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Patent and Copyright Wars Gone Wild
snydeq writes "While Apple and Samsung fight over patents and prototypes, other copyright trolls are waging an X-rated battle on innocent users, as lawyers representing some adult movie companies are sending letters accusing users of illegally downloading their movies and saying that, for a price, they can make the charges go away. 'Cases like this, usually involving pornographic content, are very common,' Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. At least 250,000 individuals have been named in group lawsuits over the last few years. There's a very common belief that if someone pirates your Wi-Fi connection or uses your computer without your permission, you are responsible for illegal downloads of copyrighted material. That's not true, says Stoltz; the law is quite clear. However, the lawyers who bring those cases use that misperception to convince innocent people that they had better pay up. Since $3,500 is just a fraction of the money it would take to fight a case in court, most people simply settle."
IAAL, and I've worked on a bunch of these cases. The real problem is, it's almost always cheaper to settle than to fight. This is what we call a "cost of defense" shakedown: if it would cost $5k to fight, then it makes sense to pay $3k to make it go away. However, there are a few things to keep in mind:
* The trolls are very unlikely to go after any individual, no matter how much they huff and puff. The reason is, if they have 1000 Does in a complaint, and they start going against one of them, that Doe will (eventually) get copies of the evidence against him. If it's sh!t (and I believe it will probably turn out to be) then the other 999 Does will see that, and no longer be willing to pay.
* The insurance industry had a problem with cost-of-defense complaints: crappy auto accidents that weren't worth more than a few grand in damages. But they banded together and fought every single one of them (paying just the actual damages & medical, and fighting almost every "pain & suffering" claim). And now, you can hardly find a PI lawyer to take a small case -- they know there's no money in it. So the insurance companies don't have to fight any more, and they don't even consider paying anything you can't produce a receipt for.
The only way to clean up these trolls is if some Does sack up and fight, or if the courts stop going along with the shakedown.