Law School Prof Looking To Challenge 'Hurt Locker' Lawsuits In Cases Of Weak Evidence

from the nice-to-see dept

With the ongoing mass lawsuit campaign for those accused of sharing the movie Hurt Locker online, we're still waiting to see if US Copyright Group will really go through with its stated intentions of filing actual lawsuits against individuals. As we've seen with similar "mass lawsuit" factories, the general business plan is to threaten as many people as possible, with demands to "pay up or else..." and never really get around to the "or else" part. USCG insists it really will sue, and I wouldn't be surprised if it planned to do so in a few select cases it thinks it definitely can win, just so it has a few "example" wins to point to.

However, as always in these mass lawsuit campaigns, the evidence is so weak that it often drags in many who are quite innocent of what they're accused of doing, and it seems rather unfair to make them either pay up, or pay lawyers to defend themselves. So it's neat to see that Robert Talbot, a law professor at University of San Francisco, is taking on a bunch of these cases (23 so far), with a focus on ones where it appears the accused did not, in fact, share the file. From the sound of it, Talbot (with the help of USF law students) have no intention of settling these cases, but are looking to fully defend the accused. My guess is that USCG will look to avoid any of those cases, and focus on the ones that are a bit more of a slam dunk.

Filed Under: hurt locker, lawsuits, robert talbot
Companies: us copyright group