Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
Well, the source you cite says the book was "expunged." There is a comment that it was back online - but the comment is three years later. A lot can happen in three years.
Unlike you, I am pretty confident that the idiot American lawyers knew what they were doing. Reason being that they didn't bother to try to sue PG in the US. What I remember from my civil procedure classes, lo, these many years ago, is enough to lead me to conclude that both as a legal and a practical matter, a lawsuit against PG in the US wouldn't work. They aren't "personally present" in the country, and they have no assets in the country to collect from.
So on to Australia (where freedom's humping bluey, according to Gordon Bok.)
Whether a lawsuit in Australia would have worked, I don't know. My guess is that it would fail, unless there is a treaty between the US & Australia that would change the situation. In the absence of a treaty or some kind of contractual relationship between the parties, no country is going to enforce the laws of some other country.
So it looks to me like the idiotic American lawyers tried the old threatening letter routine, & it worked, at least for a while. If you have any information about how the book got reestablished on the site, please post it. Maybe PG got themselves a lawyer of their own. My letter back to the idiotic American lawyers would have been along the lines of "do you really want to waste time and money suing a non-profit organization without assets half-way around the world on a legal issue you will likely lose, since you are playing in their home court? And if you win, do you think that this is the only hole in the bucket?"
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I actually know the person who runs PGA, and have chatted about this. They did try the dumb letter thing, and no, it didn't work ever.
The person in question clearly was not conversant with Australian law.
A good thing to point out to American lawyers in cases like this is loser pays the lot, too.
So they'd lose, have to pay opposition costs, probably get made to pay extra for being idiots and wasting the court's time, etc...