Court Says Demanding Settlement To Avoid Clearly Baseless Lawsuit Is Extortion
from the hmmm... dept
Over the past few years, we've seen a small, but growing, number of businesses that set up lawsuit settlement factories, of sorts. The most common, of course, is the RIAA, which built a nice little business threatening to sue people for file sharing if they didn't hand over a few thousand dollars. Of course, before the RIAA, DirecTV did this for a group of folks who had purchased card readers. For many people, this whole process of demanding payment to avoid a lawsuit sounds an awful lot like "protection money," or extortion. Eric Goldman alerts me to a recent ruling by the New Hampshire Supreme Court that agrees that such settlement demands can be extortion, if the potential lawsuit is clearly baseless. Of course, this is only in New Hampshire and folks at the RIAA (I'm sure) would insist that its lawsuit threats were not "clearly baseless." That may be true in some of them, but you do have to wonder about the time they threatened a deceased woman who was 83 years old at the time of the supposed sharing, and seemed unlikely to have used Kazaa or the user named "smittenedkitten" while sharing 700 songs.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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"I'm suing you over something baseless! But it is more costly to defend yourself in court than just settle! I have made a mockery of justice!"
The NH law changes it to:
"As above, except now you could try to prove to a court my claim is baseless. But it will cost you more to try and allege that in court than just settle. I win again!"
Unless I'm missing something.
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New - this Fall
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Can we say big budget movie about you??? (pun intended)
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The chance that it's found CLEARLY baseless is nil.
Once again Mike, you are reaching really, really far trying to find a small hole in the system. Again, FAIL.
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Jeeze Mike...
Old women can be feisty too.
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Actually, here in the land of the free, where you are innocent until proven guilty, clearly baseless should mean lacking any evidence. You should have to submit anything to anyone for any checks of any kind. This isn't nazi germany, no martial law has been declared. go back to your cave riaa troll
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Baseless would be the telephone book approach, sending infringement notices and suing people only for being int he phone book. Working with ANY evidence at all would not be "Baseless".
Go back into your cave, torrent troll.
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In other words, just because they have an IP address doesn't mean the case isn't baseless. That's nonsense, for all I know they could have made up the IP address and given their LONG history of clinging to baseless issues it's no stretch of the imagination to think that they would.
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Game changing
Baseless patent infringement lawsuits? Show clear prior art, have the USPTO invalidate the patent, and bam, tables turned, now the patent troll has to worry about defending himself from criminal charges.
Baseless trademark infringement claims that clearly wouldn't pass the moron-in-a-hurry test? Gone if they sue for any amount of money (including lawyer fees)!
Too bad this wasn't around when SCO started their shenanigans.
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