Joinder: Whether the John Doe Defendants in a lawsuit should be linked together as defendant in the same lawsuit. Joinder usually relates to the question of whether they were involved in the “same transaction or occurrence.”
In many mass-IP-adrdess-based John Doe copyright infringement lawsuits, joinder is improper because the accused downloaders did not download the same copyrighted title from the same online swarm at the same time. Yet, they are thrown together in one lawsuit as co-defendants.
With all the drama going on in the Prenda Law Inc. defamation cases (most recently, they have sent a subpoena to WordPress asking for every IP address who visited SJD or DTD’s website since 2011), I wanted to make sure the other lawsuits didn’t take advantage of this diversion. Thinking about the Malibu Media, LLC single … Read more
In a laughable attempt at a new copyright troll attempting to join the “me too” copyright infringement lawsuits that have been filed across the U.S., copyright troll attorney Sanjin Mutic [of the Mile High Law Office LLC; also on the board of the Triskele Foundation (thanks to SJD who did a good write-up on this)] stepped foot into … Read more
Introducing the Swarm Joinder Defense Strategy I am investigating a new strategy for clients who are named and served as part of a bittorrent swarm. This swarm joinder defense strategy states that if the plaintiff claims that you were part of a bittorrent swarm, then each downloader from that swarm needs to be joined as a … Read more
I am very excited to see that judges are starting to get involved in the discussion of whether it is proper to sue tens, hundreds, or thousands of John Doe Defendants accused of downloading copyrighted films (usually pornographic in character, and using BT to do so) in one lawsuit. Just a few days ago, I … Read more
There is a balancing act in this post as to how to make it NOT deathly boring, and how do I convey the information you need to understand what you have in front of you. Here we go. Judge Beryl Howell once again issued a scathing opinion favoring copyright trolls and ruling against John Doe … Read more