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Uwe Boll, Other Filmmakers Sue Thousands of Movie Pirates
linzeal writes "Directors whose films have done poorly at the box office are increasingly being solicited by high-powered law firms to file lawsuits with offers of settlement. This practice, which the EFF has been calling extortive and 'mafia-like', has resulted in courts starting to rule in favor of the consumer, and in some cases throwing out the lawsuits. This is all fine and dandy, however, when you are considered the world's worst director and you largely finance films through your own holding company. At that point, the rhetoric and ridicule gets ratcheted up rather quickly."
These ludicrous lawsuits are already in jeopardy, as the judge has ruled they have to prove a valid legal reason to roll up all these John/Jane Does in one lawsuit. Rightfully so. I have no problem with them suing these people, but trying to roll them up into single lawsuits so that their filing costs and complexity remain low is abuse of the justice system.
Living With a Nerd
That was a pretty good summary of the civil court system. :) But you left out the part that you (the plaintiff) may still will in court on an unjustified lawsuit. A lot of it has to do with how good the lawyers are for both sides. If there is a jury involved, it's all showmanship. Whoever puts on the best show wins.
Plaintiff with a big budget versus defendant who can barely afford to keep his Internet connection, I'd wager on the plaintiff.
The only sure way not to get sued is to not be on record anywhere, and never have contact of any sort with anyone. If no one knows who you are, and no one finds out about you, then you're almost safe. That is becoming harder and harder to do though.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Last year I received 3 separate emails from my ISP claiming copyright violations. Two were for downloading movies and one for a game title. My household consists of my husband and I - we have no children or room-mates to be messing around with our computers. After each email I called the ISP to tell them that we hadn't downloaded the content and were basically told that their software said we did and they didn't believe us. After much yelling and 2 more emails, we finally figured out that the problem was a cable modem that we had used briefly before switching back to an older model. The new one had gone back to the store where we bought it and evidently was purchased by someone else for use at the same ISP. Given cable company monopolies, this shouldn't be too surprising. Long story short, they still had the MAC address of that returned modem linked to my account. It was only after they blocked access for that MAC address and got a phone call from the other subscriber that they truly believed us. If anyone had gotten sued over this mess, it would have been my husband and I, despite our complete innocence. We would have been essentially blackmailed into settling rather than risk a court believing us as much as the techs at the ISP did.