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Full-Text Articles in Civil Procedure
Defense Against The Dark Arts Of Copyright Trolling, Matthew Sag, Jake Haskell
Defense Against The Dark Arts Of Copyright Trolling, Matthew Sag, Jake Haskell
Faculty Publications & Other Works
In this Article, we offer both a legal and a pragmatic framework for defending against copyright trolls. Lawsuits alleging online copyright infringement by John Doe defendants have accounted for roughly half of all copyright cases filed in the United States over the past three years. In the typical case, the plaintiff's claims of infringement rely on a poorly substantiated form pleading and are targeted indiscriminately at noninfringers as well as infringers. This practice is a subset of the broader problem of opportunistic litigation, but it persists due to certain unique features of copyright law and the technical complexity of Internet …