On his website he has "More than 30,000 people have settled their cases for between $3,000 - $12,000. Were you one of them?"

Last year I led a Startup Weekend team for crowd-sourced legal defense, 1) for people mentioned above to pool together a large defense front so more cases like these would end up in court, and 2) for people already there like Joel, who are seriously outgunned financially which hurts society as a whole by allowing bad precedence to be set.

The inspiration for #2 came from George Hotz getting a mass of donations in under 2 days when he was sued by Sony for hacking the PS3, enough that he had to stop taking them.

I still think it's a great idea, although perhaps not legally tenable. In any case just throwing it out there.