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Prenda Law is gone, and today it's a legit porno company, Malibu Media, that files more copyright lawsuits than anyone else. Malibu sues thousands of people for downloading the company's content via BitTorrent, then asks for settlements reportedly in the several-thousand-dollar range.
The antics of Malibu and other "copyright trolls" are often documented on two pseudonymous troll-fighting blogs, FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollDie.
Now that Malibu has a case where a defendant is insisting on his right to have his case heard by a jury, it really doesn't want those blogs coming up at trial. Malibu's attorney Keith Lipscomb has asked (PDF) the judge in the case to ban "inappropriate references to blogs" during the copyright infringement trial, seeking $150,000 in damages from Indiana resident Michael Harrison.
"The Court should preclude Defendant from referring to copyleft blogs for any purpose, including specifically references to fightcopyrightrolls.com and dietrolldie.com," writes Lipscomb in the motion, filed earlier this week. "The blogs target Plaintiff and its counsel with vitriolic hate speech and contain comments that are biased, slanderous, and prejudicial, and should not be referred to at trial for any purpose."
In a footnote, Lipscomb explains "copyleft" for the judge, writing: "Copyleft is the polite way of describing an anti-copyright ideology. 'Freetards' is the degrading equivalent of 'copyright trolls' when used in association with copyright producers."
A gray-market company seeks the cover of law. Any 'Freetards' care to comment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:54PM
These types of motions in limited are filed as a matter of course. The blogs have no bearing on the case. Being a troll, or not, has no relevance on whether there was an infringement.
Mind you, I don't agree with the trolls or the copyright laws by any stretch, but in court, those blogs have no significance to this case. The same would be true of the Defendant were a nazi party member and filed a motion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:35AM
You need to look into their intent. Some of these sites listed have thoroughly tracked and recorded the abuses and courtroom failures of Prenda Law and its partners.
This motion is equivalent to saying "Yes judge, we know our defendant has been arrested for sexual assault fourteen times and has been found guilty of rape twice, then legally changed his name to Malibu Media in a poor attempt to make a new identity, but the jury does not need to know about that in determining if he has a history of sexual crimes."