A federal judge wants a Los Angeles film company to explain why it’s targeting nearly 6,000 John Doe defendants around the country in a single lawsuit for torrenting the 2010 B-movie revenge flick Nude Nuns With Big Guns.

Camelot Distribution Group Inc., which claims to own the rights to the movie about a sister who is “one bad mother,” has until May 13 to “show cause why the Doe defendants should not be severed and/or dismissed from this action based on improper joinder of parties or lack of personal jurisdiction,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Fernando Olguin ruled (.pdf) Friday.

Olguin appointed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to act as amicus counsel on the side of the defendants, who at this stage are known only by their internet IP addresses and rough geographic location.

Camelot’s lawsuit, first reported by Threat Level, is the latest effort by independent film companies to turn piracy lawsuits into a profit center. The suit targets defendants who were detected torrenting Nuns between January and March of this year. The single lawsuit targets 5,865 downloaders, making it theoretically worth as much as $879,750,000 — more money than the U.S. box-office gross for Avatar.

Similar mass lawsuits have encountered a mixed reception from the courts. Civil defendants are customarily sued in the courthouse nearest where they committed the alleged wrongdoing — in this instance on computers in their homes or work.  Independent movie studios and porn companies, in contrast, are suing thousands of people at once, in a total of just about three dozen lawsuits (.xls) often filed in the plaintiff’s lawyer’s backyard and far from the defendants’ homes.

This strategy was pioneered last year by the U.S. Copyright Group, a coalition of indy film producers formed explicitly to make money by suing downloaders.

Camelot has said it needs to file a mass lawsuit to legally compel ISPs to identify the defendants from their IP addresses.

The judge’s order Friday does not address another controversy in the case: whether Camelot really owns the rights to the movie it’s suing over.

Camelot didn’t actually film Nude Nuns. According to court records, it bought the rights to the film, and about a dozen others, with a $650,000 loan from a company called Incentive Capital.

In a separate lawsuit, Incentive says Camelot defaulted on that loan, and Incentive has already legally foreclosed on the films. Camelot says the foreclosure was an improper “usurpation of its assets” (.pdf), according to court documents.

With earlier reporting by David Kravets

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Disclaimer: Results of Wired.com’s IP Detective tool (above) are not conclusive. If a match is found, this does not mean your computer was used to download the file in question, nor that you are a target of the lawsuit. IP addresses can change from time to time. If you didn’t personally use BitTorrent to download the named film on the day and time listed, it’s likely your computer has simply inherited the IP address of someone who did.