Indiana Intellectual Property Law News
Indianapolis, Indiana — An intellectual property attorney has filed seven new copyright suits in the Southern District of Indiana on behalf of Malibu Media, LLC of Los Angeles, California alleging that seven John Doe defendants infringed Malibu Media’s copyrighted works.
Copyright lawyer Paul Nicoletti is again in federal court on behalf of Malibu Media asserting infringement of the company’s intellectual property. In this current round, Malibu Media’s latest incursion into the federal court system, seven new and nearly identical lawsuits have been filed against anonymous John Doe defendants, each claiming copyright infringement. The Defendants allegedly used the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol to illegally download, copy and distribute elements of various works of Malibu Media’s copyrighted material.
Malibu Media seeks a permanent injunction barring the Defendants from engaging in infringing activities; an order by the court to remove infringing materials from all computers of each Defendant; an award of statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work and reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.
Practice Tip: There is a significant disparity in the dollar amount awarded in default judgments against defendants in copyright infringement cases involving BitTorrent. In two separate cases, Judge William T. Lawrence recently ordered two defendants who failed to appear to pay $20,000 for the copyright infringement that was deemed to have been admitted by the defendants’ failure to defend against the allegations. See here and here. However, in a similar case, Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson ordered an entry of default judgment against a defendant for $151,425, the full amount requested.
These were filed by Paul J. Nicoletti of Nicoletti & Associates, PLLC. The cases have been assigned to District Judges William Lawrence, Jane Magnus-Stinson, Sarah Evans Barker, and Richard Young in the Southern District of Indiana, and assigned Case Nos. 1:13-cv-01518-WTL-TAB, 1:13-cv-01520-SEB-DML, 1:13-cv-01521-SEB-TAB, 1:13-cv-01522-RLY-DKL, 1:13-cv-01523-SEB-DML, 1:13-cv-01524-JMS-DKL, and 1:13-cv-01525-SEB-DKL.