Just to give you an example what copyright trolling is about from our experience fighting NaughtyAmerica bogus suit. The point is to use predatory litigation as a leverage to claim damage from unprepared victim. It’s much easier to bring script creators and distribution platform to court than something like this https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fox-rothschild-dark-art-copyright-083142480.html (Paywall source: https://www.law.com/2018/07/13/fox-rothschild-and-the-dark-art-of-copyright-trolling/)
Say you are making scripts and put it on sale somewhere without proper contract in place. Copyright owner can potentially bring you to the US court on copyright and trademark infringement grounds. It makes it even worse if you are affiliate of that paysite as most affiliate agreements strictly prohibit making derivatives of any kind, changing or modifying content or using content out of permitted ways (usually limited to putting a banner on the site that you own or something like that), thus immediately putting you in position of contract breach.
Once the lawsuit is filled and you are served as a defendant you have to get into the litigation. If you don’t show up in the court then the case is decided in favor of a plaintiff who filled it. You need to get a lawyer and it’s better to be a good one. Some few people we talked to over the years can make a sense about digital copyright. It costs immediately $30k in retainer to get represented into copyright litigation with legal fees starting from $500/h for a decent lawyer. We were happy to have a very strong legal team that was dedicated to fight the case. Then you can bring all the arguments from the comments for this post into the court.
With the current legal architecture it does not really matter who is right or wrong, but how much money and time you have to fight the case. Normally trolls expect you to settle early in the process and pay a ransom and, say, move them the site and scripts on top of it.
Luckily NaughtyAmerica got severe outcome from that litigation:
- right before the settlement with us NA removed from position their 15y or something like that seasoned legal council Kevin Kachman who was their patent, trademark, copyright and corporate filler and keeper;
- NA paid hundreds of thousands in outstanding debt to affiliates which they likely planned to withhold by extortion with the same copyright trolling.
- NA copyright troll attorney Lincoln Bandlow got sanctioned in a parallel case https://abovethelaw.com/2019/03/biglaw-firm-sanctioned-over-willful-disobedience-of-court/
- NA lost any potential getting on SLR platform without fully compensating outstanding debt and legal fees.
As a part of the settlement they required us to keep the case resolution closed, but were told to fuck off, thus you guys can know the story.