LawFuel.com – Legal News Daily – Possible sanctions against the RIAA legal team over their “clever scheme” of using tactics in joinder cases could seriously affect lawsuits being brought by major music companies like Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi University and Sony BMG.
The use of ‘John Doe’ cases, in this case involving University of Maine students, can be used to effectively threaten a number of people at the same time, instead of making the companies pursue individual cases.
Magistrate judge Margaret J. Kravchuk wrote: “These plaintiffs have devised a clever scheme to obtain court-authorized discovery prior to the service of complaints, but it troubles me that they do so with impunity and at the expense of the requirements of Rule 11(b)(3) because they have no good faith evidentiary basis to believe the cases should be joined.”
