For lawyers to take that on there has to be some blood left in the stone.
In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.
At that point, you have to go after their backers. In this case its 10s of Japanese publishers, few of whom have US presences. Don't know the law there, but unless the publishers' lawyers were incompetent their liability is limited. I.e. an obvious way is to arrange a package deal to keep transaction costs low for jmanga to buy limited rights to publish derivative works as they did. On the other hand, if the publishers engaged in serious control over jmanga.com's operations there could be openings.
Given the foreign country aspect, Japan Inc. being very unfriendly towards lawsuits, and I suspect relatively small sales (their MVP wasn't particularly viable, and lots of people recognized the trap) I wouldn't expect anyone to try in this case. But I do wonder why no one has in previous cases like this, aside from avoiding going after behemoths like Microsoft when the potential payoff was probably very small (and e.g. Microsoft did offer a path to keep your songs, albeit at some quality loss ... and I can imagine a Microsoft lawyer asking a plaintiff "And you kept the volume turned up to 11? Let's get your hearing tested" :-).
After all, it's efforts that fail in the marketplace that are most likely to shut down; we probably need to wait until a big and for a while successful one goes down in flames....
> In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.
But perhaps the court could at least issue an injuction requiring them to unlock the DRM, or find some alternative way of ensuring continued access to the goods they paid for irrespective of whether or not the company stays in business.
It's not classical DRM, it's content can only be read on the site. So someone would have to pay money---for how long?---to maintain access. A bit like Carpathia's problems with the Feds and Megaupload.
Going beyond that would be difficult and expensive. Certainly jmanga.com's licenses don't allow them to publish the content in other ways that would be accessible and yet limited and then there's practical matters, e.g. Amazon wouldn't likely play ball.
And then we come to the original problem I cited: there's no money to speak of to fund such difficult litigation. We're probably talking 8 figures minimum with all the expert witnesses needed, new case law to be forged, the foreign company angle, etc.
Why do you think that would happen? Given the complexes of incentives attached to the judiciary and the legislature, respectively, it seems more likely that new statutes rather than case law would attempt to legitimize this practice, which probably already runs afoul of existing case law.
And if it was likely to happen, wouldn't it happen anyway, even if there were new legislation involved?
The one that clearly says they won't support unlocking cellphones under contract, and doesn't even address the outrage over criminal penalties?
"...neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation."
This is an awesome petition. Thanks for bringing it to our attention; I've signed it.
That being said, I don't view the cellphone response as particularly progressive. The way it parses for me is "we think your phone should be unlocked if you don't have a contract." It didn't address the criminalization of unlocking cellphones while under a contract. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'd love to hear if I am, but I've read it a few times and I can't find another way to read the response.
Before you derisively dismiss this, you might want to take a look at their response to the cellphone unlocking petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-unlocking-cel...