Leatherwood misses response deadlines. Likely win for Eros LLC
by Tateru Nino 
Nov 16th 2007 at 12:00AM
Filed under: News items, Second Life, Legal
Texan teen, Robert Leatherwood, who is being sued by Eros LLC as being behind the avatar Volkov Cattaneo, has failed to respond to papers served to him last month. Eros LLC's attorney, Frank Taney is petitioning the court for a default verdict. In many cases, if you fail to respond or appear, you lose.
The default judgement would run at a bit over two thousand US dollars, plus costs. If you're wondering what all this is about, allow me to sum it up.
Stroker Serpentine (aka Kevin Alderman) owner of Eros LLC retained Frank Taney to bring suit against one John Doe, identified as Second Life avatar Volkov Cattaneo for using an exploit (involving crashing servers) to duplicate and profit from unauthorized duplicates of one of Eros LLC's most popular products (it's a sex bed, in fact) - essentially, aside from the fact this took place in a virtual world and difficulties locating the John Doe, this is a straight-up copyright infringement case.
Cattaneo mocked efforts to locate him, claiming that he had falsified all of the identity data associated with his Second Life account.
In response to discovery requests, Linden Lab provided network addresses and a private investigator easily identified Robert Leatherwood as the only person routinely logging in from the two physical locations.
The avatar Cattaneo continued to deny that he was Leatherwood, though the protestations at that point were increasingly implausible. Whether or not Leatherwood is Cattaneo or not, Leatherwood's failure to respond to papers served will likely result in a win for Eros LLC, and a loss for Leatherwood.
[via Reuters]
