Amassing under the cloak of a pay-up-or-else scheme, over 200,000 BitTorrent users in the United States have been sued by copyright holders over the past year. Further lawsuits are mounting by the day.

We cannot possibly imagine how the court system, is going to handle 200,000 cases, each undergoing a fair trial. This massive litigation is but a method for copyright holders to obtain personal information of BitTorrent users and offer them the chance to settle their case for an amount ranging from $1500-$3000. This way, users will evade a full trial, bigger penalties, and personal lawyer expense, and the copyright holder will rake in about a quarter billion dollars revenue. Piracy is not so bad after all.

Since the start of these court proceedings in 2010, 201,828 lawsuits have been filed all in all; 24,583 are brought in by the makers of The Hurt Locker; and 1,237 of which accused of using the eD2k network. Though several tens of thousands cases had already been dismissed, there still remains 145,417 BitTorrent users at risk. Considering the figure, neither can we expect these people to have an objective trial nor have the evidence properly tested.

In other piracy news in the recent months, Dutch anti-piracy group BRIEN shut down 12 US torrent sites by sending copyright infringement notices to their hosts. However, the names of the torrent sites were not released—questionable enough as it is. There was also a previous issue of Comcast allegedly blocking The Pirate Bay, which the former denied. “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay,” said Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast. This turned out to be a network disruption and not an attack or censorship.

In addition, LimeWire is in trouble again for being sued by independent record indie music right group, Merlin, for $5 million. The former failed to reach the same settlement it made with Universal, Warner, EMI and Sony. In fact, LimeWire didn’t even offer a settlement at all. As for Warner, the company is tapering the loss from around the same time last year as it took its $12 million last quarter from LimeWire as a chunk of the $105 million settlement program.

We can’t really tell for sure whether or not the efforts of the government and other private bodies are working against piracy. As for Google’s Anti-Piracy filter which sifts through ‘piracy-related’ terms, piracy search has dramatically gone down. Still, it does not equal piracy itself going down.