Congratulations to all Rational Law clients and other John Doe defendants involved with a bittorrent case in the District of New Jersey, including the several cases titled Amselfilm Productions v. Does and Century Media Ltd. v. Does. On Wednesday 10/10/2012 orders were entered in most, if not all, of these cases, severing and dismissing all defendants except Doe #1 and setting heavy burdens for the plaintiffs and their attorneys to carry before they may re-file. Here is a link to one of . . . → Read More: Bittorrent Case Update- New Jersey
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I get a lot of calls and emails from potential clients that begin like this:
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirms Rule 11 sanctions against Evan Stone of Texas.
Copy of the order is here: . . . → Read More: A Bad Day for Evan Stone The EFF reports that Twitter has filed a motion to quash in People of the State of New York v. Malcom Harris, a case where the state prosecutor is attempting to gain access to records of Mr. Harris’ tweets from a 2001 Occupy protest on the Brooklyn bridge.
via TorrentFreak: Judge: An IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Person or BitTorrent Pirate. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a day or two now, but Courthouse News beat me to the punch.
via Courthouse News Service. Now, I’m not sure the obscenity arguments here have merit- that line of reasoning has been tried and rejected before. But the really interesting thing is the procedural situation is totally flipped by this case. In a dec judgment action, the plaintiff (who used to be a Jane Doe) spends $350 to file a case in her home court, and then the burden shifts onto Steele and Prenda and Guardelay and the movie studio. She doesn’t have to prove that she didn’t do it- they have to prove she did. If they can’t prove she did it, she wins. And they will have to pay her costs and attorney’s fees. The complaint itself is interesting (warning, PDF) because it also accuses the porn studio of violating criminal prostitution laws. . . . → Read More: Declaratory Judgment Complaint filed vs. Hard Drive Productions I am amused by the juxtaposition of this article about the Feds taking down domains for video streaming websites with this article about how one of those sites is up and running at a new domain less than 24 hours later. The site operators point out that what they are doing is PERFECTLY LEGAL in the place where they are doing it, and that in the future, the US government agencies behind the takedowns might want to find a more useful and effective way to spend taxpayer dollars. This exact scenario is going to keep happening until the government comes to terms with the fact that the battle is already lost. I don’t expect the content producers to ever admit defeat, but at some point, government policy people will decide to stop tilting at windmills (because it just makes them look silly and ineffective, if for no . . . → Read More: Firstrowsports back online at new domain There is a new order published in 11-cv-01741 in the District of Columbia. It reverses the guarantee of anonymity that Judge Bates extended to John Does in this case (discussed earlier here) before the case was transferred to another judge. It also states that the court will not consider anonymous motions from John Does, and requires all Does who have already filed a motion to either agree to have their name posted on the public docket or withdraw their motion and remain anonymous. Does with motions already filed have until February 2 to send a response to the court. This new development isn’t especially surprising, coming as it does from the DC courts. Dunlap Grubb and Weaver have been very successful in obtaining favorable treatment for their clients at the hands of DC federal judges, at least through the early-discovery stage. The initial order from Judge Bates was an outlier, and that’s why we chose to take note of it here. This order from Judge Facciola is simply a reversion to form. Plaintiff is now required to serve the new order on all of the ISPs it previously sent subpoenas, and then requires those ISPs to forward the order to subscribers. . . . → Read More: Anonymous Motions Blocked By New Judge in Hard Drive Productions 11-cv-01741 Freedom to Tinker has this commentary on the Florida “pure bill of discovery” lawsuits.
This, of course, would be utter lunacy.
So let’s have a short thought experiment: Click-wrap agreements are clearly a valid form of contract. Browse-wrap TOS are considered by many courts to be valid contracts as well, so long as the link to the TOS is not entirely hidden from users. Those terms would presumably be “valid,” so long as I didn’t hide them from you. And so you’d have to send me the check, or I could look at your IP address (which is logged for all visitors) and then report you to the FBI, and they would COME AND ARREST YOU AND CHARGE YOU WITH A FEDERAL FELONY. Utter nonsense. So it can’t work the way DOJ apparently wants to have it. Unless, of course, they are planning only to selectively enforce this power . . . → Read More: DOJ: website TOS violations should be prosecuted |
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