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LGJ: Gaming's professional plaintiffs and class actions
Mark Methenitis contributes Law of the Game on Joystiq ("LGJ"), a column on legal issues as they relate to video games: [Maveric2003] The term "professional plaintiff" is thrown out at the idea that some people make their living as someone who partners with an attorney to bring so many lawsuits that their entire livelyhood rests on suing people. Googling the term will bring up dozens of results in many different areas of the law, but a series of events this week made me wonder if the game industry might just be the next target of this kind of behavior. Specifically, the reports of a class action over Xbox Live bannings and reports that the same person who sued Sony over being banned in Resistance is now suing Microsoft over red rings and Nintendo over homebrew. So how does this professional plaintiff idea work? Speaking extremely generally, to bring a lawsuit, someone has to have standing, that is they suffered an injury and are substantially related to the harm that caused that injury so that they can sue over it. Past allegations of professional plaintiffs have often been related to suits related to the Americans with Disabilities Act, such that one disabled person is suing multiple establishments because they have standing to sue based on the lack of compliance with the Act. I'm sure many readers are thinking, "But how would this work in gaming? There are no gaming statutes that could give gamers standing to sue like that." Well, it's a pretty straightforward answer, actually.
