DANVILLE, Ill. – As you’ve no doubt heard by now, infamous “copyright troll” attorney John Steele has been disbarred, an unsurprising development in the wake of his pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in March.
To those of us who have been unfortunate enough to have met and spoken with Steele along the way, this outcome was anticipated long before his profligate copyright trolling put him on the radar of netizens everywhere.
It has been a long and winding road for Steele from the day I met him to where he sits now, but the destination at the end of his path was in no way unpredictable.
I met Steele in 2010 at an invitation-only adult industry gathering called the “Content Protection Retreat” (“CPR”), an odd event that was part legal education seminar, part sales pitch. (You can probably guess which of those opportunities drew Steele to the table.)
In a session that was remarkable both in the brazen opportunism it represented and the ire it raised in more than one of Steele’s lawyerly peers, Steele described his approach to using the threat of legal action to extract settlements from people accused of illegally downloading his clients’ copyrighted works.
At the time, none of us in the audience knew Steele was also honey-potting his targets, failing to disclose his financial interest in his cases to the court, or had any knowledge of a number of other unethical and illegal tactics he was putting into play. Even so, there were so many other flaws to Steele’s tactics that his presentation set off alarm bells, at least for those informed enough about civil procedure and legal ethics to be able to hear them.
Among other things, when asked why he was filing cases in Illinois when neither his client nor the John Doe defendants had any connection to the 7th Circuit (let alone Illinois) and none of the allegedly tortious conduct had taken place in the state, Steele responded he filed in Illinois “because I live there, and it’s convenient for me.”
Obviously, convenience for the plaintiff’s counsel is not among the criteria the court considers when deciding whether a given venue is the appropriate one in which to hear the dispute. So, when the other attorneys in the room heard this rationale, there was ample head-shaking. One lawyer who was so taken aback he essentially took over Steele’s presentation, shouting out a quick recitation of all the reasons Steele’s approach was unsound.
Interestingly, it was Steele’s sales pitch that appeared to resonate more with the audience than the misgivings expressed by the other attorneys present, many of whom are experts in intellectual property law, not — like Steele — divorce attorneys merely playing at being such.
To be clear, I wasn’t at the CPR in my capacity as a writer who covers the industry. I was there as a rights-holder, albeit an extremely small-time operator who had no plans to sue anybody — or the financial wherewithal to do so, frankly, even were that my desire.
While I’m a reasonably well-informed layman, I’m no expert in copyright, but even I could see immediate problems with the approach to enforcing his clients’ intellectual property rights Steele described.
Still, I was inclined to hear him out, if only out of intellectual fairness. So, I waited until after his presentation to ask a few questions that were burning in my brain.
“How do you establish joinder for all these people, if you do eventually take a case filled with John Doe defendants to court?” I asked him over cocktails later that evening. “How do you convince an Illinois court it has jurisdiction over defendants in some other state, when neither your clients’ companies nor their servers are present in Illinois?”
Steele furrowed his brow and uttered something we’d all hear from him again later when asked about adverse rulings issued by the court: “Mumbo jumbo, chicken gumbo,” he said.
“I don’t care about precedent, procedure or any of that stuff,” Steele said. “I’m about making money. I’m about making my clients money, and we’re making money with this. That’s the bottom line.”
To put it mildly, I was dumbfounded.
That had to be the most absurd, ethically handicapped and deeply idiotic thing I’d ever heard come out of an attorney’s mouth — and I say that as someone who once interviewed Jack Thompson about his ideas for how states should regulate the sale of violent video games.
As I walked away from Steele shaking my head in stunned silence, a representative of a successful adult studio took my place to get Steele’s contact information, so his boss could follow up about becoming a client.
The next day, I sat down for breakfast with an attorney from Jenner & Block, a major law firm that has handled some of the biggest precedent-setting intellectual property law cases in recent history, including the landmark case that resulted in the shutdown of Grokster.
Like Steele, the Jenner attorney was there to drum up new business. Unlike Steele, he had a great deal of relevant trial expertise and an earnest respect for the legal ethics he was sworn to uphold.
I had seen the Jenner attorney sitting in the back of the room during Steele’s presentation, wearing a bemused grin on his face as Steele went through his ludicrous song and dance.
“So, what did you think of that presentation by John Steele yesterday?” I asked.
I already knew what he thought, to be honest; the question was designed simply to elicit a response that would justify my own.
Showing his class (and honoring the tradition of not bad-mouthing other attorneys, even when they deserve it), the Jenner man gave me a knowing grin and stirred his coffee a bit. After a long, considered pause, he responded with the sort of rhetorical aplomb and measured caution you’d expect, given his professional stature.
“I think it underlines the importance of retaining reputable counsel,” he said.
I nodded and raised my cup in a silent toast to his resolute tactfulness.
Here’s hoping the latest twist in Steele’s tale has taught the broader adult industry the same lesson. Sadly, though, history suggests it will teach us nothing at all.
