Richmond, Virginia lawyer D. Wayne O'Bryan runs, as his website puts it, "a small law firm designed for personalized and professional legal services for dog attack injury and negligence claims." O'Bryan is quite clearly a personal injury lawyer, which is why it made perfect sense for him to file federal copyright lawsuits this summer on behalf of the pornographic film Gangbang Virgins... or not.
Yesterday, O'Bryan's cases went wrong as a federal judge demanded that O'Bryan show cause for why he should not be sanctioned by the court for running a “shake down” on the anonymous defendants.
"An improper purpose"
O'Bryan brought the cases on behalf of K-Beech, Inc, makers of the less-than-virginal film in question. He sued a few dozen IP addresses for allegedly sharing the film on BitTorrent networks, and even tried to cover his bases a bit by using geolocation technology to ensure that the anonymous defendants actually lived in Virginia.
But the court was still having none of it. Judge John Gibney, Jr. severed all of O'Bryan's cases to a single defendant yesterday, saying that the Doe defendants were improperly joined in the case.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/judge-blasts-personal-injury-lawyer-for-running-p2p-shake-down.ars
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