You make a good point, I'd love for their defense to be "But if we release the films when people want to see them a la Mark Cuban, we'll infringe a ridiculous patent filed despite prior art!". Gotta love the US legal system.
Okay, looked it up. "Once again, all of these lawsuits that Hansmeier gets involved in seem to show a fairly similar pattern, looking for scenarios where it will almost always be less of a hassle to just pay off Hansmeier to go away than to challenge the (often questionable) legal claims in court. It's unclear how many of these ADA lawsuits Hansmeier has filed. There are only two in federal court, where they're easy to find, but the latest one was actually filed in Minnesota state court, and was then removed to federal court. For all we know there could be more in Minnesota state court, which are harder to find out about. Either way, Hansmeier really seems like the kind of person who gives lawyers such a bad reputation."
You may be right about that, but I seem to recall reading that wasn't the case (maybe that was in relationship to the class action objector stuff though). IANAL as well, I'll see if I can't find the article I'm thinking of or maybe someone more qualified can weigh in.
You do make a good point, in that ultimately the tragedy of this is that Prenda doesn't have a real client to go after for damages (since they are the client). Hopefully we'll be reading about Malibu Media and the copyright holders of The Company You Keep, Elf Man, etc. being on the losing end of some of these since they have (I think anyway) much more easily verified and seized property/income.
I still think it's good that Mike does these stories though, because Prenda would like nothing more than for this to go away and all three of its principles to take up their next scam a few years down the line. It's also worth remembering that only the Federal stuff is publicly available, so their could very well be a ton of ADA suits and the like we just don't know about ongoing, they're far from dead. It seems like it's mainly Steele's name that has crossed over into mainstream, non-tech knowledge, keeping Duffy and Hansmeier up in the Google searches may just tip off someone on the other end of an ADA or Class Action Objector case.
Thanks for clearing that up, I've heard of people taking up collections for defense funds before so it seemed odd to me that something about crowd sourcing made it inherently different.
I think an interesting question going forward will be whether this scares off other attorneys from crowd sourcing, I really hope not given that these suits have expanded into poor performing movies/music/tv/etc and there are bound to be people who would like to support the falsely accused that fight back. IANAL, but I'm guessing that with this judge's seniority and reputation it would be a bad precedent if he issues sanctions based solely on that.
Can someone clear up for me what exactly Chintella did to deserve possible sanctions? I'm somewhat new to this story but unless it was just some kind of procedural error it seems crazy to me a judge would sanction the defense counsel here unless he said/did something completely out of line considering he's dealing with Prenda here.
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On the post: Yet Another Prenda Gambit Fails: Judge Agrees To Sanctions Against Paul Duffy Over Bogus Defamation Lawsuit
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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131102/23512525109/team-prendas-paul-hansmeier-now-su ing-companies-over-supposed-ada-violations.shtml
On the post: Yet Another Prenda Gambit Fails: Judge Agrees To Sanctions Against Paul Duffy Over Bogus Defamation Lawsuit
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On the post: Yet Another Prenda Gambit Fails: Judge Agrees To Sanctions Against Paul Duffy Over Bogus Defamation Lawsuit
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I still think it's good that Mike does these stories though, because Prenda would like nothing more than for this to go away and all three of its principles to take up their next scam a few years down the line. It's also worth remembering that only the Federal stuff is publicly available, so their could very well be a ton of ADA suits and the like we just don't know about ongoing, they're far from dead. It seems like it's mainly Steele's name that has crossed over into mainstream, non-tech knowledge, keeping Duffy and Hansmeier up in the Google searches may just tip off someone on the other end of an ADA or Class Action Objector case.
On the post: Yet Another Court Not Happy With A Prenda Lawyer
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I think an interesting question going forward will be whether this scares off other attorneys from crowd sourcing, I really hope not given that these suits have expanded into poor performing movies/music/tv/etc and there are bound to be people who would like to support the falsely accused that fight back. IANAL, but I'm guessing that with this judge's seniority and reputation it would be a bad precedent if he issues sanctions based solely on that.
On the post: Yet Another Court Not Happy With A Prenda Lawyer
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