This is not some dramatic news, but I wanted to write about it anyway: Christmas Eve demands a light and cheerful mood, so I want to share a recent order in Malibu Media LLC v. Farler (INND 13-cv-00071 ) that made me chuckle.

Lipscomb / Nicoletti / Malibu Media / X-Art trolls continue to game the judicial system boldly, pretending that thousands of their extortion lawsuits are about justice, recouping of damages, and deterring piracy. Reindeershit. It’s all about squeezing money from low and middle class, while purported victims — pornographers — are making obscene amounts of money by filming yesterday’s children having sex.

These lawsuits were never meant to see the courtroom: even a fourth grader, who has just started mastering math, can easily prove that if trolls were serious about litigation, Lipscomb and his local puppets would need to clone themselves dozens of times to handle the load and not to run afoul of the Rules of Professional Conduct:

A lawyer’s workload must be controlled so that each matter can be handled competently.

Some judges see the root of the problem. While they cannot rule against the law, no matter how unfair that law is, they have a lot of leverage to call out trolls’ scummy strategies. Like this: Indiana Magistrate Christopher A. Nuechterlein used some harsh words to deny Paul Nicoletti’s motion to appear telephonically at the January 17 hearing in South Bend, Indiana:

The court is aware that Plaintiff’s counsel is from out of state, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, but the court also assumes that Plaintiff’s counsel is and was aware when this action was filed that this court sits in South Bend, Indiana. As a consequence, Plaintiff’s counsel must also have been aware that there may be occasions when counsel must personally appear in South Bend. This is one such occasion.

We need more orders like this, let the trolls run like rats in the wheel to our amusement.