Mass Infringement Lawyer Complains About Too Many People Challenging His Lawsuits

Copyright

from the costing-money dept

Last week TorrentFreak had a post about a filing in one of many porn-related mass infringement lawsuits by a lawyer representing K-Beech. TorrentFreak’s post focused on the fact that the lawyer, James White, admitted that it was dropping certain types of people from its lawsuits, such as undercover cops, military personnel and politicians. That certainly reflects the double standard we’ve seen elsewhere.

But other parts of the same filing may be even more interesting. Xbiz picked up on the part where White whines about all the defendants he sued filing identical “kit” motions in response to getting sued… because it’s too expensive for White to respond to each one. Most of these are motions to sever, noting that it was improper to join so many totally and completely unrelated defendants into a single case. So far, most of the courts presented with such cases have agreed to dump most of the defendants as unrelated, but White makes it out like this is some crazy concept because the defendants dare to file boilerplate/copy-and-paste documents:

Most of these motions, however, are filed by pro se litigants and cut and pasted from BitTorrent defense kits or otherwise copied…

[….] These motions are expensive to defend against. Indeed, many such motions intentionally raise issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter before the court or matter which no court has ever held justify the motion. Consequently, Plaintiff has to spend substantial resources arguing against irrelevancies and abstractions.

It kind of makes you wonder how anyone doing what White is doing could file such a thing with a straight face. His entire legal campaign depends on making his legal efforts “expensive to defend against,” to try to pressure people into settling up rather than fighting. In fact, White seems to try to twist this abuse of the court system to force settlement in his own favor, claiming that the court should want more settlements, and thus it should encourage random joinder, because it makes White’s costs lower, meaning he can allow lower settlement deals:

Increasing the costs associated with this litigation by forcing Plaintiffs to file individual suits would only increase the settlement demands and make settlements less probable.

If I understand this logic properly, it suggests that the courts should prefer more mass shakedown lawsuits, because it’ll mean more settlements rather than court. But, of course, that leaves out the idea that many of the defendants might just be innocent.

Filed Under: copyright, infringement, joinder, lawsuits