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Comment by Thiez | Hacker News Reader

In a reasonable world, shouldn't the copyright troll be suing the girl instead? Presumably she sold the troll an exclusive license (otherwise the copyright troll wouldn't be interested in obtaining the license) which she must have lied about because she had already licensed the photo to your wife.

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well i think the defense lawyer was a bit disingenuous. I guess the only step should have been to confirm the agreement with the girl, forward it to troll and then tell them you have a license so get lost or see you in court. But it looks like they didn't go to court at all...

My understanding is that the troll would love to take it to court and keep it there until you can't afford to fight anymore.

Court costs trolls too. They don't want things in court. They want you to settle.

Trolls adore it when people settle out of court - but the cost of occasionally bankrupting people to scare everyone else into compliance tends to be accepted.

Bear in mind that a lot of times the patent troll either has a practicing lawyer on staff or has an intimate relation with one - so they're considering the cost of labour rather than the market rate.

If your defence is straightforward, then turning up in court and defending yourself is still a cheap option, is it not?

Without hiring a lawyer, how can you know if your defence is straightforward or not?

You can hire a lawyer just to give you advice. You don’t have to retain the lawyer for the case. In a lot of cases retaining a lawyer only ends up costing 10-15 hours of their time and if you’re going to court anyways add there fees to your court costs in the counter suit.

IIRC, so long as you made a settlement offer early on in the process for some low value, from that point onwards if the case eventually gets decided in the defendant's favor or even if it doesn't but the judgement awarded is less favorable than the settlement offer, then the plaintiff is liable for any legal fees after the settlement. There have been plaintiffs that won in court, were awarded a judgement, but wound up having to pay more to the defendant than what the judgement was even for. It's a rule 68 offer of judgment that triggers this fee shifting and is meant to disincentivize pointless litigation after a reasonable settlement offer has been made.

Interesting... I've never heard of this and none of our lawyers in frivolous lawsuits have brought it up. (Although none of the cases have gone to trial...)

It would only apply in federal court, there are nuances surrounding the fact that the offer must have been unilaterally better than the actual judgement (i.e. if the offer came with an NDA attached, the judgement probably wouldn't). Here's a great video going over a case where this happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSs5bQGxpas

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