Defendant makes a powerful move against copyright troll Malibu Media in Maryland
On 3/28/2014 defense attorney Morgan Pietz (with local counsel in Maryland John C. Lowe) filed a bunker buster of a motion in three Maryland individual cases, all titled Malibu Media, LLC v John Doe (MDD 14-cv-0223, 14-cv-0257 and 14-cv-0263).
This motion is, in part, a continuation of the work by Jonathan Phillips, who discovered and called out unethical (to say the least) contingency fee agreement between Malibu’s nationwide counsel, M. Keith Lipscomb, and a key witness, a German “IP harvester” IPP International.
The title of the motion is rather long: ISP subscriber’s motion for an order to show cause as to why all evidence and data from Tobias Fieser and his company IPP should not be precluded and these cases dismissed.
Tobias Fieset’s declaration is basically the only “evidence,” upon which the entire trolling house of cards is built (no wonder the trolls sabotage any discovery so aggressively), and if Lipscomb and his clique did not lie through their teeth when asking for ex parte discovery, courts would most likely think twice before allowing it:
Common sense and the slew of cases cited in Section III(a)(2), above, all suggest that the Court might have excluded or, at the very least, looked more skeptically at the Fieser declaration if the Court knew it was coming from a contingent fee witness. Thus, disclosing Fieser and IPP’s contingent interest in the litigation as an adverse fact as part of the ex parte early discovery requests would be required under Rule 3.3(d).
