f13.net

So, long story short I'm being sued by German IP lawsuit trolls IPP International UG/APMC/Guardalay via a local lawyer here in Ohio. I'm not too worried about it since I'll just declare bancruptcy and fuck off out from any judgement. I'm probably not even going to answer the suit and email him a clip of me jerking off onto the default judgement.

Here's my thing though: this situation reeks to me of champerty, and Ohio from what I understand is the only state that has anti-champerty laws in place. Is this a valid reason to make a complaint against this kid with the Ohio Bar Assc? Even better would it be grounds for any sort of countersuit? The kid graduated from law school a couple of years ago after getting a journalism degree so I find it improbable that he had no idea who he was climbing into bed with professionally or that Ohio has laws against lawsuits initiated and funded by a third-party, out of country investment corporation.

Any thoughts from the lawyers here? I'm not asking for binding legal advice, but I really would like to destroy this person's professional and personal lives without much (or any) blowback on myself. First for constipating my day and secondly for advertising himself as "The lawyer who listens to Jeezy". Also he looks slimy as a motherfucker and I hate everything I can find out about the guy.

If he's out of Columbus, PM me the lawyer's info.  My wife practices in Seattle now, but still maintains her license and contacts in OH in case we ever decide to move back.  I'm sure she'd like to share this douche's contact info with her OH attorneys. 

We do not like slimy lawyers.

I think we need Nerf on the case.

Yeah, let me clarify:  I'm not actually doing anything with that information other than letting some other OH attorneys know about a slimeball. 

I'm more interested in knowing the answer to this question.  What on earth did you do to get noticed by German IP trolls?  Something I'd like to avoid.

You really want to pull at this thread?  :why_so_serious:

Sounds Nerftastic.

There's a couple things you can do actually. One of them is download any of Matthew McConaughey newer movies. The other, which I did was download porn films produced by X-Art.com.

There's a whole saga involving this company. Their internal business presentation was leaked a while back but what they do is they advertise and send salesmen to entertainment companies, preferably porn companies. The offer to "protect" their IP from piracy of a negotiated split of the settlements. From what people have figured out it's about 20% goes to the content producer, the rest goes to the German company and the lawyer. The company then logs bt traffic of people downloading their "subscriber's" IP. They've been caught a couple times putting out big honeypot torrents that never complete to drive up the number of infringements per defendant as well as the time they spend with the files available. They don't just log their customer's IP traffic by the defendants, they log ALL the BT traffic and use it to cold call more clients as well as introduce as "evidence" to shame people into settling out of court. Their own documents state they only sue IP addresses in wealthier areas because they want people with enough money to settle and who would be embarrassed enough at a lawsuit to jump at settling. They maim for settlements between $3,500 and $30,000. The average settlement appears to be in the $3000-$4000 range. There are several websites dedicated to documenting the companies and lawyers involved. The whole thing is shady as fuck and most of the lawyers seem like real pieces of shit. Like one of them is still suing an old man he knows is innocent to get legal fees. It's probably a lot of fun reading, you can google the German company's name. They had 3 different names because apparently after a period of time their local lawyers have ruined reputations and courts just dismiss their suits.

If I wanted the guy gutfucked with a screwdriver or sharpened toothbrush I could handle that without posting about it.

So you're being sued for torrenting porn?

Ah, Downloading films.  Yeah I'll continue to avoid doing that then.  

Yes I'm a goody-goody.  If I don't want to blow $7 on a saturday morning on some shit movie I sure as hell don't want to blow however many hours and dollars defending myself if I get caught.

My house got a cease-and-desist letter for torrenting a season of Entourage once.  The guy who was doing it was a random from Craigslist, who proceeded to not kill his torrent and we received a Final Warning from Comcast a few days later.  Good times.

Same, but for the reason I just think it's stealing. I don't torrent anything, games, movies, etc. It's wrong.

I wasn't even going to start THAT argument. (Seeing as I agree with and benefit from IP laws professionally, I'm on a bad spot to argue it anyway.  :awesome_for_real:)

Yes. I've downloaded porn since 1990, almost exclusively from USENET. It's great but if something is put for more than a year and isn't a "classic" genre defining piece it can be impossible to find. Hence, sullying my hands with torrents.

I hadn't thought much about it, but I'm more ashamed of using BitTorrent than I am of downloading and watching barely legal teen porn.


Well, I'm totally okay with that too, since it doesn't deprive anybody else of anything. American copyright laws are bullshit crafted by multimedia conglomerates to feed them money for eternity. If patents or almost anything else worked the same way I'd have infinity money right now.

Maybe we can bring the tin man and lion into the discussion next.

The morality or legality of downloading isn't the point of the thread, otherwise I would have put it in politics. So lets just stick to the original topic of this particular lawyer. And how he must be broken at the wheel of sad regrets.

My only advice - get the anger in hand before deciding on a game plan.  There are a lot of attorneys that are much richer because they took on angry clients willing to go above and beyond to punish someone... throwing bad money after worse money.

My only question is why download porn at all these days. I mean, you're having a wank, not providing for your progeny's sexual awakenings.

First world problems: Lower than 720p annoys me to the point of distraction.

x-art

fuck me sued for artsy porn

what a nerd

I think getting a local lawyer would be a good start, see what they say about the anti-champerty stuff.

Seriously, use Pornhub, XHamster, Tube8 or whatever else.  I haven't paid for porn in almost 15 years and I know some of those sites I listed have a growing list of HD movies.  Genre defining piece???  Pick random scenes and bookmark the ones you like.

So close to haiku.

Aren't porn streaming sites all infested with malicious ads?

That's why god invented Adblock

Thumbzilla. use Thumbzilla.

I read somewhere, not long ago, that porn sites are actually some of the most malware-free places out there these days because they make so much money on ads it behooves them to be proactive.

Yeah, it surprised me too.

Google turned this up, but it's not what I read, which was linked through reddit
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/malware/310499-porn-sites-aren-t-always-dens-of-malware

Not a bad advise, but not completely foolproof. In Germany this year there was a case were several thousand (10,000+) people received written warnings for watching porn on Redtube. Basically trollish lawyers claimed to hold copyrights and some technically illiterate judges got tricked into believing this was a case of file sharing (rather than streaming) and giving them the users IP.

This got big enough to enter all the mainstream press & TV. The lawyers got counted sued, the court rescinded their own written warning (Abmahnung). The lawyer went bankrupt and lost their license by now, but they might have gotten away with it hadn't it blown up to a national stage.

English language article (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131224/13331825689/german-court-pulls-orders-granted-to-copyright-troll-uc-grants-injunction-against-future-demand-letters.shtml)

Meh, I'm not worried if people know I watch porn.  Being in the army for 21 years, my GAF factor for what others think is pretty low.  Most of my friends and the guys I work with watch and the women I know wouldn't care.  It's not like I watch kiddie porn and animal sex.

People: take my thumbzilla advice, it's everything from Pornhub and then some with all of the ads removed and better filtering.

Guys! Bob is obviously looking for clear and simple legal advice advice for his unfortunate situation. Please stop dragging the conversation into the gutter with your talk of porn streaming, he is being sued for downloading High Definition, Beret Wearingly Explicit Art. Let's not make this about something tawdry.

Also I am genuinely looking forward to hearing if something comes of this, partly because I suspect Bob might be the right balance of pyschotic and fully functioning to manage to successfully pursue legal avenues. Also partly hoping to get the link to a local news story about the the Day of the Rope starting early.

Really.  I'm sad about porn but I think angry.bob is awesome anyway and I've known him here for like forever.  I would hate to see him tossed into the slammer.  I would fear for the rapists and murderers who cross his path.  Srsly, though, this is very much the sort of thing that disturbs me.  From what angry.bob says, it looks like their hoping people break their very silly rules just so they can sue them.  If not hoping, they at least see it as an opportunity to make some dosh on the side.  Why else would you only sue in wealthy areas.  Obviously they're not trying to protect anything or make a righteous point.  This is very stinky.  Good luck to angry.bob.  Make them cry!

The truely scummy part is that the lions share of the profit they make off this tactic revolves around the idea that it is ususally cheaper for the people they hit to settle out of court for 2 or 3 k then it is to actually absorb the legal costs / lost time costs / emotional stress / etc of attempting to prove their innocence (and a signifigant chunk of them ARE innocent too.)

Indeed. The cost to hire a lawyer who deals with this group constantly and almost surely just changes names, dates, etc on paperwork wanted $1250 just to negotiate a settlement with them. The cost to hire them to actually go to court was something like $5000 for something then $250 an hour. I don't know exactly what the initial $5000 was for because I was still in trying to process the $1250 charge to do something I could pretty much do for free on my own with a phone and/or email account.

5k was likely a retainer that the 250/hr was charged against.

Yes, that. CPA's do the same thing for tax cases.

That makes sense and also falls in line with their business model. After a week and a half of being ignored I got an email from their local attorney. He stated that the minimum they will accept to settle is $6600, is firm and final, and is available for me to accept until close of business Friday. So yeah, pay their $6600 and be done with it or pay $5000 with the possibility of $150,000 plus both side's attorney fees. People have been reporting they claim their attorney fees are $30,000+. So a couple hundred grand possibly. This group also does whatever they can to get attorney fees out of defendants, even in cases they've lost or when they themselves try to withdraw. My favorite was an senior citizen living in an apartment building that came with internet. They sued him for downloading all sorts of their porn, but he was able to prove that he had been out of the country and his apartment unoccupied for like a year - with the "infractions" happening right in the middle. Rather than just apologize and drop the suit they continued the suit rather than eat their own legal fees. Which are pretty small in reality since everything is done in Germany and relayed to the local attorneys. The local guys literally just file crap and relay message back and forth. The times when they do have to go to court their side of things is almost always a clownshoes clusterfuck.

It would seriously not surprise me at all to find out that both attorneys had offices right across from each other at the same place.

I'd pay the $6k and then burn their office to the ground two years later.  Long as you don't get caught it's cheaper than fighting them in court AND more satisfying. :awesome_for_real:  :why_so_serious:

Just countersue them for crimes against jews.

You are such a fucking clever boy!  In today's world, I bet he would make a tidy sum.

Update!

So I sent their lawyer an email saying that I thought $6600 for a settlement was a bit high given that there was no evidence I was even involved and they did no investigation other than to get my name as the person who pays the bill for the IP address of my WiFi modem/router, as well as the suit having several incorrect statements stated as facts (such as BT users not needing to connect to any sort of central website to find files, so no way to serve a DMCA takedown), as well as misleading statements(Implying that having a part of a file downloaded is the same as the entire movie file downloaded). I also told him that I thought naming me in the suit was unjust, reckless, and groundless. He ignored it which I expected him to. I followed up this morning with an email saying that I accepted the $6600 amount but would not accept or sign anything that indicated wrongdoing on my part or that limits me in any way. Also that I was agreeing to the settlement for the sole purpose of getting it out of the way for the holidays. Just waiting to hear back from him.

His Twitter timestamped 22 hours ago said he was leaving the country for a few days. On twitter and some other websites he has shitfits about Marco Rubio, Cuba, or when the two intersect. I’m not sure of the origin of his name, they could be either Spanish or Arab. He’s a member of some Hispanic organizations and he looks Hispanic in most of his pictures, but it’s possible he could be Arab trying to pass as Hispanic to not have to deal with it. The background of his parents show that his mom is from Puerto Rico and was married once before she married his dad. His dad though was hard to nail down. His country of origin is “other” and he’s changed his name since he came here. Doing a search on his assumed name brings up a billion pages in Persian or English talking about Iraq. The county auditor shows he paid $127,000 for his 1300sqft house, but it’s valued at $59,000. I found pictures and a floorplan on a real estate site that listed it before he bought it. It’s pretty generic, small, and uninspired. It’s about a block north of Little Italy in the Short North, that was a shit neighborhood when I lived in Columbus, but who knows now. I wouldn't live there, but whatever.

Frankly I’m concerned enough to believe that he’s travelling to Puerto Rico or illegally to Cuba for suspect reasons. I think I should alert the TSA and Homeland Security for them to check on it. The under-30 son of an Iraqi immigrant travelling to Cuba, who knows what’s up with that. Probably ISIS if you ask me.


Edit: In before "Psycho"

No, no, I approve of this tactic.

Actually, yes, do that.

FULL NERF. FULL NERRRRRRRRRRRFFFF.

Can't be full nerf without video cameras.

Or a crazy dog.

Nerf isn't that clever.

The ISIS connection was certainly inspired and I wholeheartedly approve of making a spectacle of your particular brand of anti-social insanity.

 :popcorn:

Christmas came early!

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and avoids doing anything that might cause them more trouble than they can handle.

Fucking killjoy. All I want for Christmas is schadenfreude.

I am so glad I checked this thread. It honestly made my day. I am excitedly waiting for update 2.

Okay, so I guess this would be sort of legal advice, more of a paperwork sort of thing. In case they refuse to agree to the "no wrongdoing" thing I told him, I have an answer to the suite ready to send. I do have a question though. In the "prayer for relief" section I have the following:


My question is, does this cover provably false claims? Their contention that they are unable to send warning letters or takedown notices because BT clients never have to connect to any sort of index or catalog is just blatant bullshit. It's central to their business model and why they claim to have no recourse but to sue. They could effectively stop all torrenting of their IP by sending DMCA notices to two websites, but then their investment vehicle goes tits up. I would like to believe that federal judges don't like when people outright lie in dodcuments and I want to make it clear from the start that their claims are easily provable lies, or at the very least claims easily provable to be untrue.

If my answer tot he suit doesn't get them to withdraw or at least agree to my "no wrongdoing" thing then it's off to an actual lawyer I go. I just hated the idea of paying a couple grand to negotiate with them and possibly file an answer when as far as I can tell they've only ever actually won one suit that's gone to trial.

I'm pretty sure you won't get a real lawyer to answer that for you on an internet forum, as it puts them at risk if it's incorrect.

I'm pretty sure real lawyers left the thread at TSA and possibly Puerto Rican.

Where is the countersuit for defamation and the part where you will agree to settle that out of court for $12,000, or double their original suit claim which names you?

Okay, no reason to be a dick. I don't see the problem with asking a court to look into the practices of a lawyer who files hundreds of suits in one day with no evidence other than a list of billing names and a plaintiff who accounts for 38% of all copyright suits filed in the United States. Especially when most of the money goes to a German investment company listed in the suit as an network technology investigation firm.

Really? It's surprising that there's that strict a code of practice considering what amoral predatory shitheels a lot of these guys seem to be. Our forum members not included of course. Just saying there's a reason it's regarded as one of the least ethical careers. Less than half as trustworthy as our cops according to polls. And the 20% who said that they were ethical are probably lawyers themselves.

There are about four reasons why a lawyer can't/won't give you advice here, so I hope you aren't counting on an actual answer from one.

EDIT: Well, that's not technically true, I will give you the advice to go consult with a local attorney before you do anything.

You might have better luck at a site with tens of thousands of users like Reddit, with that many people the chances of finding a lawyer willing to risk their career/bar membership by offering advice over the internet is much higher.  Also realize that lawyers willing to risk their career/bar membership to give advice over the internet might not be terribly wise people to begin with.  SA also has a legal advice thread which I enjoy reading but most of the "I'm being sued for downloading stuff" questions are answered with "you're screwed".

Did you mention the Champerty thing in your reply?

You're like a much wiser, more methodical, less emotional Nerf.  If anyone can beat this through force of will and determination it would be you.  This is my new favorite thread.  Hope you win.

Of course I also assumed you of all people would be connecting to the internet via high grade ip anonymising services.

I figured it was about as likely as getting any other professional advice just below the medical level, in other words unlikely. But since it was more of a verbiage/nomenclature/formatting question I thought it was worth a shot. Sort of like the difference between asking me over the internet "Hey, is my wound infected" versus "What are the signs of an infected wound".

I also already talked to a couple of attorneys, oddly their advice was I should hire them for a couple of grand. If it actually goes to trial I absolutely will, but for the initial answer I'm being a cheapskate.

Also, bonus if at least one of those four reasons to not answer my question is because I'm an asshole. :heart:


Not for normal every day stuff. 24 years of downloading stuff eventually made me lazy and sloppy. I've mocked torrent users for years, but it was just too easy to find rare stuff that's not available anywhere else. From there it was a short trip to "Fuck it, I'll just queue everything up here and now".

I will say on general principle that you can actually hurt your case rather badly in an answer by doing things like failing to raise proper affirmative defenses or mandatory counterclaims or inadvertently admitting to something. Even answering in and of itself when you might have a basis for a motion to dismiss instead can damage your case since you can lose the ability to raise those issues by virtue of the fact you filed an answer.

If the case is significant, a lawyer should be involved from the jump rather than mucking it up and then asking a lawyer to "fix it".  Sucks to pay for one, but lawyers get high fees because they are typically worth it.

You mean because they can navigate the worthless, fuckawful system they took part in creating.

Yeah, I'm with bob on this.
Don't let those bastards win.
Keep up the good fight.

You accidentally a syllable.

I'm very angry about this injustice, schild.
Please don't push me.

Pretty much.

http://www.gofundme.com/

The internet loves sticking it to assholes like that. See if you can get some torrent sites to run a story.

As far as the website thing goes: Technically BT does not need central hubs, trackers, superseeds, or indexing websites. They make it operate more efficiently, but it is possible for it to operate without them (where earlier sharing systems could not operate at all without them). So I suspect that's not a winning point for you.

--Dave

Another lawyer IRL. 

Abagadro has given you the best advice that you are likely to get regarding the legal significance of an answer. 

There is a reason that many answers are simply general denials. 

However, please don't let that stop you from all of the fantastic ideas that you have for "pursuing" this case outside of the legal system.  :awesome_for_real:

How was this me being a dick?? I was being completely helpful with actual advice.

This was serious advice for your case, maybe even something you'd hear from a real lawyer, because as long as there is no admission or evidence of wrongdoing, the suit against you can be defamation... Counter suing is a way for them to either drop their suit or realize that a suit against you wouldn't be worth it...

These things actually go to court? I always thought this was a scheme by shady law firms to get people to pay something in out-of-court settlements in the full knowledge the case would be laughed out of court by any judge.

Okay, I apologize then. It just sounded like you were goofing on me for sounding like a jailhouse lawyer. But apparently a lot of the cases that go to court include that.


Yeah, it depends on who the plaintiff is. Some never go to court, but Malibu Media does. They've been doing this a couple of years now and have been refining it with each iteration to make it harder and harder for defendants. Out of every 20 suits they file now about 15 settle, the rest may or may not go to trial. Sometimes they withdraw, and the defendand may or may not let them. As far as I am aware of they've only actually won one suit, and that was against a guy who admitted to the judge that he had actually downloaded all the stuff, panicked when he was served and formatted his drive, and then perjured earlier in the trial. The cases they do go to court for they're pretty vile about. Legal fees apparently run into the $200,000 range on both sides. There's also a lot of shifty shit like them faking computer expert testimony from people who don't exist, using other, unrelated stuff they find on people's drives to try and force them to settle, the Plaintiffs aren't actually involved at all except they get a check at the end for 10% of awards for letting this group "protect" their copyrights. http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/ and http://dietrolldie.com/ are two great sites to read all about the industry. The whole industry is run by a German company called Guardalay, who sets up different shell companies like IPP, AGMC, etc. They're all the same place and the employees are all the same people, just sometimes working under different names. They seem to just keep chugging along in an area until things start going really bad where they're on the hook for a several suit's worth of attorney fees. They'll do whatever they can to wiggle out of them like contest the accuracy of opposing fee logging, offer $5000 to settle a $220,000 fee, etc. Then their plaintiff seems to make a big stink that they were never consulted with and that the attorney did everything on his own. Which seems to be true since every email and decision gets forwarded from the local attorney to a lawyer named M. Keith Lipscomb and then to Guardalay. Decisions are made there, sent back to Lipscomb, and then back to the local attorney. They'd do away with the local attorneys if they could but they need them to file. Honestly, I doubt I've even been dealing with the local guy, it's probably been someone in Germany since the hours they respond at are really, really odd at night. This all may or may not be true, but it's what 2+ years of lawyers, investigators, and interwebz detectives have pieced together. Plus, one of Guardalay's websites had their investor presentation accidentaly available for public download for a couple of hours and the whole thing can now be read and it details the whole thing.

TLDR: Yes, they go to court and try to get the maximum statutory damages and legal fees. $125,000 per infraction. 30 clips X $125,000 = $3,750,000 plus +$200,000 avg defense + $200,000 avg plaintiff cost. That's why most people settle without going to court.

How that shit doesn't violate 8th amendment is beyond me.

Did you share this pron or just DL it?  I've always thought they only nail the folk at the top of the seeder list.  You must've left the torrent running for quite some time to cum on their radar.   :awesome_for_real:

Would it make the situation better if you just purchased the video and sent them the receipt?  Or, if you seeded, purchase enough vids. to cover the amount of IPs you shared to?

I just DLed it, but only a few of the files ever completed. Most of them were stuck between 95-99% complete. Eventually I just deleted them out of the queue because they were never going to complete. That's one of the things they've been accused of doing, seeding torrents that will never complete because they dick with one of the files in the folder after the torrent is made. Frankly I don't know enough about torrents to know if that's bullshit or not. It wouldn't surprise me though.

I should consider myself lucky I'm in a later round of these suits. There are internal emails and suits from the earlier batches where they tried to get some sort of contributory damages too. Like if there were 2802 people leeching a file when they scanned they would add 2802 additional infringements.

That would be trivial to do; make a torrent of the video plus several screencaps, then delete one when you begin to seed. Of course, the video will still play if they do that; getting it to seed to 99% but not play the vid is a bit trickier.

Oh, well most of the torrents they allegedly uploaded were bigger "collections". Like 20-30 of their website features at 500-900mb each. That way people were downloading quite a while before they even got to the problem of it not completing, plus then they got 20-30 infractions instead of one. Even for files in the torrent you never actually downloaded. That might be one of the things that caused them some problems when pressed to explain it. Well, that and suits against network printers in office buildings and so forth.

Also, apparently someone recently used an unclean hands affirmative defense against them because they didn't have 2257 records for a bunch of their films, effectively making them child pornography until proven otherwise. How the fuck they're not in trouble for that is also pretty frustrating.

Probably because charging people for crimes in another country is a very very difficult and murky area.

I am curious, how do you all feel about this? I mean, it's obviously kind of illegal. So how can they prosecute Bob but let this one live for so long? And it's only getting more and more popular. I know people who are closed their Netflix subscriptions because of this. ANother question: how do they makie any money, considering they don't even have ads?

https://popcorntime.io/

That's not kind of illegal, it's absolutely illegal. They're just streaming off torrents though, and likely verify the contents of the torrents before doing so. Or it's a studio trying to honeydick a million people. Who knows.

 :ye_gods:

Yep, illegal.

The couple that own the porn production company live and film in Malibu. In fact they film a lot of stuff in their multi-million dollar house. Which is also illegal to do in Malibu. If you want to see what owning one of the smallest and least successful porn sites will get you, watch some X-Art video. They're pretty boring but they have a really great house.

Also, a general update on the lawsuit thing. The lawyer made a big deal about the potential judgement and I told him that there was no way he would get anything close to 3.5 million dollars even if the only answer I made to the suite was box feces and used condoms. I countered with an offer of $400 for the filing fee and another $20 for a one month subscription to their website. I also re-enforced that this whole thing was a waste of time on his part because he was going to get nothing from me and he'd be better off just withdrawing the suite. In the end we came to a lump sum settlement of $6600 dollars due in 30 days. How amazing that the settlement was just a little bit more than hiring a lawyer, but with none of the risk. Anyway, a condition of the settlement was that if it took longer than 30 days to pay I would have to pay interest and be put into collection for it. I told him fine, whatever because I wasn't going to pay him that much on that little notice.

So the 30 days comes around and I still hadn't payed. shortly after that I got a thing from the court that a couple days after the due date for the settlement he asked for and was granted a default judgment against me. Which I thought was pretty fucked up since part of the agreement was that he was supposed to withdraw the suite. Fucking lawyers.

I think I'm going to go to school this coming fall and get a JD for a hobby. The whole thing seems pretty tedious but simple when you learn the process, and it appears to be the most awesome way of trolling people in real life. Plus, there's also probably something really awesome that pays a ton of money for an RN with a JD to do. I'd love to work as a bullshit detector in medical suites/cases. THen I could write a book based on my awesome adventures and eventually get it made into a movie or TV series.

 :oh_i_see:

Holy shit dude get some help. If you treat their kind of legal bullshit seriously by actually replying to it you are digging your own grave. It'll be hard to climb out.

I don't now the legal situation in the US, but over here that was about the dumbest thing one could do in that situation. Never sign anything admitting any kind of guilt (we even have modified cease-and-desist declarations you can download over here because you never ever sign the original one where you admit guilt or make concessions), but when you do, at least keep to the terms of the settlement since now they have the chance to easily screw you over in court once you violate the settlement (due to you likely already having admitted guilt by signing).

Stop giving him real advice and let him go full-Nerf, dammit! :why_so_serious:

Don't get in the way of Bob fulfilling his dream of becoming a legal beagle

This sums up my opinion as well.

Part of my demands for settlement agreement was a section saying I admitted no guilt, was only agreeing to the settlement to make it go away for the Christmas/New Year holidays, and that the IP address they recorded may or may not have been assigned to me, may or may not have been in use by me, and may or may not have been spoofed.

Frankly he/they had a lot more to lose signing that than I did. It's a pretty clear admission that (in my opinion) they filed suite against me recklessly in violation of Rule 11 by not doing any investigation at all past my IP adress being logged by their "proprietary" software. Software that's been shown repeatedly to be shit-tier and unreliable. There was also a lot of other stuff involved like me wanting the "tech experts" from Germany, Colorado, and the people from Malibu to come here for statements. And that they should all bring records of how, when, and how much they all get paid from the settlements because there's some really interesting things going on there.

Also, fuck your country Germany in it's legal system for letting these greasy ass disco weasels exist. And yes, I've seen pictures of the guys in Germany running this thing and they're greasy and shady as fuck. Like Romanian Mafia shady.

I know two people who will be portrayed as joyless curmudgeons in the glorious hit that is the franchise of me. Lawyering for nearly all purposes is expensive real life min-maxing stuff with D&D rulebooks. Plus I met a lot of law students at school, it was not impressive.

I don't doubt they are. They have a long tradition of fucking people over, the first I remember was a lawyer from my beloved northern neighbor country that specialized in letting a "girl" answer to classifieds in Computer magazines and when somebody sent "her" a list of games the lawyer sent them a cease-and-desist letter or sued them. That was back in the early 90s. So yes, those lawyers had a long time to perfect their tactics, and they haven't gotten more ethical I presume.

I really think we will have more frivolous lawsuits in the future thanks to their new "Leistungsschutzrecht (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers)" law they passed recently, for example. Basically a company can sue anyone if he uses parts of their articles on his website. Recently a court in Berlin convited a company for having the  screenshot of an article of another company on one of their webservers (not even openly, you only found it if you knew the adress). Want to know why they had that screenshot? To show that the other company had used one of their photos in that article without permission, essentially stealing from them and being able to sue them on top of it.

Oh, brave new internet world.

More like keeping my mouth shut (can't speak for Ab) because opining at this point puts me into a grey area that verges into black letter ethical rules territory. Also, don't go to law school. It's for rubes and asshats at this point.

So Bob's in, then?  :why_so_serious:

Here's my unlegal advice, from a place of personal XP:  Hang up on everyone, Don't sign anything, don't admit anything including who you are, and don't give anyone any money. 

This explains why you haven't returned my call about borrowing $20.

HEY EVERYBODY NIX IS ALIVE

(the wiki is not)

There's a wiki?

So, are you forwarding them a countersuit for defamation? <totally serious

If you have $6000 that you're willing to give away... Can you spare a dime, buddy? <also totally serious

Still never would've done "settlement" where you give anyone any money, even with protecting yourself (somewhat) from admission of guilt.

Don't know why you thought a lawyer you'd give $5000 to wouldn't have been the better option, you might've owned yourself a porn company and website.

Generally, filing a lawsuit is not defamatory (nor is sending someone a letter accusing them of doing something wrong). There'd be other kinds of liability (if the lawsuit was false/baseless), but not for defamation. Also, truth is an absolute defense to defamation; I'm pretty sure that Bob admitted that he did download some pr0n.

Reminds me of Oscar Wilde oddly enough.

She doesn't live here anymore.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=6345;type=avatar)

Signe uses "You're breaking up. We must have a bad connection." in face to face conversations.