Another Northern Illinois summons...

[LennyDennis]

Last Friday, I got an email from a law firm in Chicago stating they have lodged a complaint against 'me' in Northern Illinois for copy right infringement. I assume this relates to a Redbubble account I had until January of this year.

Now, I say 'me' and assume it's from Redbubble for a reason as the court documents state that there are more than one defendant in this matter and they are listed in 'Schedule A' which is 'attached'. However, there is no schedule A attached. And having gone through the other documents, I cannot find any mention of myself or anything else that would identify me directly. All I have is this email, which does not even address me directly. Nor is there any direct information regarding the actual infringement I am apparently responsible for. All the docs show is a couple of random examples of the kind of infringement they are referring to (neither has anything to do with me) as well as lots of references to numerous platforms (incl. Redbubble). Nothing definitive at all.

Having done some research, I've tried to access the US PACER courts filing system as that does appear to contain the missing 'schedule A' document, however I cannot access this as whilst I can register with the site, the only way to access immediately is to provide a credit card for them to verify and they don't seem to allow UK credit cards. However, my feeling is that Schedule A is going to be a list of anon user names and\or email addresses from the various platforms their complaint refers to.

I'm not a US citizen and nor am I or ever have been resident in the USA. So how would be best to approach this? From what I've read, it seems that these guys are well known for this approach, obviously to scare people into settling, mostly as people like me have no realistic way of fighting it without incurring crippling expense.

Would it be best to write to the court detailing the above failing on the firms part, as well as the "I'm not from the US" aspect and thus not in their jurisdiction? Or reach out to the legal firm in question and negotiate as best a settlement as possible?? Or both?

I'm speaking with a UK based lawyer tomorrow on the matter, but I obviously expect this to be very high level stuff, as clearly he's not going to be an expert in US law on this matter!!

[AndyJ]

Hi Lenny and welcome to the forum.

I assume from the 'Another' in the title of this thread you have seen the two other threads which concern this particular species of demand letter: viewtopic.php?t=3532 and viewtopic.php?t=3102
As you will have seen we have had no reports about any of these cases going to trial, although a couple of the earlier posters do seem to have settled their cases.

I'm afraid that you are right and your lawyer based here in the UK will be unable to provide much detailed advice on the legal situation in the USA. My gut feeling is that this operation relies on scaring defendants with threats but without any actual litigation taking place. It only costs a few dollars to file a claim with the Illinois court and get the official looking paperwork, but beyond a clerk at the front desk, no-one in the court will have scrutinised the paperwork or be interested in it until such time as the claimant's lawyers decide to proceed. I don't think they do this, firstly because they don't want to incur any further costs and secondly because any court which is paying attention should be very sceptical (one would hope) about the one sided and very inadequate evidence, not to mention the lack of specificity in the alleged individual infringements.

But I stress that we are working with an inadequate set of facts. Because I am not your lawyer I cannot advise you on how to conduct a defence against this claim, but as you have said yourself, they seem to have very little information which identifies you personally, which would make it both difficult and more expensive to enforce any order, made by a US court, here in the UK.