AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile Hit With Dumbest Antitrust Lawsuit Ever

from the please dept

We just wrote about how Max Davis, who's trying to create a silly and totally pointless compulsory licensing system for MMS content was more or less laughed out of court in the lawsuit he filed against the mobile operators, claiming that they were running illegal P2P file sharing programs in the form of their MMS capabilities. It apparently took him all of a few days to come up with a new, perhaps even more ridiculous strategy: he's suing AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and TracFone for supposed antitrust violations over the same basic issues. Once again, it seems clear that this is an incredibly weak (and almost certainly unproductive) attempt at getting these companies to agree to his pointless licensing scheme.

So how are these mobile operators guilty of antitrust violations? According to Davis:

Defendants purposely conspired via collusion to install themselves as the new primary gate keepers and sole beneficiaries of multimedia content sharing through their new MMS technologies.

Except, of course, that's ridiculous. These companies did agree to set up MMS systems, but that's because they're the mobile operators who run the mobile networks. That's not collusion. And it's not antitrust. The filing gets more ridiculous as it goes on. He claims that these operators do not qualify as DMCA service providers, contrary to the pretty clear language of the law and plenty of case law. The whole thing seems frivolous, and it seems likely that this lawsuit will reach a similar conclusion to the previous one.

Filed Under: antitrust, mms
Companies: at&t, sprint, t-mobile, tracfone, verizon