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Video Professor Sues 100 Anonymous Critics
Techdirt is reporting that the Video Professor Company is suing 100 anonymous critics of their company. The Video Professor is known for their television ads hawking DVDs that teach you various skills like how to use your computer. Most of the complaints center around how their "free" product offering automagically signs you up for a subscription. Instead of addressing the concerns the Video Professor has decided to take the litigious route.
That's ridiculous. Suppose some large IP-holding organization sues a sweet old lady for copyright infringement, and manages to, through sheer force of millions of dollars in lawyer-time, convince a court that she's guilty of a couple thousand dollars in infringement?
Heck, let's assume she was actually guilty and the fine was appropriate.
Is it really fair to saddle her with such a disproportionate level of compensation that she'll never be able to repay?
What about the reverse, wherein the little old lady is incapable of protecting her IP from being stolen by a larger organization because of millions of dollars of stalling and diversionary tactics?
No, what we need is a "stupid pays" system. Where an omniscient overlord assigns legal costs to the party that acted stupid or maliciously.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I would have thought that the issues raised by this are a lot more important (especially given that he has shut down blogs belonging to MP's, a candidate for Mayor of London etc.), but Slashdot is too US centric to care about what happens across the Atlantic (even though you can be sued for libel in the UK, if just one person in Britain views your website based anywhere in the world - so slashdot better not libel me!).