US Copyright Group Drops A Bunch Of Cases… But Will It Refile?
from the waiting-game dept
There was some news last week about copyright trolls, US Copyright Group (really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver), dropping thousands of lawsuits it had filed against people for file sharing. While some are declaring victory, I’d wait and see. It may simply be setting up to refile those lawsuits in the proper venues, as the firm has done in the past. It would be nice if USCG and the various studios had realized that this was a dead end strategy, but I find that unlikely…
Filed Under: copyright, lawsuits, pre-settlement
Companies: dunlap grubb & weaver, us copyright group
Comments on “US Copyright Group Drops A Bunch Of Cases… But Will It Refile?”
Of course they will refile, they also are risking being hacked and having their firms documents splashed on the internet, which could be much more damaging, since the other side also have the capabilities to tap into their communications channels.
This will be fun to watch.
It will certainly cost them a lot more for separate cases which they may lose. As to the plaintives in this case who are they hardly universal pictures never heard of them.
Started in Germany
I believe that this scam started in Germany (where it may have had some success) then moved to the UK – where it has had rather less, and now appears to be dead. The US legal system seems to be even more resistant to it than the UK. I predict that it is on its last legs.
Depends on PIracy
Mike is often accused (incorrectly) of backing business models that “depend on piracy”. Of course this is wrong – the models he suggest do not depend on piracy – they are simply insensitive do it (i.e. they do not depend on the absence of piracy).
In contrast the US copyright group/ ACS law business model absolutely does depend on piracy – strange that our regular critics here have never complained about it.
Re: Depends on PIracy
do we now know where the trolls live?
Re: Re: Depends on PIracy
You give new meaning to the word pointless.
Re: Depends on PIracy
“Mike is often accused (incorrectly) of backing business models that “depend on piracy”. Of course this is wrong – the models he suggest do not depend on piracy – they are simply insensitive do it (i.e. they do not depend on the absence of piracy).”
You hit the nail on the head. The arguments made by the entertainment industry are ridiculous in the extreme. All you have to do is apply their arguments to other industries. Is each stolen car or shoplifted candy bar a ‘lost sale’? Of course not. I’d like to see Ford to start going after car thieves.
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Grrrrr, above comment is mine…
Re: Re: Depends on PIracy
erm haven’t we been trying to make the distinction between physical goods and non physical goods? Why would Ford bother going after somebody who stole a customers car, the car has already been paid for once and can only be resold, not replicated for nothing and distributed, else you could be sure Ford would be going after people very quickly! Analogy is extremely flawed.
Re: Re: Re: Depends on PIracy
Is it? That’s the entire argument of the *AAs. They don’t even want you to resell.
Re: Re: Re: Depends on PIracy
Yes the analogy is flawed. I knew that when I wrote it. However, the entertainment industry refuses to accept it. If they are going to equate filesharing with theft, then by their logic, the rest of the rules should apply too, hence the analogy.
Re: Re: Re: Depends on PIracy
So Ford has never pursued people claiming to own customers pictures of their personal cars?
BTW the answer is yes they have.
The flawed thought is…
If someone downloaded it = they would have purchased it if not for those meddling kids.
The studios and lawyers often say downloading a copy is theft, and try to evoke the emotional response in the audience that something tangible has been stolen.
I can press control+c and control+v a buncha of times, and copies of the movie do not disappear from the studio warehouse.
The focus of this type of litigation was merely to extract money they feel they should have gotten.
Someone who downloads a film, often watches it once and then deletes it.
They are not, in the majority, producing knock off copies of the movies to be sold everywhere to actively deprive the studios of income.
They are not supporting terrorism or drug running.
Often it is response of people fed up with the imposed scarcity of the product, designed to keep a business model going ignoring the customers desires in the equation.
Now if not for the studios imposing silly rules about when things are available to rent or purchase, are they not really out whatever they get from a rental?
And then they decided to create special “Rental” versions of the movies and not be upfront about that.
They create crappy subtitles to save a few bucks and then scream how a fan made set of subtitles is killing them.
They create menus designed to annoy, and can not see annoying people who actually paid you is the dumbest thing ever.
There are the collectors who buy the movies or TV shows they like and then download copies to avoid bad subtitles, or the hassle of trying to format shift it so they can enjoy it where they want.
There are the Studios who make truly crappy releases of properties they own, and then complain it is piracy that killed the sales not their own inept methods.
But we have a law, so we are owed trillions of made up dollars.
Rather than wasting time and money on trying to outwit the public, why not invest some of that time and effort into finding out what people really want and deliver that.
You will never stop piracy, despite the promises of the lawyers, researchers, elected officals, and paid advisers.
Maybe just maybe it is time to see what the market wants, and move towards that.
If the awards in these cases was the retail cost of the product, do you think there would be a cottage industry trying to pursue these claims?
Re: Re: Re: Depends on PIracy
Like the rolls of film used in the east cost that saw Mr. Edison try to corner the market with patents making the film makers move all to the west cost and produce their own roll of films?
You can dance around it all you like, but as a legal strategy, they are doing it right.
Start out with a big case, find out where some of the people are located, and then refile in those areas to keep the jurisdiction right.
Mike, the only dead end strategy is throwing up your hands and embracing piracy. That is like swallowing a cyanide pill.
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“Mike, the only dead end strategy is throwing up your hands and embracing piracy. That is like swallowing a cyanide pill.”
Is this what the “death throes” of an industry look like? Interesting that they should lash out at the people they are trying to win over. The “pirates” are obvioulsy media junkies to the extreme, so instead of “feeding” the habit and making money, they are trying to put them in jail or bankrupt them. I feel I am missing something here…….
It’s like the fishermen analogy … but in this case were not feeding him, and were not teaching him to fish, were just running him down with a mac truck…..
Re: Heh...
I was about to say I was surprised you didn’t make an appearance in this thread…
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It is an ill-conceived strategy.
They want to use the law, but have taken every step to lower the costs, and turn it into a protection racket.
They have no hope of actually taking the thousands of people they accuse to court. They did hope that people would just pay them to make it go away.
They have lied to the courts and misrepresented the facts of the cases. They claim to be unable to tell where these people are located, which is false. They claim to have proof the named party is a fault, which is false. They claim the court is the proper venue based on the idea the accused might have been in DC at some point.
They are not the shining knights of copyright protection that the astroturfers would have you believe.
They use a system they refuse to expose to the light of day, because it would reveal the emperor has no pants.
And no one suggests they they embrace piracy, but maybe if they attempted to spend some and time money to find out the reasoning they could address those issues in failing to meet the market demands.
Because honestly if you expected to win $150,000 accepting $3000 to avoid the “hassle” of the trial shows that this is about extracting money, not ending piracy.
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They want to use the law, but have taken every step to lower the costs, and turn it into a protection racket.
No, not at all. I think you are accepting the standard “techdirt line” here without thinking through to the end.
What do you think it would cost to actually prosecute a full on copyright violation case from one end to the other? I am guessing a rights holder go easily go through $50,000 in legal fees without trying. You know, file the case, discovery against the ISP, withdrawing the case when it turns out the end user is in another state, re-file, more discovery, move to court, the court case, the judgement, the appeal, the appeal of the appeal, and so on. In a blink you have spent $50k.
The person you are suing? Probably isn’t worth $5k. Even armed with a full value, full price judgement (and legal fees) of say $175,000 total, the chance of collecting the money is almost nil. Even if the settlement is for $1 plus legal fees, you are still in the hole.
The answer is to try to group the causes together, so that the court costs are spread over a large number of violators. Offer the violators settlement terms up front that are significantly lower than the costs to go to court, and hope to call it a day right there.
The legal system does not at this point provide a simple system to file copyright violation cases. Everything has to be done on the “grand scale”, which means it is expensive as hell. Pirating is cheap, easy and fast, prosecuting it is expensive and slow.
Yet rights holders have little choice. The other option is to stop producing content altogether and give up, as the “business models” out there that embrace piracy just don’t seem to be workable in the long run.
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So throwing money down a rathole of litigation is your idea of profit generation?
Wow.
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The legal system does not at this point provide a simple system to file copyright violation cases. Everything has to be done on the “grand scale”, which means it is expensive as hell. Pirating is cheap, easy and fast, prosecuting it is expensive and slow.
The nub of the problem is that copyright itself is predicated on the obsolete theory that copying can only be done “on the grand scale”. Because that is no longer true copyright itself is now out of date.
However the AC you reply to is quite right – and in fact you don’t disagree with him on this point. The strategy is to try to scare people into settling out of court in order to save your own costs. That is simply an abuse of the law – and judges in the UK and the US have seen it as such.
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Yet rights holders have little choice. The other option is to stop producing content altogether and give up, as the “business models” out there that embrace piracy just don’t seem to be workable in the long run.
If you can’t see a way to make money then you are right to give up. That will leave the field clear for those who can.
You are naive if you think that others will not find a way to fill the void. Personally I suspect that you do realise this – and it is your worst nightmare.
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Richard, I understand it perfectly. But I am not willing to trade the Hollywood blockbuster films that I enjoy for another playing of “Sita Sings the (copyright) blues”. I don’t deny for a second that people would still make movies. They would however, make them with much lower standards and much lower cost structures because the potential return drops as a result of the risk of piracy in the marketplace.
If there wasn’t some push back, some legal action, I think the current level of piracy would be even high. Already the recorded music industry has dropped by 2/3 from it’s peak, and it won’t be long before most people get their music from pirate sites. Movies are a little slower (because the file sizes are larger), but it won’t be long.
The quality of what you get shifts dramatically when nobody is paying the freight.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
Funny these were my ideals before TechDirt.
Copyright wasn’t meant to bludgeon people who were sharing what they liked but instead punish those who made their own copies and sold them creating profits.
USCG is trying to be the white knight with clean hands out of all the the shakedown firms, but considering they formed another entity to take on the risk, they knew it could blow up on them.
Then you have Evan Stone and violating the basic rules they teach you in law school, and his 2 man operation of shakedowns.
Then you have Steele, who can’t seem to catch a break because he can not get the courts to alter the rules to suit him.
And yes the poor Hollywood Movie Industry and its record 9 Billion dollar year… yeah their sales are just gutted. Mind you the numbers might be down in the same manner the final report for the Harry Potter film showed it LOST money in the end. They managed to pull out all of the profits and stick all of the losses into 1 production company.
And Music, yes CD sales are down. BECAUSE NO ONE IS WILLING ANY LONGER TO PURCHASE THE SWILL THEY FILL THE DISCS OUT WITH. What is the current rate of new CD players being produced now? Oh that is correct… those are down to, because the public has moved onto MP3 and other formats. And digital sales are growing, but they lament the death of CDs. Mainly because they no longer get to extract more from each artists income to pay for the cover, jewel case, easy open wrapper and anything else they can tack on. The artists now have solid numbers to look at not crunched by the labels accounting department, that show what is actually being sold.
Mind you almost all of these numbers are not grounded in factual information, but in FUD spread by the **AA’s screaming the world is out to get them and they support terrorism.
Piracy should only be used to label those that take the movie and create and sell copies. That is actual piracy they are depriving the studio of their income from selling the same object.
People using P2P networks and sharing the files are rarely doing it to make money, but more so to share things they enjoy with others.
Rather than try to figure out why people would go through the hassle of using P2P, they assume they are all just “pirates” out to sink the ship rather than customers frustrated with a system that punishes the fans at every chance.
If the losses were as real as you and the other astroturfers would have us believe, at least one of the studios would have collapsed by now.
Oh and taking cheap shots at “Sita Sings the Blues”, just makes you look more moronic and pissy that someone was able to do something Hollywood claims is impossible.
Oh and what the legal wrangling has managed to cause is more people using VPN and Proxy services moving them well outside of what the lawyers can penetrate in seeking to extract any portion of the trillions “piracy” supposedly costs.
“The answer is to try to group the causes together, so that the court costs are spread over a large number of violators. Offer the violators settlement terms up front that are significantly lower than the costs to go to court, and hope to call it a day right there. “
Funny how you call the violators, considering the sheer number of people the RIAA went after who were infact innocent. How several of the USCG defendants can barely work email but you’d like them to be seen as these super pirates siphoning millions out of a bank somewhere. And IP address leads you to who pays for the account, not from the “violator”. But not one of these shakedown firms take that into consideration. We KNOW you did it, and pay us or else. Some of the settlement agreements go so far to claim that even if you were unaware of it, your still responsible.
The problem is the MPAA hasn’t been able to create commando teams like FACT and BRIEN in the US to have them botch case after case. So the litigation is being done to support the idea we are loosing so much money, we need new laws and we need others to pay to protect our works.
And again I point out that if they got around to looking at what the customers really want instead of we’ve done it this way since we claimed the VCR would be the Boston Strangler, they might manage to change the business model and see a decrease in people getting their movies in “unauthorized” ways.
Now hit me with your best shill shot of I just want them to give it away for free, it’ll let me know I’m doing something right.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
“Already the recorded music industry has dropped by 2/3 from it’s peak”
If you mean “profits ‘earned’ by the the RIAA” then, maybe, but definitely Citation Needed. A quick Google search gives this: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=history+of+number+of+recorded+songs&hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS268&prmd=ivns&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=3JWHTb3vCMSJrQH237mzBg&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=13&ved=0CEwQ5wIwDA
I don’t see any significant reduction from this info. I’d REALLY like to know where you claim the 2/3s number came from. I think it might be a little dirty from pulling it from your ass….
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
Already the recorded music industry has dropped by 2/3 from it’s peak, and it won’t be long before most people get their music from pirate sites.
I will have to politely disagree that the record industry is where it is because of piracy. While piracy can be called a factor, it’s hardly the sling that’s slaying Goliath.
It is where it is because the industry as a whole can best be compared to an ogre. Irritable, greedy, overly large, unwieldy, and more likely to attack anything that wanders too close to it than think about how it can benefit them.
While I’m not condoning piracy as a means of “sticking it to the man”, the fact that their staunch refusal in regards to adapting or capitalizing on new technologies and instead trying to recreate the glory days when they had free run of anything remotely considered music -like an old shut-in who’s most advanced piece of technology in their house is a transistor radio(don’t tell me you haven’t met those people)- is what is causing their business to collapse, not piracy.
They’ve been crying the deathknell about everything that has come out since the 1960s, but this time technology has actually advanced to the point where people can actually make music without the recording industry, and that’s why they’re suffering now. Now that they can no longer strangle anything that dares do something music-related without them, people are willing to work with them less and less.
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But I am not willing to trade the Hollywood blockbuster films that I enjoy for another playing of “Sita Sings the (copyright)
If there are enough people like you then you can organise yourselves on kickstarter and fund the blockbusters. If there aren’t then they won’t get made – and that would be the right thing to happen. What mustn’t happen is for the rest of us to be taxed to pay for the blockbusters we don’t want.
In short – if enough people really want these films then they will pay for them voluntarily. The poeple who pirate and never pay obviously aren’t keen enough on the films to make sure they keep getting made. Trying to force them to pay won’t work – since they always have the option of ignoring the content – and if you turn them against you that is what they will do.
I personally will never go back to the cinema until those ridiculous and offensive copyright warnings are removed.
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You can dance around it all you like, but as a legal strategy, they are doing it right.
Yeah – like ACS law in the UK – that worked out just fine didn’t it?
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Mike, the only dead end strategy is throwing up your hands and embracing piracy. That is like swallowing a cyanide pill.
So accepting reality is like swallowing a cyanide pill?
No – continuing to keep your head in the sand is that.
In any case US copyright Group is an organisation that is intending to monetise piracy (in a rather nasty way). So their business model is in fact more than embracing piracy – it absolutely relies upon it.
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“That is like swallowing a cyanide pill.”
It’s more like taking the red pill: accepting reality and the responsibilities it brings.
This could mean a number of things.
The ship is sinking and they want out before any blowback happens.
They are going to refile..which may be likely but I doubt that refiling them all in their thousands would be a good financial move. The cost in research and asset analysis to see which targets would be worth filing against would be high as would the cost to their business model if they start losing cases.
Could this also be associted with the suit filed against DG&W? Better to make it all look “above board” before answering charges of racketeering.
They are going to refile..which may be likely but I doubt that refiling them all in their thousands would be a good financial move. The cost in research and asset analysis to see which targets would be worth filing against would be high as would the cost to their business model if they start losing cases.
Let’s also not forget the price that they will have to pay to hire local counsel for every one of those states. Imagine paying for all of those teams of lawyers for every case in every state that they don’t have license to practice in? No doubt it would be a huge cut into their profit margin.
And lets not forget that the big “THEY ARE REFILING” stories ammount to a small handful of named defendants. Im betting that was purely a strategic move to keep on scaring people into settling. There sure hasnt been tens, let alone hundreds or thousands of named cases filed.
As an aside, I would also be FAR more inclined to fight a case refiled close to my home vs hundreds of miles away. The cost over time of travel/lodging to DC to fight it Pro Se would alone probably not be worth it compared to 1-2 K to make it go away.
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except the only filing needed in that case is a challenge of personal jurisdiction.
They had no intentions of filing any named cases, just the mere threats in their “settlement” letters, which really are a step up from – Its a nice house it would be a shame if anything happened to it.
The settlement letters all follow a standard formula of we can prove it 100% that YOU DID IT, and if you didn’t your still responsible. Now pay us X, take time to think about it and we want an extra $1000.
There was always the chance they would take someone to court, and that would be the person who answered the letter and annoyed them and made some sort of admission. (see LMH/CF suing a guy, his unicorn, and a leprechaun)
It is all a big gamble to scare someone into settling, or using their admission of guilt to keep the sheeple scared. If they had to argue a case on the merits, it would quickly fall apart.
They would fight having to expose how the propriety tracking system works, yet this is the basis for all of their claims.
Evidence gathered by unknown methodology with no review of the system by any independent experts, and we are to accept that the people with a stake of up to 80% of any award will be completely honest.
They aren’t even targeting the most prolific of downloaders, they’ve long since moved on to other methods of downloading where they don’t have to share back, where their traffic is encrypted and the servers they log in to and downlod from have their logs scrubbed every 120 minutes.
Correct me if I’m not understanding this correctly, but these dropped cases do nothing to discourage USGC or any other such group from continuing to send out settlement letters to thousand of people and rake in money that way, right? So they get shot down from moving on to the next level with those who refuse to settle – enough people *do* settle that it is worth it to continue that initial part of the plan, over and over again. As long as judges keep allowing initial discovery to proceed and subpoenas to be issued to ISPs to identify thousands of John Does, this scheme still makes lots of money. Why would they stop? Why isn’t anyone (EFF, Public Citizen, attorney for a Doe) arguing against the extortive nature of that first level of the process?
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Because up until recently the Judges have not considered the Does rights. The wheels started to come off around the time Evan Stone was faced with EFF and Public Citizen appearing for the Does in a TX court. While they were drafting their motions in the case they were contacted by one of the Does, who was unaware he had representation in EFF/Public Citizen because he had gotten notice that a subpoena had been served on his ISP demanding his details. Stone proceeded to be unavailable by phone, resulting in a letter to the Judge demanding sanctions and that the case be halted and anything he had been given being taken. Stone responded by dropping the case blaming the court for letting the pirate loving EFF/Public Citizen people to screw it all up.
I am sure they will opt to change 1 line in the standard settlement agreement that makes reference to an open case against them where they are about to be named. Heck Steele warned people he had up to 2 years to pursue them and they were not to make any changes to their computers in that timeframe. Shame they get altered at every boot.
The problem now is that it is becoming more common for people to not immediately panic upon getting an ISP notice, or even a settlement letter. There is no major reported case in the media to keep them afraid. LMH/CF had created that level of fear for their filings, and offered up 2 amnesty programs (that provided no real protection) and kept in the press going from 35k to 40k ip addresses they were going to file against. As of now, despite Randazza’s claim of targeting South Florida first, no cases have been filed in this arena. They do have a case with a copyright component, but that appears to be from people exploiting a flaw in the CF system and gaining unpaid access to material and an additional charge of copyright infringement for having done so.
So to sum it up, it will take 2 years or a massive failure in the courts to end these shakedowns. They are slowly down currently merely because most Judges are finding the cases improperly joined as a cost savings rather than because they all worked in concert to commit the crime.
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Correct me if I’m not understanding this correctly, but these dropped cases do nothing to discourage USGC or any other such group from continuing to send out settlement letters to thousand of people and rake in money that way, right? So they get shot down from moving on to the next level with those who refuse to settle – enough people *do* settle that it is worth it to continue that initial part of the plan, over and over again. As long as judges keep allowing initial discovery to proceed and subpoenas to be issued to ISPs to identify thousands of John Does, this scheme still makes lots of money. Why would they stop? Why isn’t anyone (EFF, Public Citizen, attorney for a Doe) arguing against the extortive nature of that first level of the process?
Exactly. As long as the judges don’t stomp on the case immediately upon filing, as long as it gets to discovery, this tactic will remain viable as long as even one person is scared into paying. The first person pays for the filing fee and the time spent to get to discovery. The rest are pure, 100% profit that nearly entirely goes directly into the pockets of the attorneys(with a pittance going to the copyright holder).
They don’t have to pursue anyone(in fact, the costs associated with that would completely mitigate their settlement harvest profits, which is one of the main reasons that they are hesitant to do so) past the settlement phase. Just getting there is more than enough to ensure their chances as “free” money.
You want to talk about “getting something for nothing”? It’s not the “pirates” that you should be looking at in that regard.
I can one speak of one household, but the biggest problem with this is that they are accusing people that are 100% innocent. I remeber the day and time they are claiming someone illegally downloaded a movie vividly and it did not happen. I may have to end up paying these crooks thousands to settle, since I probally couldn’t afford a trial. And no one in this home downloaded that movie when they claim it was.
WEll guess what this whole thing took me to a Phych Ward for 6 days, Internet bill was in my name. couldnt cope with the pressure and threating letter. Cant even see a lawyer on tv now without flipping out. Lost my mind over this, now on depression anxiety pills. Seeing therapist now. Never thought something could get to me and break my mind or break me down like it did. but it did. Wonder if this law group wishes to pay my Mental bill in March and my meds. I do not like them. Do not like them one bit for causing this break down.
its amazing at this day and age that our Gov will allow people like this to just pull IP adrressses out of a hat and blackmail people for thousands. I may just stop using the internet until these kind of things are brought under control
I was just checking the docket for the Maverick Case @:
http://archive.recapthelaw.org/dcd/141583/
and discovered that I was one of the people dismissed without prejudice on 15 April 2011.
http://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.dcd.141583/gov.uscourts.dcd.141583.97.0.pdf
However I just received DGW?s demand letter today and it?s dated 26 April 2011. They are trying to scam me into paying on a case they dismissed already?
Is that legal?
Should I notify the judge?
Should I just leave well enough alone???
What a bunch of scam artists!!!