Well, isn’t this a strange twist in your garden-variety piracy drama? Apparently, representatives at mega-media conglomerate Time Warner Cable have blocked lawyers from getting their hands on all the names of those who have illegally downloaded the porn flick This Ain’t Avatar XXX.

Apparently, the standard operating procedure in these sorts of BitTorrent lawsuits is the offended party subpoenas user names from the ISP that hosts the file-sharers—and, once the names are obtained, they set about to royally sue them. This time, however, Time Warner Cable is fighting the subpoenas by only providing ten names a month. So, only ten This Ain’t Avatar XXX downloaders will be identified every thirty days, making the legal process excruciatingly slow. And even then, TWC says it will only release names of those defendants “whom it reasonably believes the Court has personal jurisdiction” over.

To comply fully with the porn lawyers would mean to “redirect substantial resources away from compliance with law enforcement requests,” of which some are “emergency requests in which death or serious physical injury are at issue.” Whoa—so you mean we might have more important things to do than to sue porn downloaders? Crazy!