January 28, 2014 ruling<\/a>, Federal Court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in New York granted Ed’s client Richard Noble\u2019s motion for email service of court papers on several defendants. \u00a0The defendants which are\u00a0\u201ca number of websites and individuals\u201d that \u201care part of an intertwined, opaque online T-Shirt-selling enterprise that has sold T-Shirts bearing the \u2018Bo Knows\u201d photograph [of Bo Jackson], in violation of Mr. Noble\u2019s rights\u201d in the copyright of the photograph.<\/p>\nThe judge gave his permission to serve process via e-mail where traditional service (ie handing the defendant the actual papers) is impractical. \u00a0The court ruled that \u201cNoble has more than shown the impracticability of traditional service. He had been shown that actual prior attempt, performed with due diligence, have been unsuccessful.\u201d The Court also found that email service comports with Due Process because \u201cNoble has served the defendants at email addresses that they listed on their websites and on confirmation stating, “emails sent to [Noble\u2019s] lawyer, Edward Greenberg, after Greenberg purchased T-Shirts from defendants.<\/p>\n
The judge was convinced that given prior attempts to serve papers “that these emails are likely to reach the defendants. As a result, the email service comports with the requirements of due process.\u201d<\/p>\n
The case stands for the proposition that you don’t necessarily have to actually find a living person or an actual business address to commence a lawsuit. Whether the infringer is well heeled or not cannot be ascertained just based on their lack of a hard address. \u00a0In 2014 the mere inability to locate a warm body or “real” address ought not deter anyone from pursuing an action based on copyright infringement of a registered work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a vast, underground market, which resides on the web and is based on infringing copyrights and selling counterfeit goods. Protecting your work against such thieves who have no brick and mortar address to call home nor even a “true” identity, is a difficult but hardly impossible task. Creators – and even some lawyers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[151,1,15,20],"tags":[316,318,317],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-be-aware","category-copyright-info","category-legal","category-stuff-you-should-know","tag-bo-jackson","tag-infringing-copyrights","tag-richard-noble"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecopyrightzone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}