Congratulations to our client, one of ninety-nine defendants who have have been dismissed from the Lightspeed Media Corporation lawsuit (Civil Action No. 1:10-cv-05604).
This is an ongoing lawsuit with Mr. John Steele at the helm, where aggressive attempts to solicit and collect settlement offers for the alleged downloading of copyrighted materials via the bittorrent protocol.
The guilt of the defendants were not at issue in this case. We did not even get the chance to defend the copyright portion of the lawsuit itself. As with the other cases, defendants were improperly sued in courts which did not have personal jurisdiction over them.
This is a victory for now, but as always, there remains the threat that the plaintiff will sue each defendant either individually or in a class in a federal court having personal jurisdiction over each of the defendants sued. Of course, this would mean that the plaintiffs would need to hire local counsel in the relevant jurisdiction to file and serve each of the defendants, pay the filing fees for each defendant, and properly prosecute each lawsuit.
Considering the amount of defendants sued, this can be a costly proposition for the plaintiff client, but Mr. Steele has promised that this is the route he will take. Then again, this was the same promise that DGW’s notorious Evan Stone made when dismissing his clients in the Far Cry lawsuit.