbia Pictures.
Joe Maslanki illegally downloaded the Spidey sequel, according to a claim Columbia made in a suit filed Wednesday in Illinois, part of a national legal offensive against alleged Internet movie pirates.
Several dozen copyright infringement suits like the one against Maslanki were filed Wednesday, according to The Motion Picture Association of America. The industry has sued alleged pirates before but it hasn’t publicly named them, said Kori Bernards, an association spokeswoman.
The movie industry’s legal salvo comes in tandem with a volley of lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, which is also trying to fend off illegal downloads from the Internet.
Maslanki allegedly used Direct Connect peer-to-peer software to swap Spider-Man 2 online with an “unknown amount of people,” Bernards said. “It’s probably a healthy amount of people,” she said.
Maslanki couldn’t be reached for comment. In fact, the Tribune didn’t find anybody with that name at the Chicago address the suit was served at, though the property there appears to be owned by a man with a similar name, records show.
Bernards said Columbia got Maslanki’s name from his Internet service provider. Maslanki was then contacted, and like others who were eventually sued by the movie industry, either didn’t respond to or refused to settle with Columbia, Bernards said.
Court penalties for copyright infringement range from $750 to $150,000, depending on the number of infractions, Bernards said.
Both the film and music industries claim they are losing billions of dollars in sales to people who download or swap movies and songs without paying. And both are particularly targeting college students.
The record industry said earlier this week that it plans to sue up to 405 unnamed students at 18 U.S. universities. Meanwhile, the movie industry said it will sue an undisclosed number of unnamed students at 12 universities. None of the schools are in Illinois.
The students in those cases, referred to as “John Does,” allegedly used their school’s Internet system to illegally download songs or movies. The record and movie associations will seek the students’ names through the colleges’ Internet records.
In addition to the unnamed college defendants, the movie industry is suing several dozen people by name, including Maslanki.
Suits against individual movie users are just one part of the movie industry’s big legal fight against computer file sharing. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio’s suit against Grokster Ltd. is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
MGM claims that Grokster, with its peer-to-peer technology, is widely used for copyright infringement.
———-
mhughlett@tribune.com
