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LionsGate Wants Pirate Sites To Pay For 'Expendables' 3 Leak (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: During the summer of 2014, the movie studio LionsGate suffered a major setback when a high quality leak of the then-unreleased Expendables 3 film appeared online. Fearing a massive loss in revenue, the movie studio sued the operators of several websites that allegedly failed to remove the infringing files. Over the past year there has been little progress in the case as most of the accused site operators failed to respond to LionsGate's complaint. In a new filing at the California district court, LionsGate indicates a desire to move forward by asking for a default judgment against the operators of LimeTorrents and the (already defunct) Dotsemper and Swankshare sites. Previously LionsGate settled with the operator of video hosting service Played.to.
This is also how cable companies have often gotten judgments against their customers. They'd set up a court date, pay a couple of lawyers (even though they're not allowed by state law to have legal representation for these low-$ civil cases) and schedule a whole group of customers to come in. The customers don't get to challenge the court date and time, because 100 cases are scheduled to be heard. And most of them default.
I had this pulled on me once because I had refused to pay a bill for 4 months of service I hadn't received. I had a witness and documentation. They had no witness and no documentation. Judge ruled against me anyway, because he said he "could not believe" the cable service people would simply fail to show up when they said they would.
It was my first brush with the corrupt practices of US cable companies.