Crazy: Judge Grants Copyright Troll Maximum Statutory Damages In Default Case

from the don't-ignore-cases dept

We've talked plenty of times about issues with "default judgments" in lawsuits. Generally speaking, if the party being sued doesn't show up, judges will usually grant the plaintiff's claim, and issue a default judgment in their favor. The thing is, courts don't have to issue default judgments, but many courts act as if they do. Even then, the courts have significant power in then determining what the awards are in those cases. So while it's not surprising that a court issued a default judgment against someone in a copyright trolling case where the person (Gerald Glover) chose not to respond to the lawsuit, it's somewhat ridiculous that the judge then granted the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for the claimed copyright infringement (plus another $1425 in fees and costs). As you probably know, statutory damages for copyright range from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed (not per infringement...), but then also allow for the court to increase it up to a maximum of $150,000 in the case where a copyright holder has proven that the infringement was willful.

Given that, it's somewhat troubling that the court awarded the absolute maximum here. It's unclear how there is proof of willful infringement. The complaint against Glover just makes general allegation of using BitTorrent to download and share the copyright-covered work, but does nothing to show willful infringement. I recognize that judges will often rubber stamp motions for default judgment, but can't they at least take the minimum amount of time necessary to note if the awarded amount is proper?

While the DieTrollDie site (which alerted us to this story) notes that it's unlikely that the copyright holder CP Productions will actually see any money from Glover, what's much more worrisome is that other copyright trolls will point to this default ruling as proof that simple downloading can get you hit with a $150,000 judgment (skipping over the fact that it's a default judgment).

Filed Under: copyright, copyright trolls, default judgment, statutory damages
Companies: cp productions

Judge Dumps Yet Another Mass Infringement Suit In Response To Single, Pro Se Motion To Quash

from the quashed-indeed dept

The various lawyers who have jumped on the bandwagon of mass lawsuits against people accused of sharing certain porn productions have been finding that courts are becoming more aggressive in dismissing most of the defendants due to clear abuse of the law by the lawyers to file a single case against so many defendants. We've seen a bunch of such cases have all but a single defendant dismissed. However, it looks like one judge in Illinois, Judge Milton Shadur, went beyond even that in dismissing an entire case against all 300 defendants in response to an amateur pro se motion to quash from one of the anonymous defendants. Of course, we've talked about some "kits" that have been put online for such defendants to file motions to quash and some of the folks in our comments insisted that such motions would never work. Oops.

In this particular case, brought by one of the "new breed" of P2P mass lawsuit lawyers, John Steele (who was a divorce lawyer before jumping in to these types of cases) sued 300 defendants on behalf of porn producer, CP Productions. The judge seems to think the whole thing was clearly unwarranted, and had made it clear to Steele earlier that he didn't think much of the case at all. Steele pushed forward, but once the motion to quash came in, the judge dumped the whole case, going with his initial intuition that the case never should have been brought in the first place. Ars Technica summarizes the judge's reasoning:

"Among other things, the newest motion demonstrates that there is no justification for dragging into an Illinois federal court, on a wholesale basis, a host of unnamed defendants over whom personal jurisdiction clearly does not exist and--more importantly--as to whom CP’s counsel could readily have ascertained that fact," the judge said, apparently referring to the fact the IP lookup services would have shown the lawyers that most defendants were unlikely to be Illinois residents.

In addition, the judge saw the joinder of 300 defendants as little more than a ploy for saving cash. "No predicate has been shown for thus combining 300 separate actions on the cheap," he added. "If CP had sued the 300 claimed infringers separately for their discrete infringements, the filing fees alone would have aggregated $105,000 rather than $350."

The judge also noted Steele's amazingly fast response to his own initial concerns about the case, which he said seemed to suggest that Steele already knew why the judge would be concerned and had all of his arguments ready to go. To the judge, this showed that Steele knew quite well the "obvious problems" of these types of lawsuits. Nice to see more judges realizing that these lawsuits are a massive abuse of the legal system to squeeze money out of people.

Filed Under: copyright, john steele, pre-settlement, quash
Companies: cp productions