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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> > They will have to respond to this

> Why?

They don't have to respond to the demand letter, but they do have to respond if a lawsuit if one is filed. If they don't, it's a default judgement for the plaintiff. (This is one of the things that is broken in the American legal system. You can force someone to spend a lot of money by suing them even if your complaint has no merit.)

So while they don't have to respond to a credible threat of a lawsuit, it would be prudent for them to do so because otherwise there is a real risk for them of having it cost a lot more.

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> they do have to respond if a lawsuit if one is filed. If they don't, it's a default judgement for the plaintiff.

Google's response will be very cheap for them, compared to the cost for the plaintiff (meaning, as a percentage of their respective incomes): that they have no legal obligation to provide the plaintiff any services whatever, and that the terms of service for the Google service the plaintiff was using clearly state that Google can terminate the account whenever it wants. Google's lawyers probably have a template for such a response all ready to go. The cost of this to Google won't even be rounding error in their financials.

I agree.

These aren't the first people Google has denied service to. They have defended this right before. They're not going up lose.

And Google has a salaried team of lawyers. This is a sunk cost. This case will cost them no more.

It's not prudent unless it's likely to both happen and succeed.

Not only is "I'll sue you" often just bluster, if they already think they're in the right —and I'm yet to understand that they're not— they'll be betting that you're not actually going to risk paying their legal fees to make a faulty argument in court.

In making that bet, only lose out by having their legal team engage with you. That's expensive. In a low risk scenario, it's easier and cheaper to wait until it actually counts.

> you're not actually going to risk paying their legal fees to make a faulty argument in court.

In the U.S. a losing plaintiff does not pay the defendant's legal fees unless the lawsuit is deemed to be frivolous, which hardly ever happens.

Which i think is a failure of the system - it makes some court cases that would be ruled in favour of the "small guy" to not take place instead, which makes the "big guy" win by default.

The US should adopt a small claims courts system which costs less (like a copyright small claims etc), which would admit frivolous DMCA take downs etc, as well as cases like these. And amend the damages awarded to include fees incurred as part of the case.

There are small-claims courts, but the limit on what you can sue for there is typically <$10k. Not enough if your entire livelihood is at stake, as it is in this case.

"It's not prudent unless it's likely to both happen and succeed."

No, that is incorrect - there is an asymmetry here which is (oddly) in the ops favor.

Paying my lawyer (for instance) to create and send a letter like this, etc., might cost me $3-800. Properly responding to it and covering all the bases and carrying out ones legal duties vis a vis google might cost 5x that.

... and the letter writer will be dealing with an entirely different operation at google. Real people will be considering the case.

Costs aside, you're still weighing up "the case", like it's a definite, or that by responding to a legal letter, that it's definitely not. In real life it's neither of those things.

Very few people actually litigate unless they have very strong grounds on well trodden rights. I'm trying to establish any grounds in other comments, but any lawyer looking to litigate this is going to have to warn to their clients that they're not going to win against Goliath. When you're dealing with a family that's just lost its only income, hiring a lawyer is even more unlikely.

And even if Google reads and responds with the best letter, solid reasons, the bulk of a real legal defence, short of some backtracking or a large payoff, there's no reason the devs wouldn't go on to sue.

For a case which would take a junior and a massive pile of existing case law and afternoon to dismiss, I don't see that making a new penpal here helps Google. It might be ten times the amount to read and respond to a letter, but it's twenty times less likely to happen.

And as I was recently reminded, Google's legal cost is sunk. Those lawyers are salaried Google employees. The cost to put them on this case for the ten minutes it'd take to defend is only measurable in what else they could be doing for Google.

How is it broken to require a defendant to respond to a lawsuit?

Because an innocent person can be bankrupted by repeatedly having to respond to frivolous lawsuits.

Can anyone find an example of that actually happening?

Not bankruptcy but this type of abuse? Sure:

https://dailyillini.com/news-stories/2013/04/26/suburban-exp...

He would intentionally file lawsuits in another county because he knew it's too much of a burden for many students to travel there for court hearings. Students just settle even if they think they're completely innocent.

I discussed this very particular issue with my friend who is an attorney, he mentioned that you can't actually abuse the system with frivolous lawsuits. Judges will start throwing your cases out and you can be disciplined by the BAR.

At the same you don’t think google is big enough to hire lawyers to file n-1 the amount to get fined or punished frivolous lawsuits against you and keep rotating lawyers?

No, because at n=3 the the judge will say “if you file another one of these, I’ll fine you $1,000,000, and Sundar better be here at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow so I can explain it to him personally.”

Courts and judges aren’t something to be truffled with.

So then a different google subsidiary with no clear connections will file the suit next. Also if google wants to do something or ruin someone a few million dollar fine isn't going to deter them one bit

Not that concept, just our specific implementation.

If person A decides they don't like you, they can sue you over and over and cost you tens of thousands of dollars and never get that back. If you don't reply to each with a lawyer and spend time and money fighting, you lose even more money.

There are some bandaids like having someone declared a vexatious litigant, but that also requires time and money. If you owned some small business, someone could certainly bankrupt you before you could stop them.

I don't know exactly what a solution looks like, but I do see this as a problem.

If person A decides they don't like you, they can sue you over and over and cost you tens of thousands of dollars and never get that back.

As an attorney, I’ve never even heard of that actually happening - other than prisoner litigation.

Moreover, a judge will order someone to stop filing cases if they are bringing frivolous claims, and can hold them in contempt if they do.

IANAL but my guess is that it costs money for the defendant to respond to a lawsuit, so if company A wants person B to stop doing something, even if person B is within their legal right to do so, company A can still force person B to stop, because either person B goes bankrupt fighting it or person B ignores it and company A has the judgement in their favor.

Because (if I understand correctly) the judge side with the plaintiff without looking at the case : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_judgment.

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