Judge eviscerates P2P lawyer: "I accepted you at your word"

[nsane.forums]

As a lawyer, you know it's going to be bad when a federal judge summons you to his courtroom at nine in the morning to talk about your “ill-considered lawsuit” that has “abused the litigation system in more than one way.”

Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a "Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!" sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. At issue was Steele's representation of CP Productions, an Arizona porn producer suing 300 anonymous individuals for illegally sharing a film called (ahem) Cowgirl Creampie.

Shadur had already had enough of this particular litigation and had tossed the case not once but twice within the last few weeks. The first dismissal came because Steele had not actually served all defendants in the case within 120 days of filing it (Steele pleaded that he was still waiting on ISPs to turn over the names associated with the IP addresses he had provided).

Then, after receiving an amateur motion from one of the anonymous defendants in the case, Shadur was reminded of just how much he hated the whole case and tossed it again. He also ordered Steele into his courtroom to talk about ways that CP Productions would notify anonymous defendants about the end of the case, and (more importantly) how to get those defendants to stop mailing their "motions to quash" to the judge's chambers.

With that hearing scheduled for this morning, Steele yesterday asked the judge to reconsider his two dismissals, allow Steele to add a charge of "conspiracy" against all the BitTorrent downloaders, and let the case proceed. Steele even said one anonymous defendant had committed "fraud" on the court by listing "Possible John Doe" as his name. To Steele it was "somewhat unsurprising that an individual involved in theft would be less than truthful to this Court, particularly when he is allowed to operate under the cloak of anonymity.”

"I accepted you at your word"

Steele arrived in the court room for his 9am hearing at 9:19am. When called forward, Steel identified himself and then had to stand in silence as the judge dropped his previously genial manner and proceeded to read the riot act to Steele and steamroll his case.

“I accepted you at your word,” said the judge, pointing to Steele's assertion that the case was connected to Illinois. But, after allowing Steel to take discovery and issue subpoenas to Internet providers, "I start getting motions to quash” from places like Tennessee, Texas, New Jersey, from "people that had nothing at all to do with the state of Illinois.”

CP Productions was based in Arizona and, if their intellectual property was infringed, the company's injuries "take place at law at the place of the party that's injured." The case didn't belong in Shadur's district at all, he said, calling Steele's complaint about fraudulent behavior "ironic."

Steele interrupted, pointing out that he had in fact secured some settlements from defendants located in Chicago, which showed that at least some of the alleged infringement took place here and should be actionable. The judge wasn't having any of it, and he repeatedly talked over Steele to tell him, "You chose to sue 300 anonymous people… that was your choice.” But the venue for the group was improper, he said, and if CP Productions plans to continue a mass lawsuit campaign, it can do so in Arizona.

“I don't see any justification at all for this action,” the judge concluded, and he had less-than-complimentary things to say about Steele's work. Facts in the case “were not as asserted,” said Shadur, adding that case filings “did not really comply with the subjective and objective good faith requirement."

After 10 minutes of this, in which Steele managed to speak for about 30 seconds, the judge ended the case for good. "That's it," he concluded.

Pressing on

The ruling joins similar rulings from federal judges in West Virginia and Texas, where most of these sorts of suits have already been dismissed. The various rulings don't ban file-sharing cases, but they make them harder to prosecute en masse.

In a statement afterwards, Steele told me that he respects the judge's decision even though he disagrees with it.

"Our client, CP Productions, is happy that Judge Shadur dismissed the case without prejudice and has allowed us to file against the few remaining John Does individually," Steele said. "We will certainly continue to fight on behalf of CP Productions in its war on piracy."

Steele is also confident that his Illinois porn cases can continue. "The judges in our other cases have, for the most part, sided with our clients and dismissed anonymous motions filed by non-parties," he added. "We expect to continue to have a majority of the courts find in our favor and allow us to find out who is stealing our client's content."

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[irefay]

Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!

What the heck does that mean?

[nsane.forums]

Judge: P2P class-action suit looks like a "fishing expedition"

Most of the attorneys who file mass P2P lawsuits do so in a single court. Chicago family-law-turned-copyright attorney John Steele this week broke that pattern and scored a hat trick by filing at least one large-scale pornography lawsuit in each of Illinois' three federal judicial districts: Northern, Central, and Southern. But one federal judge this week worried that Steele is running a "fishing expedition."

Steele has run into some problems in Illinois' Northern District, which includes Chicago; just yesterday, Judge Milton Shadur threw out one of Steele's lawsuits against 300 anonymous defendants, berating Steele and saying, "I don't see any justification at all for this action."

Steele hasn't been deterred; after all, there are plenty of judges and plenty of courts, and not all of them will see things Shadur's way.

"The judges in our other cases have, for the most part, sided with our clients and dismissed anonymous motions filed by non-parties," he told me yesterday. "We expect to continue to have a majority of the courts find in our favor and allow us to find out who is stealing our client's content."

To that end, Steele has filed two of his recent cases in entirely separate court districts. The first was filed in the Southern District, downstate near St. Louis. Steele tried to avoid the jurisdiction questions that have dogged these lawsuits elsewhere, filing this case as a reverse class-action lawsuit against everyone who illegally shared his client's pornography.

On Tuesday, the day before his run-in with Shadur, Steele filed a second class-action lawsuit in the Central District, which includes the University of Illinois. Steele says he brought the case there because he "used geolocation technology to trace the IP addresses of multiple Defendants to a point of origin within Champaign, Illinois."

Of course, with 1,017 "John Doe" defendants, it's likely that the case could have been brought just about anywhere, including Chicago, where Steele has his offices. But if Steele hoped a change of venue might help his chances, Judge Harold Baker disabused him of that notion within a day. As Steele was getting grilled by Shadur back in Chicago on Wednesday, Baker looked at the class-action filing before him and issued a sharply worded note.

Steele had asked for "expedited discovery," which would allow him to get the necessary subpoenas more quickly and which could be done without input from any defense lawyer. Judge Baker called the lawsuit a "novel case, which has turned Fed. R. Civ. P. 23 [the class action rule] on its head" and he worried that granting Steele his subpoenas without hearing from the other side would be unfair. The judge instead wants an "adversarial proceeding where questions or claims of privilege or protection could be raised" before signing off on subpoenas, and he directed the court clerk "to refuse to issue any subpoenas to plaintiff's counsel until further order of the court."

The basic problem here is that the defendants are known only by IP address, so there are no identified defendants who might contest the discovery request. In a similar case in Texas, the judge on his own initiative invited the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen to get involved in the case and stand up for the defendants' rights until such time as those defendants were actually identified and could send their own counsel to court. Shortly after this move, the Texas lawyer bringing the case dismissed it, blaming the judge for allowing the public interest groups to get involved.

Summing up his concerns, the judge concluded: "Plainly stated, the court is concerned that the expedited ex parte discovery is a fishing expedition by means of a perversion of the purpose and intent of Fed. R. Civ. P. 23."

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