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Comment by hn_throwaway_69 | Hacker News Reader

I take the view that there needs to be a penalty for people who send out these letters but fail in their ultimate claim.

If you send cease and desist letters without merit you should be forced to indemnify the respondent for the entirety of their attorney's fees and pay exemplary damages.

This would require lawyers to make a careful assessment about prospects of success, rather than hoping to scare the other side into capitulation.

These heavy handed tactics are just dreadful and shouldn't be accepted in any rational legal system.

To avoid doubt, I'm not saying that their claim doesn't have merit. Unfortunately you will need to pay a lawyer to find out.

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This is a great idea.

What is particularly galling to me is how media companies trying to protect their content rights make completely meritless legal claims such as mass sending false DMCA requests to video sites saying that they own some work that is completely false, with no punishment for spamming out factually incorrect claims and harming people. That whole messed up system has been commented on many times in other threads.

For actual legal filings, the only issue is that how a "case without merit" is defined is probably very subjective, because legislation can be very complex and lawyers can make a legal argument backed up by some statute for just about anything. There needs to be an extremely high standard for what constitutes a meritless case that should be punished in this way, because otherwise it also makes seeking restitution for wrongs risky, and that's not a good outcome either.

Similarly good ideas in this vein IMO include: simplifying the language of laws, making the actual text of laws more easily accessible, and sunsetting/time-limits on old legislation so that old ideas that no longer make sense aren't kept permanent due solely to bureaucratic inertia.

>> This is a great idea.

Indeed, but cottage industry of ambulance chasing lawyers are heavily lobbying politicians to not let these great ideas see light of the day.

I mean, if they have to take it to court I would recommend that they countersue for the trademark and the .net domain.

> I take the view that there needs to be a penalty for people who send out these letters but fail in their ultimate claim.

There's also a need to penalize domain squatting. While the avaricious company is in the wrong here, but own.com was showing a generic static page with links for many years, which is clearly domain squatting hoping to speculate on the three-letter domain.

Both are wrong, even if the domain squatter is legally allowed to do so. How many domains is OP speculating with?

I don't disagree, but I know many lawyers do. They believe it will just cause the reverse problem, that you'll be afraid to sue even when you have good cause. The rich win either way.

It seems to me that there are enough cases of obvious misbehavior like this that don't get punished, but I get that it would open up a lot of risks where it would be a matter of opinion. They hate judgment calls if they can possibly avoid them.

They like the law to be black and white, which means they rarely punish lawsuits that follow the rules. Even when it's clear to anyone else that the rules are being abused.

I believe you can usually file in small claims court to recover your legal fees.

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