In September 2010, West Coast Productions—maker of such films as Teen Anal Nightmare 2 and Juicy White Anal Booty 4—paired up with West Virginia lawyer Ken Ford to file a set of mass lawsuits against online file-sharers. Ford was the brains behind the Adult Copyright Company, which promised to help the porn industry cash in on the epidemic of piracy. His business model involved suing thousands of people at once in "Doe" copyright infringement lawsuits, even though the defendants lived all over the country, the film producer was in California, and the court was in West Virginia. After filing suit, Ford would try to turn lists of IP addresses collected from BitTorrent into real names and addresses, then attempted to settle each case for a few thousand dollars each.
It was a copycat business idea, already being worked on by other lawyers, but Ford hardly looked like a good candidate for executing on it well. He had recently been admonished by West Virginia's Office of Disciplinary Counsel for his dealings with clients, was the subject of 12 official complaints, and had his law license suspended five times by the state bar since 2006.
But none of that stopped Ford's West Coast Productions lawsuits. In the year that followed, the Teen Anal Nightmare 2 case spread outward from Ford's legal base, a dingy office in Charles Town, to three federal district courts. It engaged defense lawyers from states like Colorado, Texas, and Georgia. It targeted thousands of US residents from across the country in a scheme that reduced some to near-hysterics.
The lawyers bringing these sorts of cases across the country are a motley bunch. One in Illinois leaped from divorce cases (phone number: 1-800-DIVORCE) into federal porn copyright cases. Another in Texas has already been fined $10,000 for sending out subpoenas without judicial permission; the judge in that case blasted the "staggering chutzpah" involved. But Ford's strange story takes pride of place.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/how-a-troubled-west-virginia-lawyer-foisted-a-teen-anal-nightmare-on-the-nation.ars