Not many that I know of. (A lot of my extended family are lawyers).
Or even worse, they can lose their entire livelihood by being disbarred.
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$125,000 in fines for D&D pirates? Help me do the math...
- Thread starter Emirikol
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Not many that I know of. (A lot of my extended family are lawyers).
Or even worse, they can lose their entire livelihood by being disbarred.
Yep. Murder.
Other than that, all illegal acts have a statute of limitations.
Determining what it is in a given situation, however, can be tricky in certain cases. Many laws have clauses that extend a statute beyond what you might think or require a certain trigger to start the clock running.
This is probably the one big reason why many of my friends who went into into the medical profession, are no longer doctors today. Apparently they've been sued one too many times, that their malpractice insurance premiums (or other insurance) make it no longer viable to be a practicing medical doctor.
A big AMEN! Lawsuits and malpractice are a HUGE factor. (Another is many Medical InsCos- both private and the Gov't- tendencies to pay claims late...and underpaying when they do.)
My Dad is an MD, and I can remember to this day the one that got him. Completely baseless from a medical standpoint, a slam-dunk. But the terms of his malpractice insurance had a threshold for claims below which the InsCo would not pay to defend, and would only settle. Refusal to settle and hiring his own attorney would also cap his potential coverage to the amount of the initial claim for which he didn't settle.
This means if you are sued for $10k, but don't want to settle...if you lose at trial and are fined $100k, the InsCo is only on the hook for $10K, regardless of the policy's face value.
(This, BTW, is typical.)
So he settled.
SiderisAnon
First Post
Read your history. The legal system has ALWAYS been a tool for the rich or powerful. Legal systems are created by the rich and powerful and so reflect the necessary tools for them to use. This doesn't mean that the "common" man can't use the legal system to their advantage, just that they may have to work a little bit harder at it because they don't have attorneys on staff. However, the US has a huge availability for the common man to use the same tool, the legal system, to protect their own rights. (If it weren't so easy for just anyone to use, there wouldn't be so many stories of abusing the system.)
As for avoiding "the requirements of legal justice", I would point out that civil suits such as what WoTC filed are in most basic fact the tools to acquire legal justice. Something WoTC feels is unjust has occurred. WoTC sues the entity they think is responsible. There is a legal process. The judge or the jury decides which party is in the right. Hence you have legal justice. (Or as close as we're likely to get. It may not always seem like the "right" party wins, but in general the party who is in the right due to the law is the one who wins.)
As for civil court being the "runaround to the right to an attorney", this makes no sense if you understand how our system works. In a criminal matter, you have a right to an attorney. This is ONLY in a criminal matter. In any other matter, you have no right to an attorney or any other kind of legal representation. It's simply not a right that you have. You may have the right to sue, but there's nothing that says that society has to give you an attorney to do it with.
The right to an attorney comes about because of the idea that since society is charging you with a crime and you have a right to defend yourself fully and properly, then SOCIETY has a responsibility to provide you with an attorney to help you with that defense. The right to an attorney is only because of the right to a proper defense in a criminal matter. (And it's only criminal. If the government sues you because you failed to honor a contract with them, you don't get a public defender there either.)
It will depend on if anyone wants to be a hard-ass.
Sometimes, the winning party will take a token payment- often, somewhere around the cost of actual damages- and a written commitment do "not do it again." This is usually done with the understanding that if they do do it again, they will seek full enforcement of the order or settlement.
And from what I understand, such things usually aren't extinguished by Bankruptcy. (That's not my field, though.)
OTOH, its possible the defendants may wind up paying out $120/wk to WotC for the next 20 years.
If they don't pay...then other penalties can kick in.
Sometimes, the winning party will take a token payment- often, somewhere around the cost of actual damages- and a written commitment do "not do it again." This is usually done with the understanding that if they do do it again, they will seek full enforcement of the order or settlement.
And from what I understand, such things usually aren't extinguished by Bankruptcy. (That's not my field, though.)
OTOH, its possible the defendants may wind up paying out $120/wk to WotC for the next 20 years.
If they don't pay...then other penalties can kick in.
Some people will do weird or extreme things to avoid paying at all. It's sort of like their implicit way of giving the middle finger to the other party.
One way is to get one's self totally into heavy debts in over their heads, and file for chapter 7 bankruptcy. In one case, I even knew of one guy who ended up a homeless drunk/stoner on welfare for several years before filing for bankruptcy. His creditors were directed to skid row if they wanted to find him.
Cerebral Paladin
First Post
Obligatory and probably unnecessary disclaimer
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice and I am not *your* lawyer.
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As others have said, "general deterrence," meaning punishing one person for something to prevent others from doing the same thing, is a basic justification for punishment in the American legal system. It is generally accepted as a valid reason (although not the only valid reason) in both the civil and criminal contexts.
Second, "cruel and unusual punishment" is absolutely not implicated in this case. First, in order to apply, the punishment must be both "cruel" *and* "unusual." Even if you could argue that a large fine was cruel, which would be a tough argument to make, it would be very hard to argue that large fines are unusual punishments. Second and more conclusively, the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments only applies to criminal penalties, not to civil penalties as here.
Third, there are limits on the scope of punitive damages under the Due Process clause, but it is highly unlikely that those limits would be applied to strike down a copyright judgment for a couple hundred thousand dollars. The cases where those have been invoked have usually been where damages were in the thousands of dollars and the punitive damages were in the many millions or billions of dollars.
Fourth, because this was a settlement, both parties agreed. That frequently involves waiving any claims that the demand of the other party violated the law-- after all, the point of settling is that both sides agree that it's better for them to stop litigating and be done with what they agreed to. If you can then continue to litigate, it kinda defeats the point. Even if they just concluded that going to trial would drive the legal fees up to a point where the settlement would be less bad, that's a perfectly acceptable reason for a settlement in our legal system.
Fifth, the fact that this might be something that a DA or US Attorney could prosecute doesn't mean that WotC didn't have a legal right to sue civilly. Let's say I'm walking down the street and John Doe jumps out of an alley and beats me badly, sending me to the hospital and costing me thousands of dollars in medical fees. Has he committed the crime of aggravated assault (or some such) or the tort (i.e. civil wrong, offense against me) of battery? Both, of course. I can sue him and demand payment of my medical fees, plus extra for pain and suffering and such. The DA could prosecute him for the crime. Those are really separate legal actions with relatively little interconnectedness (technically, there's a little-- if he got convicted in the criminal case, I could use that to prove my civil case, but not vice versa).
And if the DA chose not to file charges? Nothing I could do about it, except I suppose to support their opponent at the next election. So contrary to what others suggested, WotC couldn't force the DA or US Atty to bring a criminal suit.
That also means, incidentally, that the suggestion that the offenders could be facing prison time because of WotC's suit is wrong. You only go to prison if the gov't brings a criminal suit against you, and I've seen nothing suggesting that there was a pending criminal suit or that that played a role in the settlement. But the availability of large statutory damages does make the settlement potentially make sense from the point of view of the defendants. And the possibility of getting some payment, cutting off their legal fees, and getting the publicity of a successful effort to punish piracy makes it potentially make sense for WotC.
Well, hypothetically, if wizard (and any other company) is able to charge a few random people in court and settle for large sums of money, then it really doesn't matter to them if piracy flourishes or not, doesn't it?
If anything, it seems more profitable to find well-to-do people who pirate your stuff and then sue them.
If anything, it seems more profitable to find well-to-do people who pirate your stuff and then sue them.
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