Cruel and Unreasonable
Sadly the court can't rule on damages for accusations of being an Adam Sandler fan.
Damn the U.S. Court system!
Hollywood lawyers have been ordered to foot more than $17,000 in legal bills after falsely accusing a bloke of illegally downloading and sharing the Adam Sandler flick The Cobbler. Thomas Gonzales, of Oregon, US, was sued by legal eagles retained by the movie's makers on the basis that an IP address he paid for was being used …
No, it was probably someone with very advanced Alzheimer's who mistook it for a proper movie that would actually entertain a human viewer.
Grown Ups was good though. Speaking of which, I have 2TB of media for anyone who greets me and says; "gimmie the goods, me ol' son!" That is 460 SD quality movies and about 100+ mostly complete TV shows from 60s cartoons classics and up until present day, and only shit someone would watch over and over again, classic stuff for nerds and wannabe nerds alike. It's like Hulu that is not 80% garbage shows the networks gave up on. You must provide your own 3TB disk device for the copy. It takes about a day to copy it on one RPi with the lowly USB 2.0 ports, but it gets there in the end.
The RIAA and MPAA cannot stop SneakerNet. I fucking shit on those guys. Every. Single. Day.
Clearly Mr Gonzáles knows what he's doing, judging by his meticulous record keeping (e.g., the 55.2 hours of legal advice and the parking tickets). Well done to him, and I hope he will also be able to claim for his own time spent fighting off those ambulance chasers.
It's just too bad Eddie Murphy quit being allowed to release stinkers as Adam doesn't have as much competition for all time most razzie awards winner (Sly Stallone right up there too but sadly Adam has a lot more years left, groan). Winning both worst actress and worst actor in the same movie for Jack and Jill was pretty "impressive".
>What about Steven Seagall?
Actually thought of far worse a few minutes after posting but just now got around to reminding everyone of the horror. When it comes to the lifetime low score on rotten tomatoes tough to beat Larry the Cable Guy (sorry being the voice of Mater doesn't make up for the craptastic movies).
These guys are like the private car parking fine agents. They operate a private 'infringement' system outside the local councils and the authorities jurisdiction. Where I live, if it's a private operator, and even if they get your details, just don't pay *, despite the warning letters.
* This is not legal advice, I recommend that you seek professional legal advice.
Nah - Thats just the lawyers mantra
"Someone is going to get fucked at both ends and we don't care if it's our client or the opposition"
Plaintiffs lawyers create a mountain of BS = loadsachargeablehours
Defendants lawyers read the mountain of BS = loadsachargeablehours
Everybody who is a lawyer wins wins wins$$$$
In the magistrate's ruling, the company (whose name is "Cobbler", so one might reasonably impute their existence to this one movie) objected to the award of parking fees. She excluded (page 13) the parking expenses of $12.40. However, the company did not object to the number of lawyer hours nor the rate of $us 312 per hour. So yes, Virginia, there is honor among [class which includes some lawyers]. Furthermore, the magistrate amply considered the "reasonableness of the billing rate", even though it was not objected to, and found it right and just. So yes, Virginia, "Money always flows towards lawyers".
IANAL, but I wonder if she could have gone further. She objects to the company's lawyers' tactics, yet she holds back from calling it ~conduct which tends to put the administration of justice into disrepute~ (or whatever the phrase is) (which it clearly is) and throwing them, the company's lawyers, in the brick house.
No, I'm not talking about the specter of a country's resources being depleted over an item that you could probably buy for $1 on DVD at the discount rack. And if you got caught stealing that item, the consequences would be relatively minor. That, too. But about the tactics she explicitly objected to in her ruling.
"How do you put a value on damage done to his public image by being accused of watching Adam Sandler?"
what always gets me on these things though is that the guy who makes the accusation is neither the one who suffers from a false accusation not the one who pays the bill if the court says damages due ... there needs to be a way to make the lawyers themselves take responsibility for their actions, not hide behind "I was only obeying the client's orders". Same as there needs to be a way to make "no win no fee" lawyers also liable for the other side's costs (if they share the winnings, they share the losses on exactly the same basis, and as individuals, not hiding behind corporate shields) ...
Since the judges also acknowledge the worrying trend with lawyers exploiting the system, perhaps it's time to introduce punitive rewards for vexatious prosecutions.
Plaintiffs should have a realistic prospect of winning their case on the evidence presented in court, not the defendant failing to turn up.
I was in LA for few months this year, the ISP sent the person I was staying with a notice that IP had been detected on torrent networks.
As it happened the wifi had been hacked, every time we changed the passwords they got back in, must have had a network sniffer.
We hid the SSID and even got a new router, still got in.
We pointed out wifi is not possible to secure and suggested they investigate themselves if they wish to take it further.
What amazed me was that there were 32 wifi SSID's visible on my laptop, biggest issue was them bumping into each other.
I hate the way these film companies go after people, it is like killing one ant and expecting it to make a difference.
The greed of studios is the root of this, instead of fighting they should embrace the torrent arena as a market, produce a product for it and price it at a price affordable for that market.
> As it happened the wifi had been hacked, every time we changed the passwords they got back in, must have had a network sniffer.
(Aside: are you sure they got in via the wifi? For example, if you go into the access point do you see their MAC address associated with the access point?)
Anyway, to deal with this:
1. Choose a very long and genuinely random pre-shared key. At least 96 bits of entropy (randomness) so that it can't be brute-forced offline.
e.g. use this under Linux or OSX for a 16 character key:
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=12 | base64
2. Install this key manually on your router and on all the clients. *Don't* use any auto-security-setup button you have (e.g. anything labelled "WPS")
3. Make sure there are no other ways into your network - e.g. you are not using any powerline ethernet devices.
If you are, you'll want to reset the keys on those too. Best to take them all to a completely separate location, plug them in, reset the keys, then bring them back home.
We hid the SSID and even got a new router, still got in.
Hiding the SSID is a rather pointless exercise.