Town Upset with Process Server

FRONT ROYAL -- Town officials are upset with the way defendants in a $30 million lawsuit were served their notices during a Town Council work session.

"I don't know how else to describe it, [the process server] was slapping the copies [of the lawsuit] down on the table, just plopping the copies of the lawsuit to the named defendants and to me, which was of course to serve the town," Town Attorney Thomas R. Robinett said of the Monday session.

"I think he did, if not disrupt, he certainly interrupted an ongoing meeting of the council," Robinett said. "In other words, all they had done was vote to close the meeting and therefore to clear the room. Their meeting was ongoing and continuing at the time he decided it was time to serve process, and various folks started snapping pictures and running video cameras and whatever."

The town and three councilmen are defendants in the $30 million defamation suit that is related to an allegation involving whether Town Manager J. Michael Graham was offered what could be construed as a bribe during the bidding process for the construction of a solar energy farm.

On Thursday, David W. Silek, of the Manassas law firm of Ours & Silek, filed the lawsuit in Warren County Circuit Court on behalf of SolAVerde LLC, Donald F. Poe and Gregory A. Horton.

In addition to the town, the defendants in the lawsuit are Vice Mayor Chris W. Holloway and Councilmen Carson C. Lauder Jr. and Thomas H. Sayre.

Silek says Horton and Poe are partners in SolAVerde. Horton is the owner of Arctic Air Refrigeration Inc. in Front Royal, and Poe operates a local construction business, Silek says, adding there could possibly be other defendants added to the lawsuit.

Silek had informed The Northern Virginia Daily prior to Monday's meeting that he was going to have the defendants served at that time.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Served Legal Papers

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently received a side dish of legal papers with his lunch while at a media lunch event on Saturday in Idaho.

According to an article in the NY Post, he was sitting with COO Sheryl Sandberg when someone approached their table, asked for Zuckerberg's signature and stated, "You've been served."

What the lawsuit is about is not clear. The NY Post indicates that a Facebook spokeswoman had "no immediate details" about the lawsuit.

Zack Whittaker, who writes the iGeneration blog on ZDNet posted some updated information on the situation on Sunday.

I spoke to ZDNet blogger Denise Howell, a qualified lawyer in regards to this to try and get a better perspective of this issue ... Howell said, "Long story short, the law specifies ‘personal service’ for things like a summons and complaint or a subpoena ... Service by ambush like this is something more the province of collection actions against deadbeats, not captains of industry in Sun Valley. Seems like there’s some kind of embarrassment-related agenda at work here perhaps.”

Hard to say what the alleged lawsuit is about but the facts behind it are likely to surface over the next few days. After all, there's nothing faster than the social media grapevine.

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"Hurt Locker" Lawsuit Target Pirates

The war against movie piracy is getting downright explosive.

The producers of "The Hurt Locker" are preparing a massive lawsuit against tens of thousands of people who pirated the Oscar-winning drama online. The case could be filed as soon as Wednesday.

Voltage Pictures, the film's financier, has signed up with the U.S. Copyright Group, a Washington D.C.-based venture that has begun a litigation campaign targeting users of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) service.

"The Hurt Locker" first leaked onto the web more than five months before its U.S. release last June, and was a hot item in P2P circles after it won six Oscars in March, including best picture and director. Despite the accolades, the film grossed only about $16 million in the U.S.

The U.S. Copyright Group has already filed lawsuits over about 10 other films, including German filmmaker Uwe Boll's "Far Cry," "Call of the Wild 3D" and "Uncross the Stars." Reports of those suits raised alarms in some circles, whereas others joked that the movie industry was merely suing those with poor taste.

"You can guess that relative to the films we've pursued already, the order of magnitude is much higher" with "Hurt Locker," said Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the firm.

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Serial Suer Drops All Lawsuits

Erik Estavillo has a long record of litigation against a number of large gaming corporations and celebrities for reasons some might call "frivolous". In July, he sued Sony for banning his PlayStation Network account, which he relied on for socialization due to suffering from agoraphobia, a fear of crowds. In November, he sued Microsoft after his Xbox 360 suffered the infamous "red ring of death," as well as Nintendo for a recent update that disabled a homebrew Wii Channel that he used to unlock characters in Mario Kart Wii.

The suits failed to take into account niggling details such as the fact that Estavillo was banned for behavior, the "red ring of death" is fixable at no cost to the consumer, and there were a number of updates available to re-enable his homebrew channel, but Estavillo has never shown much interest in the details of his case. Furthermore, many of his cases were outright dismissed, though until now that hadn't stopped him from trying.

In his decision to drop the cases, he cited the stress of the long wait for his cases to resolve, which in turn led to his doctor advising he walk away. Estavillo also cited panic disorder and Crohn's disease as health issues keeping him from following the lawsuits to completion. Also, a number of changes were made that apparently appeased Estavillo.

The fact that he couldn't afford the process server fees to serve people like Bill Gates and Winona Rider probably helped the decision along as well. Estavillo has since dropped off the map: All his sites and blogs have been obliterated from the internet. Whether we've truly heard the last of this man remains to be seen.

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Pepsi Co. No Show in Court Could Cost them 1.26 Billion.

It's an expensive lesson on the importance of reading your mail.

A Wisconsin judge has ordered PepsiCo Inc to pay $1.26 billion to two men who said it stole their idea to sell purified water after a secretary mislaid a document alerting the world's No. 2 soft drink maker the lawsuit existed.
The case was reported earlier on Wednesday by The National Law Journal. The judgment amount is equal to more than 20 percent of PepsiCo's reported annual profits in recent years, regulatory filings show.

According to filings with the Jefferson County Circuit Court, Charles Joyce and James Voigt won the September 30 judgment five months after first suing PepsiCo and two distributors.

The Wisconsin men said they talked with the distributors in 1981 about their idea to bottle and sell purified water and that PepsiCo later stole the idea by creating Aquafina.

The complaint was filed on April 28, but PepsiCo said the legal department at its Purchase, New York headquarters was not alerted to the case until around September 18, when secretary Kathy Henry received a letter for her supervisor Tom Tamoney.

Henry, however, put the letter aside and did not tell anyone about it or enter it into her log "because she was so busy preparing for a board meeting," according to PepsiCo's October 13 motion asking the court not to enforce the judgment.

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Celebrity photographer faces lawsuit over $24 million rennovation

A legal row has broken out over the renovations of two historic properties in New York owned by international celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

A company that lent the photographer $24 million to renovate the 19th century red brick, vine covered buildings has filed a law suit claiming she is in breach of contract.

Art Capital claims that the loan was backed by the negatives and intellectual property rights to every photograph Leibovitz has ever taken, and by property she owns.

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New York AG Sues to Overturn Default Judgments

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is going to court to try to overturn about 100,000 default judgments he claims were improperly obtained against consumers — including more than 6,000 in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties.

The lawsuit, filed this week in state Supreme Court in Erie County, names as defendants 35 law firms and two debt collection agencies who relied on a Long Island company, American Legal Process, to notify consumers they faced debt-related lawsuits.

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Lawsuit Alleges Candidate Doesn't Live in District

Three Valencia County residents have filed a lawsuit in district court challenging whether a candidate running for the State Representative Dist. 8 seat lives where he says he does.

Tony Orr, Frank Pando and Fermin Lopez have filed suit against Democrat Salomon Montaño, alleging that he does not and has never lived at an apartment located behind his sister's bar business on Becker Street in Belen, which Montaño claims as his address.