I.T. Productions, “Judge, I’m filing this lawsuit against Does 1-10.”
Judge Hughes, “No you are not. You may not sue Does.”
I am interested to see where this one goes. One of the cases I am working on in the Southern District of Texas court is I.T. Productions, LLC v. DOES (Case No. 4:17-cv-00597).
In this case, Gary Fischman is the attorney, and he filed this case just as he does any of the others (he is currently filing lawsuits against John Doe Defendants for the ME2 Productions plaintiff, and the I.T. Productions plaintiff). [And, together with Josh Wyde, Fischman is also representing the September Productions plaintiff, the Cell Productions plaintiff, and the Fathers & Daughters Nevada plaintiff.]
In his attempt to convince TX Judge Lynn Hughes to rubber-stamp an ‘early discovery’ authorization to allow Fischman to send subpoenas to AT&T in order to unmask the identities of the 10 subscribers who are John Doe (unnamed) defendants in this case, the judge responded with a prophetic slap across the face.
“No you may not sue Does.”
Instead of allowing Fischman to sue the putative defendants as Does (e.g., Doe 1, Doe 2, etc.), it appears as if Judge Hughes wants Fischman to identify them by the last five digits of their [accused] IP addresses.
For example, Doe 1 with accused IP address 193.254.221.683 would likely be identified as “Subscriber 21683.”
What is the relevance?
Unknown. Judge Hughes obviously titled the order as “Subscriber-Identity Subpoenas,” which means he has thought enough about this case to give it a title which links it to other (likely Malibu Media, LLC) cases he also has in his court.
Either way, a ‘copyright troll’ never likes a judge who questions him, alters his proposed order, or does anything other than rubber stamp his requests and allow him to do whatever he wants in (and out of) the judge’s courtroom.
No doubt, Judge Hughes will likely change all of that, somehow.
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Josh Wyde and Gary Fischman are Keith Vogt’s apprentices. Thus, the history is bound to repeat itself over and over again.
I agree (Keith Vogt used to run the Dallas Buyers Club lawsuits here). But, who was Keith working for?
Same network. Vogt even appeared for Malibu in Illinois once.
I can’t help to laugh to think that such an entity suing for these titles is also suing for porn titles. This was a connection I didn’t want to see, but oh well, here we go.
PS – Seeing lots of porn titles show up in search results from visitors to our site (this was why I thought CEG-TEK was at it again a few weeks back).
Today Hughes issued the same orders in the Malibu cases assigned to him. How wonderful it would be if a Doe “locked” a one of Hughes’s cases: Malibu pays cash to avoid trial.