Federal Court Pulls Plug On Porn Copyright Shakedown

netbuzz writes: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling it a 'crushing blow for copyright trolls.' A federal appeals court today has for the first time ruled against what critics call a shakedown scheme aimed at pornography downloaders and practiced by the likes of AF Holdings, an arm of notorious copyright troll Prenda Law. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit called the lawsuit 'a quintessential example of Prenda Law's modus operandi' in reversing a lower court ruling that would have forced a half-dozen ISPs to identify account holders associated with 1,058 IP addresses."

Re:Judges are People (pervs) Too

[UnknowingFool]

If you actually read anything about this case or ones brought by the MPAA: plaintiffs cannot file lawsuits against multiple people at once that are not joined or related. If the copyright holders wish to sue any individual they have to bring individual lawsuits.

Re:The US needs a loser-pays legal system

[Boawk]

Wow, you Republicans are getting more brazen...The legal system would become instead of 80% biased for the Republicans...

Blaming "loser pay" advocacy on political affiliation shows you haven't done your homework [npr.org].

Re:The US needs a loser-pays legal system

[hr raattgift]

The current system (in U.S. District courts) *is* loser pays (see U.S. F.R.Civ.P. rule 54(d)).

Where the federal courts differ from most "loser pays" systems is that evidence of offers to settle ahead of a trial is generally excluded as a matter of policy.

Pretty much no loser-pays system (and that includes federal courts and several private law systems in the various states) actually requires that the loser *always* pays the full costs of the other side *in all circumstances*; wide latitudes are given to the courts to assess costs in a way it feels is just, or appropriate to the behaviour of the parties, etc. U.S. district courts have narrower latitude than both, owing in part to statute.

Generally speaking, if no offers to settle out of court are made (and thus also not rejected), then the loser generally is assessed costs unless it would be unjust to do so, thus "loser pays". However, offers to settle out of court are normal and even in district courts are encouraged to avoid unnecessary court costs and time dealing with controversies which can be worked out by the litigating parties outside of court.

In most loser-pays systems costs are assessed against parties who should have ended litigation sooner. For example under most systems that use a regulated offer along the lines of the Calderbank rules (this is definitely untrue of many state systems and U.S. district courts, but is true in some states, such as Florida), a winning party that was made an offer to settle out of court that it rejected and subsequently did not beat in court is usually assessed at least some proportion of the offeror's costs after that point, even if the offeror is ultimately the losing party. That is, even though the party won, it could have achieved the same result with fewer costs to the parties and the courts, and should therefore bear some of those avoidable costs. There are often codified forms of offer which make it even more clear that refusing a well-pitched offer could be expensive (as in Part 36 of the Civil Procedure Rules (England and Wales)) for a party that does not subsequently better it.

Additionally, most systems allow the parties to agree on how to split costs in order to avoid further litigation on who should pay which costs; the motions under F.R.Civ.P rule 54(d)(1)&(2) are frequently consent motions agreed between the parties after judgement.

http://www.nlrg.com/public-law... [nlrg.com]