Autolitigate "on"

Glenn Reynolds has an article up at Tech Central Station on the use of web crawlers and other automated systems to generate law suits.

Gertrude Walton was recently targeted by the recording industry in a lawsuit that accused her of illegally trading music over the Internet. But Walton died in December after a long illness, and according to her daughter, the 83-year-old hated computers.

<snip>

Though news stories don't report what the RIAA based its decision to file suit on, the likelihood, based on past practice, is that it was a 'bot-based lawsuit. That is, computer programs led to the generation of a complaint, which was then filed without any real human investigation. I wrote on this phenomenon a while back:

The software, which crawls the Web the way search-engine software does, looks for files that appear to match copyrighted material: songs, movies, etc. When the 'bot finds the material, a human being is supposed to check the results, then notify the Internet service provider that a customer is infringing upon protected material and that the material must be removed. This usually leads to the ISP terminating the Internet account of the individual posting the material.

But depriving a victim of access to the Internet is only a little bit of fun – the same kind of result reaped by writers of viruses and worms. There's no profit in it for the RIAA, merely loss for the victim.

The way to turn a profit is to sue the victims for copyright infringement and collect settlements.

But regardless of what happened in Ms. Walton's case – a question to which we can be fairly sure Ms. Walton herself is indifferent – it seems that this sort of automated litigation is a growing trend. And that's unfair. As I wrote in my earlier column:

Much like the operators of rigged traffic cameras, they're relying on their own institutional power – and the hassle of opposing them – to let them get away with near-criminal sloppiness.

Glenn discusses a possible cure, which I find very interesting:

We need remedies for this. One, of course, is for courts to start enforcing the law. Lawyers who file complaints without taking care to verify them are subject to sanctions. Courts don't impose those very often, but based on the press accounts this seems like it might be a prime candidate for that sort of supervision. Organizations who file bogus or frivolous lawsuits based on the results of obviously flawed computer programs ought to be sanctioned. They should have to compensate the people they falsely charge for their costs, lost time, aggravation, and damage to reputation. And the lawyers involved should be subject to professional discipline

Maybe my idea of suing these lawyers for malpractice isn't that far-fetched at all.