Recently filed documents on the AACS-LA vs. DVDFab case show similarities of the battle between David and Goliath. It shows how little time DVDFab had to prepare itself and how hard it was to find a law firm to represent the company in the United States. Because the AACS-LA is a consortium of many companies (e.g. movie studios, Microsoft, Toshiba, Panasonic, IBM and more), many well known law firms were unable to defend DVDFab due to conflict of interest.
The newly filed documents of the case contain a motion to set aside the default judgment that the Clerk (not the judge) entered in favor of AACS-LA along with supporting documents and exhibits. DVDFab is now represented by the law firm Schoeman Updike Kaufman Stern & Ascher LLP who stress that DVDFab has only limited time to defend itself. According to the law firm the AACS-LA informed DVDFab about the lawsuit by e-mail. The e-mails came in between all other e-mail DVDFab e.g. receives from customers and it was also not directly clear to DVDFab the e-mails were legitimate until a law firm contacted DVDFab to advertise their services.
That law firm informed DVDFab it was sued in the United States and offered them their services as an attorney in the United States. It was then, when DVDFab found out it was sued in the United States. but not knowing their business could be shut down from there. DVDFab also didn't understand that a lawsuit in the United States could be started by e-mailing pages to an e-mail address in China.
The preliminary hearing was scheduled at the 4th of March, DVDFab learned about the case February the 26th and on the 10th of March their domain was shut down. Between February 26th and the 4th of March, DVDFab tried to find a law firm to represent them. Due to conflict of interest several law firms rejected DVDFab and referred DVDFab to other law firms, some of those didn't want to handle the case or didn't have time. It wasn't until the 17th of March before DVDFab signed an agreement with a law firm to represent them. Till then the company was unaware of legal possibilities such as asking for more time to prepare its defense.
Besides the explanation why DVDFab didn't respond sooner when it was sued, and why it didn't properly represent itself at the time of preliminary ruling, the motion also goes against other allegations of the AACS-LA. DVDFab uses English on its website, according to the AACS-LA this would because it targeted customers in the United States, the DVDFab lawyers argue that English is an international language and an English website provides access to customers through the world with 55% of the 10 million most visited websites written in English.
The AACS-LA also argued that a .com domain name means that the business is targeted to the United States. According to the DVDFab lawyers many of the most popular Chinese websites all have .com domain names as it's the most popular domain name in the world.
The motion also mentions (again) that DVDFab also sells software that doesn't circumvent any technology from the AACS-LA, and that the DVDFab lawyers strongly believe that the U.S. copyright laws can't be applied worldwide.
When reading through the documents, the most disturbing is how a Chinese company, with no legal experience in the United States can be sued by e-mail. How it doesn't get time to find a proper law firm because many law firms reject them due conflict of interest as they already represent one of the many companies that are part of the AACS-LA consortium. And how in the mean time the AACS-LA is able to force companies to cease to work for DVDFab because a couple of the company's products circumvents AACS-LA technology and because it also sells to customers in the United States. If the company didn't change their domain and payment processor in time, the AACS-LA would have wiped the entire company based on the former.
