From Threat Level:
A film company suing 5,865 BitTorrent downloaders over the flick Nude Nuns with Big Guns doesn’t own the rights to the movie, according to court documents and interviews. Incentive Capital of Utah took ownership last month of the B-rated flick about a sister who is “one Bad Mother.”
Yet two weeks after Incentive Capital foreclosed and assumed Camelot Distribution Group’s titles because of an allegedly soured loan, Camelot filed a mass copyright lawsuit (.pdf) on behalf of Nude Nuns claiming it owned the rights.
Now Your Honor, I’m not some fancy big city lawyer. Back home in the back woods of Kentucky, we got usselves a sayin’. If you gonna sell me a hound dog, make sure you sell me y’all hound dog, ah reckon.
Yesterday, Wired ran a story about a novel way to recoup investments in indie films: wait until they’re pirated, and sue the downloaders. This plan seemed far from foolproof, but I have to say, I didn’t expect someone to actually bungle this step quite so dramatically. The film company defaulted on the loan used to finance the movie in the first place, and the film itself was apparently collateral for the loan. So now the lender owns the film, not the plaintiff. Whoops!