While I was concentrating on John Steele’s criminal organization, I’m afraid other trolls have been feeling neglected, especially a mega villain Keith Lipscomb. To rehabilitate myself, I looked into my backlog and found this gem.
Back in November, in a slow-moving class action lawsuit (Jennifer Barker and Sabree Hutchinson v. Copyright Trolls, KYWD 12-cv-00372), plaintiffs’ attorney Kenneth Henry used a pretty mild description of what Keith Lipscomb and his gang have been doing for about two years:
To bastardize the litigation process and abuse the court system as the Defendants have done, and now to object to the taking of early discovery vis-à-vis their claim that this Court lacks personal jurisdiction over them is yet another display of the Defendants’ total disregard for the courts and the rights of those with whom they deal.
In my (and not only my) opinion, Mr. Lipscomb’s “business” is better described as an extortion racket rather than a mere “bastardization of the litigation process.” Yet Lipscomb took an offense and demanded to strike that reasonable assessment from Henry’s motion:
Plaintiffs repeated accusations that Defendants are “bastardiz[ing] the litigation process” and have purposefully abused the court system in order to harass innocent individuals nationwide are baseless and unwarranted.
[...]
Accordingly, the language “bastardization of the litigation process” should be struck.
And this is not ironic enough: this man shakes down many thousands (a significant part of whom are innocent) over obscene material; his evidence is flimsy at best; and his fee-splitting agreements with porn purveyors and unlicensed foreign IP address harvesters are undeniably unethical. This man, in addition to having become furious over a dictionary word, was also offended when Henry called him “obviously not a Bible scholar”:
[...] the first page of Plaintiffs’ reply exclaims, “[o]bviously, counsel for the Defendants are not Biblical scholars.” This is deeply offensive. Undersigned was raised a Christian, was active in Campus Life and Campus Crusade (now known as “Cru”) in high school and college respectively, and used undersigned’s only preemptory waiver to ensure enrollment in an always oversubscribed biblical law class while attending The Cornell Law School. Undersigned is currently a member in good standing of the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and is a regular attendee at services.
Here we are: an indefinitely greedy person who indiscriminately assaulted many elderly, poor and sick, a person who lies each time he opens his mouth, a coward who loves to spill his saliva threatening fellow attorneys, demonstrates that he has a thin skin in unexpected places.
It evades me how this man can reconcile his purported Christianity with the fact that the public in general reasonably thinks that copyright trolling is a labor of Satan. Maybe people of faith chime in and explain. Until then I cannot get rid of the vision of Lipscomb’s famous relative turning in his grave.
Question for the community
Given the passionate and articulate pleading embedded above, it seems that M. Keith Lipscomb manages to conflate two incompatible things: a Christian worldview and “theft via extortion” (a.k.a. porn copyright trolling). I meditated on this paradox and cannot think about but two explanations, unless I am totally wrong. What do you think?
Filed under: Lipscomb, Uncategorized
