It seems that some lawyers want intellectual property law to operate in only one direction. Everyone’s favorite sue-happy trade organization – the US Copyright Group (USCG) – is now going after the lawyer who provided collated legal documents and instructions (his own intellectual property) for use to defendants being sued for downloading Far Cry and The Hurt Locker.

Graham Syfert put together a packet of legal paperwork that would act as a leg-up when defending against settlement-seeking USCG. These can result in a dismissal, but – at the very least – mean more time and energy needed on USCG’s part. Not something that firms merely phishing for settlements appreciate.

But let’s step back and look at the absurdity of this for a moment. If defendants have the legal right to file motions that might save them from emptying their bank account solely so that we can fund more law firms, then this sort of action should be universal. Instead, legalese remains a threatening, intimidating force that compels many people to settle out of fear of greater reprisal.

But what the accused should be aware of is that if they made the legal process more difficult (and filing the motions included in Syfert’s packet would do just that) then it wouldn’t be so efficient a model of making money any longer. I just hope there’s no one out there who thinks that trade organizations suing individuals means that the content creators (let alone the artists) are the ones seeing the money. It’s only the lawyers, under the auspice that the reward to the copyright holder is that such lawsuits act as a deterrent (which there’s no empirical evidence to suggest, mind you).

And USCG is already in hot water for filing thousands of suits against people who’ve downloaded Hurt Locker who are not only not in the court’s jurisdiction, but when they didn’t have anything more to ID the defendants than an IP address. All that need happen to stop vampires like USCG from profiting off piracy is to make it more difficult and time-consuming to operate in this fashion.

If you receive a cease and desist letter or anything of the like, do yourself a favor and spend some time doing legal research on how to dismiss or otherwise protract the process before looking to settle up with scumbags like USCG.