Folks in respects the disgraced Evan Stone is last year’s news but seeing as how the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just bitch slapped his sorry ass with sanctions for conduct befitting a Goatherder I thought I’d highlight Stone and the legal shithouse from which he slithered beginning with this AP story from yesterday:
It’s a common tactic for pornography producers trying to protect their product from online piracy: They sue unknown “John Does” who illegally download movies, then go to Internet providers to learn their true identities and collect.
Hundreds of porn companies have filed thousands of lawsuits across the country in recent years. Often, representatives will call up the defendants, offering quick settlements of $1,000 or $5,000 to avoid facing $150,000 claims and the embarrassment of being publicly outed.
Some defendants in the lawsuits are pushing back, arguing that they’re being squeezed for quick settlements even when they claim to have never downloaded anything.
A Kentucky woman, Jennifer Barker, is suing the five companies that targeted her and is seeking class-action status to hold the companies accountable for harassing calls for settlements.
The approach uses assumptions for which the US courts harbor increasing dubiety the main one being an IP address can be directly associated with a specific person as I continue:
Barker’s attorney, Ken Henry of Louisville, who filed the lawsuit, estimated 500,000 people have been sued or gotten calls from representatives of the companies since 2007.
“Nobody wants their name associated with downloading porn … “ Henry said, giving the example of a typically graphic movie title.
Among those being sued were 57-year-old Josip Gotvald, a Croatian immigrant living in Tempe, Ariz. When Gotvald received a notice that he defaulted and lost a copyright lawsuit, he didn’t know what it meant and hadn’t ever heard of the company suing him, Raw Films, or the film he was accused of downloading, “Raw Rescue.”
“I have never used a computer, much less used one to download a movie,” Gotvald wrote in an affidavit.
Henry and other critics call the lawsuits “copyright trolls,” a tactic used to extract quick cash settlements from people who have no connection to any downloaded movie but want to avoid having their names associated with porn.
Enter shithouse lawyers like Stone that can’t even copywrite troll without cutting corners as he first entered into the public’s consciousness last year when Judge David Godbey hit Stone with severe sanctions for issuing subpoenas to Internet Service Providers on behalf of his porn company client without first obtaining leave of the court. If all this sounds familiar rest assured it is as shithouse lawyering is alive and well across the 5th Circuit but Stone’s luck ran out today as the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dispatched him in a manner eerily reminiscent of Debbie when she brought the entire city of Dallas to heel.
In any event folks, Stone’s money shot is certain to cause tongues to wag in the intellectual legal community as we’ll be hearing more on the subject of copywrite trolling down the line here at Slabbed.
sop