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I was childishly hoping for some explosive TV-style courtroom drama but this leaves me satisfied. One thing I don't understand is why all the shadowy connectio

• MichaelGG 14y ago
  From the bits I've read, you must disclose who has interest in a copyright suit. And you can't sell the "right to sue" to other entities. So if company X owns a movie, and wants company Y to sue on its behalf, Y must list X as having interest in the suit or X must transfer all rights to Y.
  • parfe 14y ago
    Right but if they just had company A owned by dude X purchase the rights and hired company B owned by dude Y as legal counsel what would the problem be? How is that different than any other copyright suit? I'm not understanding why they needy the shadowy shell corporation structure. Edit: prenda has problems with a fake CEO and other issues of who is responsible for what. That's really what confused me. Why not just put one guy in charge and the other as legal counsel?
    • will_brown 14y ago
      By statute the Copyright Act provides for attorney's fees to the prevailing party (Plaintiff only). An attorney representing themselves (or with interest in the matter) is not entitled to the statutory attorney's fees, so it appears that ownership of the company was willfully obscured by the Firm so the Firm could represent the Company and seek prevailing party fees that they would otherwise not be entitled to. You are correct a lawyer can purchase IP or a Company that owns IP and enforce the same, they can hire another attorney to represent them (as you suggested), and if they win be entitled to attorney's fees, or they could represent themselves but not be entitled to prevailing party attorney's fees. To take it a step further, even if an attorney owned the IP, and had the Firm he/she worked for represent the individual attorney this can still be very problematic. Here they appear to be having their cake and eating it too, not only does it appear to be willful fraud on the Court but willful fraud on the Court by a officer of the Court. As the saying goes the lawyer that represents themselves has a fool for a client.
      • parfe 14y ago
        Thank you. So their scheme might be something like sue someone for $1,000 or whatever, and if they win collect $10,000 in attorney fees. But without the shadow ownership, they would only be entitled to the $1,000? edit: although on rereading my hypothetical, I still don't understand why strictly separating ownership of the media company and the law firm wouldn't have been sufficient.
        • deleted 14y ago
          [deleted]
        • simcop2387 14y ago
          There's a pretty decent chance that it would have been sufficient to satisfy all of that, but that's not what they chose to do it seems. They instead created a company that they owned, put someone else's name on it with alleged forged signatures that had little idea what was going on ( Cooper ) and tried to do that while controlling both so that they'd have complete discretion to sue and collect fees.
        • will_brown 14y ago
          >I still don't understand why strictly separating ownership of the media company and the law firm wouldn't have been sufficient. Lawyers are not allowed to knowingly misrepresent facts to the Court. So the Firm's interest would/should always be revealed. Ownership can always be traced back, this generally is revealed during discovery, but if as alleged the true ownership was not revealed because the very Firm who both is attorney of record and actually owns the the Plantiff's Company and the Firm willfully misrepresented that to the Court - never-mind the allegation of identify theft to deceive the Court.