SAN FRANCISCO - In addition to being thieves, some content pirates evidently are slow learners.
Take Gilbert Michael Gonzales of Palm Springs, Calif., for example. Gonzales, who goes by the online handle "MikeyG," is the man against whom Titan Media parent company Io Group Inc. in April earned a default judgment for $1.275 million because he uploaded 17 Titan titles, in their entirety, to file-sharing websites.
At Titan's behest, the case was back in federal district court Tuesday after Gonzales ignored the judge's permanent injunction prohibiting him from "engaging in any unauthorized use of plaintiff's copyrighted works" in the future. The judge did not appear to be amused.
"Subsequent to the court's order, Gonzales made further unauthorized copies of plaintiff's registered work and distributed those copies by and through the Internet," Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in the second order for injunctive relief, dated Oct. 1. "In statements accompanying the distribution of the unauthorized copies, defendant Gonzales wrote, ‘I will never stop sharing what I have with others.'
"It is hereby ordered that defendant Gilbert Michael Gonzales is enjoined from engaging in any unauthorized use of any Io Group Inc.-owned work. It is further ordered that defendant Gilbert Michael Gonzales is enjoined from aiding, inducing or encouraging others to engage in any unauthorized use of any Io Group Inc.-owned work. It is further ordered that any violation of this Order for Injunctive Relief shall be deemed an act of contempt. Upon presentation of evidence of any such violation, the court shall issue a warrant for the arrest of Gilbert Michael Gonzales."
Gonzales, who appeared before the court by telephone, "apologized and agreed to cooperate fully and to immediately desist infringing plaintiff's copyright-registered works," the order noted.
According to Io Group corporate counsel Gill Sperlein, Gonzales - who claimed poverty after the initial judgment - "was operating under an ‘I've got nothing to lose' mentality. He continued infringing and publicly stated there was nothing anyone could do about it."
Io Group discovered Gonzales' continued piracy because employees and friends keep an eye on blogs and other sites that cover the file-trading milieu, Sperlein said. In addition to ticking off Io Group, Gonzales' nose-thumbing at the original court order stood to undermine the court's authority, so the judge had no choice but to take additional action.
Io Group vice president Keith Webb said the company was happy with the outcome.
"This is no longer a game," he said. "This is serious business, and [it] will include his arrest if he is caught pirating our content again. All of this could have been avoided if he would have listened to us the first time when we told him to stop pirating Titan content. We shut down six different blogs he ran, and each time he would just start up a new one. After we won the judgment against him, he went online and bragged that he would never stop. Well, this time he got the message: Do it again and you are going to jail."
Gonzales was one of 22 people named in the original complaint. Webb described him as the ringleader of a group that posted copyrighted Titan titles to file-sharing sites like RapidShare and Megarotic and then posted links to the shared files on Gonzales' blog.
The company also was able to track down the other 21 John Does mentioned in the original suit. Once confronted with Titan's evidence against them, "more than half of them" accepted the company's offer to settle for what Webb called "a substantial cash sum." According to Webb, the defendants were from a variety of countries - including the U.S., Mexico, Canada and Switzerland - and many were prominent citizens in their communities. Architects, restaurant owners and several married men were among those who settled, Webb said.
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