Silly Promotional Stunt Lawsuit Against CBS For 'Profiting From Piracy' Dropped

Earlier this year, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous lawsuit from a guy named Alki David. Lots of sources reported on the story as if it was serious, but we assumed it was a publicity stunt lawsuit. David's startup was being sued by broadcasters, such as CBS, for trying to retransmit TV channels online. So, David first put together a silly and ridiculous video insisting that the reason CBS was suing him was because it was profiting from piracy and wanted to keep that racket going or something. The crux of the claim was that CBS owns CNET. CNET runs download.com. Limewire was distributed via download.com. Limewire was found guilty of copyright infringement. Thus, CBS profits from piracy. That's a stretch by any imagination, but David took it even further and sued CBS. We noted at the time that the lawsuit seemed unlikely to get very far, and that's definitely the case.

The lawsuit has been dropped entirely. Of course, most of the hot air deflated from the suit when David and his co-plaintiffs had trouble listing out any actual copyrights that were infringed. They finally dug up one movie and five songs, but the original strong claims were severely weakened. David's lawyer insists that they'll refile the lawsuit with more people and more infringement claims, but I still can't see the lawsuit getting anywhere at all.

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