Comment by bluGill
1 day ago
It is reasonably sure that each party has a 90% chance of suing if they have rights. There is a 90% chance someone will send you a cease and desist just because all 3 are the type that will do it if they think they have rights. There is a reasonable chance more than 1 will send a cease and desist (some weaselly "we are still checking rights but if we have them your notice starts now - just enough to avoid fraud if it turns out they don't have rights)
OK, but according to ChatGPT (so correct me if the AI is wrong), if you ignore the cease and desist, then the process goes into default judgement where the claimants now need to prove standing to collect judgement. You now know with 100% certainty that they need to hire someone to dig through a file vault at Iron Mountain to collect judgment and they're not going to bother doing that so the default judgement means nothing and you can go about your merry way ignoring their cease and desist.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that is wrong. Still consult a lawyer if you need real legal advice.
If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).
A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
They also will send a cease and desist when they know there is no chance in hell of winning a court case, but people might stop anyway because they are afraid of getting sued.
Ignoring such letters will result in absolutely nothing. The trick is to know which is which, and that is why you ask an attorney.
If you want to fight it in court, you go fight it in court and waste a bunch of money, but if you don't lift a finger, then it enters default judgement. But in default judgement, the plaintiff still needs to demonstrate standing. Otherwise, I could randomly sue a bunch of random people for random nonsense and bank on most of them entering into default judgement.
If I'm a patent troll spraying and praying patent violation suits, I still at the end of the process still need to prove to own the patent I claim I do.
In this case, we know there is a lower cost to producing the document that Activision will not want to bear because the total they can recover is below just the cost of producing the document that proves standing. Why would I not just let it go into default judgement, knowing it's toothless?
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How do you get to 100 percent certainty that they won't do that, or that they need to go through the file vault at all? What if someone just needs to find it in an email server or etc?
In the article: the documents in question was created before email or digital storage was used for this. It is believed that someone still has a copy in a file cabinet somewhere - but it will take a lot of manual effort to find it and nobody wants to do that if they don't have to.
> OK, but according to ChatGPT
Shut up.
If that’s the best argument you have, then you’ve got nothing.
I, like most people, don’t come here to see AI slop opinions. We can get that approximately everywhere else. We don’t need HN to be filled with AI confabulations, and if it were to happen, we would leave.
Did you not slide your eyes immediately to the right to see (so correct me if the AI is wrong)?
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