Judge In US Copyright Group Case Seems Skeptical Of Lumping All Those Lawsuits Into One
from the convince-me dept
Following the filing from the EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU questioning US Copyright Group’s (really law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver) decision to lump together thousands upon thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits into a single lawsuit, it sounds like the judge in the case is quite skeptical of the strategy. She’s demanding that US Copyright Group explain in writing why she shouldn’t throw out all but one of the John Doe defendants for “misjoinder.”
A brief entry in the official court docket lays out the order. “MINUTE ORDER requiring Plaintiff to show cause in writing no later than June 21, 2010 why Doe Defendants 2 through 2000 should not be dismissed for misjoinder under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20,” wrote the judge in The Steam Experiment case. The same order was repeated in a separate case targeting 4,577 users alleged to have shared the film Far Cry.
Considering that USCG has been making the argument that ISPs who don’t hand over the names of the accused are guilty of inducing infringement, I can’t wait to see the legal response. In the meantime, though, it’s good that the judge appears to be aware that this strategy is highly questionable.
Filed Under: copyright, joinder, lawsuits, misjoinder
Companies: us copyright group
Comments on “Judge In US Copyright Group Case Seems Skeptical Of Lumping All Those Lawsuits Into One”
actually, she doesnt appear skeptical, she is just asking for their legal reasoning to put them together. if you want to run 5000 does at the same time, there needs to be some connection.
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Oooh! They’re all named ‘John Doe’
Obviously it’s some sort of crime family…
; P
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you cant say that in a doe-mocracy.
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Doh.. If she wasn’t being skeptical, she wouldn’t have questioned the reasoning in the first place — she’d just taken it for granted.
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“there needs to be some connection“
Considering they downloaded an Uwe Boll movie, they all have excruciating bad taste in movies.
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Yeah. Almost worth setting aside the constitution so we can throw them in the clink for wanting to see that awful waste of film.
But not really.
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“But not really.“
But it’s pretty darn close.
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Ding!
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After reading the entire story and links, she appears quite skeptical to me!
new names for democrcy
larry-darrlyanddarrylocracy
MO-ocracy
curlyocracy
stoogocracy
pinkynbrainocracy
I guess Uwe Boll figures if he isn’t going to make any money at the box office with his crappy films then he’ll make it up in lawsuits. I can’t believe even 4,577 people downloaded Far Cry.
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Proof that piracy does not represent monetary value!
I thought that Far Cry was a video game not a movie.
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It was a good video game that was made into a terrible film.
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This same guy keeps making awful video game movies.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0093051/
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Wow! Jessica Simpson as Metroid…this film has no chance…no chance whatsoever.
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FTFY
The One
That would suck to be the one guy.
For added reading
You should see the Ars Technica report about the accused P2P users themselves:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/songs-of-innocence.ars
Here’s where the pirates be human and falsely claimed by Davy Jones.
YAARGH!
The real reason
These lawyers, aside from being money “Grubb”ing whores, are probably interested in jobs with the Obama administration.
Hurt Locker Hypocracy
Strange that the Hurt Locker people are being sued by the person on whom the movie was based on. Apparently he wasn’t paid anything for his story. So he sued them in a Delaware court and now the defendants are telling the court that none of them live in Delaware and the suit should be moved to California where they live.
It seems though that they have no problem suing people in DC where practically none of their down loaders live.
Justice……what a joke. USA has the best justice money can buy.