The Honor System (2012)
esquire.com
esquire.com
The story to me is less about intellectual property and more about having a stalker. Celebrities, but also just normal people who happen to be attractive have to deal with similar stuff often. If you have something, or even just represent something, you likely develop a vigilence for people like this random character trying to use leverage, blackmail, and other ultimately destructive tactics to weave themselves into your story, so that the story they tell themselves and others can be about you and what you represent, instead of them, and what they know themselves to be. Sad and weird, but also, surprisingly consistent with other variations, just this time with magic.
The judgement included $15k in damages, $30k for costs, and $500k in attorney's fees. Teller had asked for $989,568 in attorney's fees, so it sounds like the only real winner here was the lawyer.
https://www.courthousenews.com/teller-gets-545000-in-magic-f...
But how did he rack up 1m when it was a default judgment...
I'm assuming that Teller didn't do any of that himself and had his lawyers organize it all. This "default judgment" was many months in the making because the guy stayed hidden.
So, they're engaged with a ton of different industries, not to mention as stage performers who interact with audience members, they're frequently exposed to the public in risky ways.
They almost certainly have a large and very expensive team of lawyers. What a large team of expensive lawyers would reasonably charge to chase down a defendant across multiple nation's borders over several months, I wouldn't dare to guess.