So apparently federal courts in Illinois consider email to be sufficient to serve someone notice of a lawsuit, including for our-of-state defendants. Now we have a case of a woman in Florida facing a default judgement for copyright infringement because she missed her summons.
Apparently it was in the junk mail of a lesser-used inbox.
Kinda scary to think that getting behind on your email could cost you $250k. I don't think it should work that way...
She really was doing some overt infringement with her merchandise, so it was legally justified to send her a cease and desist and follow up with litigation. It sounds like the record label was targeting a number of unauthorized merchants in one lawsuit.
But she never had a real chance to defend herself, and the judgement against her is not proportionate to the actual damages.
Email is not a realistic solution to process serving. Nobody would expect something this important to be paperless.
@Alex obligatory statement that legally justified extortion by record labels is still extortion.
@cy Agreed, but this isn't really one of those cases of extortion, such as when record labels send toothless threats of litigation unless you settle, just hoping to settle with people fearful of ligation.
This is a combination of two issues: artificially high damages with the expectation that the damages will be argued down in court, and a flimsy summons system that prevented the defendant from receiving a cease and desist or summons, and being unable to argue down the damages in court.
@Alex That sounds to me like extortion and abusing the justice system. At least "toothless" litigation wouldn't result in court summons, but this way drains money and effort both out of our courts and the victims of extortion.
It's probably part of the reason the court only sent an email; I'd assume they're understaffed and processing a high volume of fraudulent but technically legal claims.
@cy I'm sure there are plenty of shortcomings to address, but I don't really care to make assumptions.
Going after for-profit counterfeiters is not very predatory, I don't see how suing someone for selling unlicensed merchandise meets the definition of extortion, and lawsuits often start with the maximum allowed damages until they can discover the actual scale of infringement.
The only major shortcoming I can actually see is that the defendant's right to a defense was unjustly forfeited.
@Alex She's not a for-profit counterfeiter she's a lady with a heart condition and medical bills. But yes I'll grudgingly give the benefit of the doubt that MAYBE they didn't know suing her for more than they could possibly win in court would result in the court failing to properly notify her she was even getting sued. but:
1) they didn't cancel the debt
2) they don't get punished for betting on the courts failing
3) they have a high volume of lawsuits
so that's why I call it extortion.
@cy I empathize with her heart condition, but I doubt that information was even available to the record label, nor is it a factor in this situation at all.
Regardless of that context, selling merchandise on Amazon is a for-profit endeavor, she was absolutely selling counterfeit merchandise.
They have, as of yesterday evening, dropped the judgement against her because of media pressure and the iffy details surrounding the lawsuit, which is good because this wasn't a fair judgement.
@Alex I thought the whole point of process serving via neutral third party was to prove the person received the summons. You can’t feasibly do that via email.
I can’t believe this was even considered, let alone legally binding.