LEGAL BRIEF: Hot Coffee Suit = Waste of Time
- Scribbled on June 25th, 2008 by Jonathon Howard
- Filed in Action, Legal Brief, Microsoft Xbox, PC, Sony PlayStation 2, WTF
A conglomeration of lawyers from ten different law firms are disappointed by the low response they’ve received from the general public, specifically those of use who purchased Take Two Interactive’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (at last count some where around 12 million people.) You remember all the drama when this lawsuit was first filed, mainstream media outlets covered it, talking-heads and politicians couldn’t shut up about it, and Jack Thompson… It was big ugly mess, the game was pulled off of shelves and re-rated by the ESRB. All for a code that was inaccessible in the game unless you hacked it, something the majority of users didn’t know how to do or couldn’t bother with trying.
Lawyers, smelling blood, jumped in and filed suit against Take-Two asking for $1.3 million in damages. With the suit filed, the class-action forms went out. If you could prove you bought the game you’d get up to $35. How many people have responded? How many people have been harmed by the “offensive content?” 2,676 people, that’s it. Doing a little bit of math, if everyone can prove it that’s less than $100,000, and if they all only have the disk it’s less than $30,000. That leaves the lawyers with over a million, either way, just for themselves. Theodore H. Frank, Director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest, summed it up quite well, “they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all.”
No one is in doubt as to the lawyers’ greed.
(Thanks, New York Times.)
June 26th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
[...] bunch of money to some lawyers, rather than doing anything useful.”); GamePolitics; TG Daily; GameStooge; Switched; Reason Hit & Run (who ignored me when I shopped the story to them first, but thought [...]