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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Popehat comment: "Based on my observations throughout this case, it couldn't happen to more deserving criminals."

Which I totally agree with. When this situation started unrolling it really offended my sense of justice. Here were criminals using the judicial system as the tool for their crimes. It really showed how the US judicial systems costs and processes have created a mechanism for abuse. I wish sometimes there were some criminal law around abuse of a public institution which would capture this sort of thing more quickly and effectively.

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Has anyone started talking about what a sane process for handling online copyright infringement would look like, or are we just going to continue this trolls vs. pirates thing forever?

It will be hard for change to happen with the copyright trolls being entrenched/moneyed vs. the pirates grass roots/technical. Each will continue to go with their strengths, which mostly don't interact except in their attempts to work around the other.

Has anyone started talking about what a sane process for handling online copyright infringement would look like

Yes: reduce the term of copyright and expand fair use.

However, while Prenda used copyright infringement as a cudgel in these cases, there was no infringement in any of the suits that they brought.

At the very least, reduce the bizarre, surrealistic damage amounts.

It wouldn't look so different than the system we have now. The justice system assumes a lot of good faith by participants (not limited to copyright law). It's somewhat slow to react to bad actors because first assumption is that they aren't bad.

It feels like this whole saga is evidence that the system isn't as broken as we think it is. Remember, no set of rules we come up with can eliminate the possibility of fraud on either side of the debate.

Eventually we will have something like tor with enough bandwidth to handle large files and then there will be nothing for the trolls to do.

I believe this way more likely than a complete change of U.S. copyright law.

IANAL

From my following of the ADA abuse, which is fairly rampant and basically equivalent to these two, the only real solution is getting a lawyer designated as a vexatious litigant[0] which is a very high standard to reach. I'm not sure if every state even has such a designation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_St...

Hansmeier actually got into ADA trolling after the porn thing dried up. Of course, he couldn't even do that "honestly" (if there was such a thing): https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131110/23180225191/turns...

Hilariously:

> "We consider ourselves to be an advocacy association more than we consider ourselves a law firm," [Paul Hansmeier] said. "With the porn reputation, I wanted to shift my focus and focus on something more positive. We're really focused on doing it right so anyone who hears about us says, 'Yeah. This is the right way to go about it.'"

There's a pretty strong bias built into the system against designating any lawyer a vexatious litigant. Filing lawsuits is how a great many lawyers pay the bills, after all, and they don't want to be looking over their shoulder every time they file.

There was a woman in the SF bay area who was finally restricted from filing lawsuits, but look what she had to do before the courts took action:

>McColm, a law school graduate, has acted as her own attorney in filing dozens of lawsuits against public agencies, tenants, banks, neighbors, physicians, newspapers, lawyers and insurance firms.

>Litigating with McColm "is a time-consuming and incredibly expensive quagmire," the homeowners' brief said. "Discovery becomes hand-to-hand combat and litigation a war of attrition as McColm filed motion after motion without regard to the merits of any arguments or the veracity of the facts."

>Among McColm's lawsuits was one for injunctive relief from children next door playing basketball in their own back yard.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-woman-vexatious-litig...

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