Therefore, trolls have no choice but to file individual lawsuits and name defendants, which is nothing more than a makeup on trolls’ ugly faces. While John Steele plays his last Grand Bluff with dozens of individual suits filed by local orcs across the country¹, other Mafioso families are not that active.

A wrong target

M. Keith Lipscomb, who is a mastermind of one of the most powerful extortion outfits that have been terrorizing this country for more than two years, and who wrestled hundreds (if not thousands) of his victims into settling without ever naming a single defendant, has squirted out his first individual lawsuit.

I always thought that Lipscomb, although being a nauseous creature, had a sharp logical mind. Seems it’s not the case, because he picked a clearly bad target. (Other trolls demonstrate surprising sloppiness in selecting their targets too — look at Lightspeed Media v. Adam Sekora, for instance, a lawsuit that is expected to seriously damage Lighspeed’s new shakedown business model.)

Lipscomb’s first individual lawsuit (Malibu Media, LLC v. Pelizzo, SDFL 1:12-cv-22768) targets a 61-old man, a citizen of Venezuela who was in that country from January 8 to August 20, while the alleged infringement was taking place from January 3 to May 29², according to the affidavit that was written photocopied by a German non-licensed “investigator” IPP International (Guardaley in disguise). The defendant never heard about Bittorent before the lawsuit, he is not likely a person who had ever downloaded pornography, and the identified address is located in a 700-unit condo AND the defendant has a wireless router, most likely unsecured.

It is fair to note that since the defendant’s IP address is dynamic, his claim that his IP address is not the one indicated in the complaint is irrelevant. Nonetheless, the very existence of such claim tells volumes about the defendant’s lack of understanding how Internet works, which adds a huge question to the validity of Lipscomb’s claims.

This affidavit accompanies a short yet decent Motion to Dismiss for Failure to State a Claim (attorney Francisco Ferreiro).

I have one plausible explanation of Lipscomb’s disastrous choice. According to the subsequent explanation (now striken), Lipscomb tried to contact the defendant a couple of times, but to no avail. It will be not a big stretch to suggest that Lipscomb smelled a default judgment hoping that the defendant wouldn’t reply to the summons. Trolls love default judgments: although the prospect of recovering tens of thousands is slim, those rulings are very effective in scaring others into submission, pretending that those judgments are victories on merits.

Whatever the real reason is, Lipscomb was apparently taken off the guard and quickly filed a response full of excuses. Seeing that this response oozes weakness and can potentially damage his future shakedown operations, Lipscomb changed his mind and decided to get rid of this document. To add insult to injury, he also apparently attached a document that he did not want Judge Seitz to see — I’ll talk about it below. He hastily filed a motion to withdraw the embarrassing material (which could jeopardize the case), and asked “that all parties that receive an inadvertent disclosure destroy the disclosure.” Naturally, this motion caught our attention, and we managed to preserve the document while it was available.

Pure Bill of Discovery or pure mockery of Justice?

The wrong attachment is a Miami-Dade county court order authorizing discovery, written by Lipscomb and signed by Judge Trawick, apparently without reading (this copy does not have a signature, yet according to a later Lipscomb’s motion, the discovery was officially granted).

I don’t want to analyze this document: read it and make your own conclusions. I only want to stress one thing. The practice when plaintiff’s and defendant’s attorneys write agreed orders that judges later sign without reading is bad enough, but when there is no opposition, this practice becomes a pure mockery of justice allowing ethically challenged plaintiff’s attorneys smuggle into orders whatever they want.

Trying to address these two bloopers, Lipscomb submits a Memorandum in Opposition to Motion to Dismiss, written in the familiar tone of a castrated weasel, which had his organ responsible for telling right from wrong removed (instead of testicles).

I briefly mentioned that this case has landed in the docket of Judge Patricia Seitz, which is an icing on the cake. She is the same judge who referred a miserable arrogant boy Perea to Florida’s bar for investigation. Another not-so-well-known fact is that Patricia Seitz is a daughter of a World War II hero Richard Seitz, and therefore she grew up in a family where “dignity,” “honor” and “honesty” were never bendable words, but real concepts – necessities no less important than food and clothing: something that Lipscomb will never be able to comprehend despite his academic achievements.

We are impatiently waiting for the judge’s decision.

Update

10/16/2012

It is getting interesting. Defendant’s attorney, Francisco Ferreiro, has filed an opposition to Lipscomb’s motion to withdraw/substitute documents today. While I articulated my opinion why Lipscomb wants to remove the document, I did not elaborate how he attempted to do it. Read the opposition that thoroughly explains Lipscomb’s bad faith, disrespect and outright lies. As a matter of fact, I overlooked another reason for Lipscomb’s desire to withdraw his filing: he filed the original document (and later brazenly lied that it was a honest mistake) right before the deadline, and now he attempts to smuggle a new version using a non-existent error as an excuse, 6 days after the deadline. Unbelievable crookery.

10/16/2012

Judge Seitz granted Lipscomb’s motion to withdraw allowing to substitute his “mistakenly” filed memorandum. It is always funny how in XXI century officials still order to destroy electronic documents that have been already made public.

10/26/2012

Defendant’s counsel, Francisco Ferreiro, filed a Response/Reply in support of Defendant’s motion to dismiss complaint, where he calmly reiterated why Lipscomb’s complaint should be put in a garbage basket dismissed. I recommend reading it — there are only five pages, which does not imply the lack of arguments: on the contrary, those arguments are clear as mountain air. I highly recommend every attorney to spend more time on Twitter — a mental gym for to exercising the brevity and clarity muscles.

Followups

¹Steele wants to convince his victims that he will go after everyone, yet he is not likely to cover a mere 1% of all the potential targets. In addition, named defendants are much more likely inclined to fight back, so the current Steele’s boogieman is already terminally ill.

²Lipscomb mentions a couple of times that “Plaintiff’s investigator has recorded Defendant’s IP Address uploading Plaintiff’s movies through the BitTorrent protocol 398 times.” This number is bogus: just look at the complaint’s exhibit and you will see that many instances were “recorded” in minute intervals. With the same impudence, Lipscomb could claim millions of infringements reducing the interval to milliseconds.