One interesting tidbit to come out of the MPAA and RealNetworks suing each other over Real's DVD backup software: the lawyers for the MPAA who presided over the press conference announcing the lawsuit asked the press not to identify them. This is bizarre. What sort of spokesperson won't allow themselves to be identified? And why would the MPAA's lawyers do that? More importantly, why would the press oblige?

One of the results of the word processing era is just how easy it is to simply cut-and-paste things, and perhaps no profession has made more use of this than lawyers. We've seen it where lawyers include the name of the wrong defendant in a lawsuit, for example. Now, a court in the UK has slammed some lawyers for practicing boilerplate cut & paste lawyering, noting that a drafted contract was so meaningless at points that it's clear the lawyer who drafted it had no idea what parts of it were talking about. The court noted "malapropisms, poor uses of terms and drafting errors" all of which "made interpretation of the agreement difficult."

In fact, it was so extreme that the judge actually looked to figure out what was most likely meant between the two original parties, rather than what the actual contract says. This is pretty rare, as most courts tend to default to the actual text of a contract, rather trying to get into what was meant, as that opens up all sorts of questions. Yet, in this case, what was actually in the contract was apparently so terribly written that the court decided to go in the other direction.

For a while now, we've been covering the lawsuits surrounding "AutoAdmit." If you haven't been paying attention, AutoAdmit is a message board system used by law school students, many of whom apparently used it to be what, at best, might be called juvenile jerks. For example, there were certain threads insulting various female law students (in incredibly crude terms), which those students insisted cost them jobs. This point is rather difficult to prove -- because there are many reasons why the women might not have been able to get jobs, and any firm that won't hire someone because of juvenile messages on a message board probably isn't worth working for (also, a few months back, someone sent us some evidence that one of the women actually had gotten a job at a law firm, despite her complaints of not being able to).

However, since we're dealing with a bunch of law students and lawyers, it wasn't long before the lawsuits began flying. First, the women filed lawsuits against the message board, various anonymous posters and an administrator of the message board. Of course, the administrator pointed out (correctly) that he's clearly protected, and eventually he was dropped from the lawsuit -- but not before he lost his job. So, of course, he sued back for the wrongfully targeted lawsuit against him. Quite a mess.

Wired News is running an update on the case, where it reveals that one of the anonymous law students who made the juvenile comments has now been identified to the women filing the lawsuit, meaning that he won't be anonymous much longer. This is a bit surprising, since we've seen a series of lawsuits lately that US courts believe it's important to protect anonymity, even in cases where the content in question is "unquestionably offensive and demeaning."

However, what's more interesting, is the rest of the article from Wired, where it explores the "Pandora's Box" this case has opened up concerning a bunch of issues involving free speech, anonymity and the limits of both. And, of course, since we have a bunch of lawyers involved, there's one downright scary suggestion: create a DMCA-like law that allows someone to demand a takedown of content they find defamatory. If you thought false DMCA takedowns were a bit much, can you imagine how many such defamation takedown's would be sent on a regular basis? As we've seen time and time again, many people (falsely) assume that any content they don't like is defamatory, and already send cease-and-desist letters at the drop of a hat. If you added a notice-and-takedown provision, this would be abused to no end.

But, in the end, as the article notes, it's unclear what good any of this has done. The lawsuit is wasting a lot of people's times, and is doing a lot more to harm various reputations than the original thread ever really did. Yes, it was offensive, demeaning, juvenile and idiotic to some extent. But, opting to file a lawsuit almost seems guaranteed to make the situation a lot worse -- and, frankly, seems to do a lot more damage to the law students suing, than any random obviously childish thread on an open message board would ever do.

We've covered the concept of SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suits plenty of times before. These are bogus lawsuits filed to try to bully a critic into shutting up. In one such case, involving an incredibly broad subpoena against a librarian blogger compiling information on the potential link between mercury and autism, a magistrate judge has seriously smacked down the lawyer who filed the subpoena. The blogger had merely published on her blog information about the fees the lawyer in question had received. In response, the lawyer subpoenaed a ridiculous amount of information from her: "all documents pertaining to the setup, financing, running, research, maintaining" of the blog, "including communications with representatives of the federal government, the pharmaceutical industry, advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, political action groups, profit or non-profit entities, journals, editorial boards, scientific boards, academic boards, medical licensing boards, any 'religious groups (Muslim or otherwise), or individuals with religious affiliations,' and any other 'concerned individuals.'"

The judge quashed the subpoena quickly, but has now hit back really hard on the lawyer, Clifford Shoemaker, for filing it in the first place:

Shoemaker has not offered a shred of evidence to support his speculations. He has, he says, had his suspicions aroused because she has so much information. Clearly he is unfamiliar with the extent of the information which a highly-competent librarian like Ms. Seidel can, and did, accumulate. If Shoemaker wanted to know if Ms. Seidel was in part supported by or provided information by Bayer, he could have inquired of Bayer or limited the Seidel subpoena to that information. Instead he issued the subpoena calling for production of documents and a deposition on the day before he stipulated to dismiss the underlying suit with prejudice. His failure to withdraw the subpoena when he clearly knew that suit was over is telling about his motives. His efforts to vilify and demean Ms. Seidel are unwarranted and unseemly....

I find that Clifford Shoemaker violated Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b)(1) and Rule 45(c)(1).... The 11(b)(1) violation may also violate Virginia's Rules of Professional Conduct .... Clifford J. Shoemaker’s action is an abuse of legal process, a waste of judicial resources and an unnecessary waste of the time and expense to the purported deponent.

The Clerk of Court is directed to forward a certified copy of this order, the motion to quash, the show cause order, and the response of Shoemaker and Seidel to the appropriate professional conduct committee of the Virginia State Bar in order that it may be made aware of Clifford J. Shoemaker's conduct and so that those authorities may take whatever action they deem appropriate.

As a sanction from this court, Clifford J. Shoemaker is ordered to attend within three months, a continuing legal education program on ethics and on the discovery rules in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He is ordered to file a certification of completion of the programs.

Now that's a smackdown.

Well, it's a mistake plenty of folks are bound to make eventually, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. Joe Mullin has a short post about a big time patent law firm that has launched two recent patent lawsuits over the same basic patents held by a patent holding firm. The only problem? In filing the second lawsuit, it appears that the patent attorneys used cut & paste from the first lawsuit, but didn't use search & replace to get rid of the name of the original defendant. Hopefully, the patent holder didn't pay too much for the cost of filing that second lawsuit.

On Tuesday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch took a straw poll on Twitter and decided to set up a screening of the new movie Iron Man, based on the comic. By Wednesday morning the details were set. He had rented out the Metreon by calling the "Group Sales" phone number on the Iron Man website, and paid for 600 seats for the showing. He posted the info to his blog, and asked people to pay $1 per seat in order to hold the spot (and to avoid no-shows). All this was perfectly reasonable. And then... a lawyer from Marvel Comics sent Arrington a threatening cease-and-desist letter demanding that he pull down the information about the show, claiming that Arrington wasn't authorized to set up such a showing. Again, the whole thing was arranged by Arrington by calling the "Group Sales" line on the Iron Man website. All of the tickets were paid for. It's hard to see what Marvel can possibly be complaining about. Also, I know for a fact that Arrington's event is hardly the only such event... because I got invited to a different one (also tomorrow, though at a different time and location and organized by a different group) and have a ticket on my desk for the show.

As a guess, perhaps Marvel is upset that Arrington made his an open invite system. The other showings I'm aware of are all private invite-only showings. But, even if that's true, it's rather ridiculous for Marvel to be complaining, and this is giving the company a ton of totally unnecessary bad press for an event that was generating plenty of enthusiasm and excitement for the movie. It appears to be yet another case where a lawyer is complaining because he can, and not because it's a good business move. As of right now, AMC Theatres, which sold Arrington the tickets, is standing behind the showing, and hopefully someone higher up at Marvel is figuring out what a ridiculous move this is, and will apologize by morning.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a new website, Avvo, that had created an algorithm to try to "rank" lawyers based on quality. It should come as no surprise, of course, that some lawyers (e.g., the low-ranked ones) weren't particularly pleased with such a system and some of them got together to sue the site as a class action suit -- on behalf of poorly ranked lawyers around the world. While you can certainly understand why lawyers would be upset at such a site, just because you're upset about something doesn't make it illegal. And, just as judges have repeatedly pointed out that things like Google's search rankings are protected free speech as opinions, a judge has dismissed the lawsuit against Avvo, noting that the rankings are merely opinions and that's protected free speech. That's not to say that the judge thinks Avvo is particularly useful. In fact, he points out how ridiculous the rankings are -- but that doesn't mean they're illegal. Chalk one up for free speech online.

The whole "blame Facebook for killing the economy" line seems guaranteed to get press these days as we've already had two totally different stories of "studies" coming out from biased parties, supposedly "blaming" Facebook for killing productivity. The stories all follow a pretty similar arc to all of the "personal surfing is killing productivity" reports that come out every few months from some company trying to sell internet filters. However, by adding the Facebook element, you've got a definite press hook that most can't resist. Con von Hoffman writes in to let us know about the third example in the series, as some employment lawyer in the UK is claiming bogus "productivity" losses from Facebook. It's the same old story, counting every minute spent on Facebook as "lost productivity" despite studies showing that taking personal surfing breaks tend to be good for employees, and they more than make it up in the work that they do. No matter, though, the story hook is too good for the press to ignore. As Con notes, none of the press reports on the topic bothered to check with anyone than the guy who's trying to get publicity for his employment law practice, and none seemed to question his methodology.