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I've got a pet peeve, but I don't have the evidence to say whether Lightspeed has triggered it.
The pet peeve scenario is this: Lawyers take an aggressive view of the law. They tell their clients "If we send a hundred really aggressive demand letters to people we could probably screw in court, we'll get eighty of those people to do what we want without litigation. Then we'll pick the best case out of the remaining twenty and screw him in court, so that folks will know that they have to do what our demand letters say the next time we run this scam."
Generally when lawyers do that, about half the letters have some merit, and about half of those could result in winnable cases. So the lawyers wind up "winning" 81 cases, out of 100 cases where they probably had only 25 real solid winners.
I *hate* this. It's dishonest and a form of extortion, as it affects the fifty folks against whom there was no good case but who could not afford to fight, or to take the chance of being picked as the designated screwee.
The problem is, generally the lawyers don't admit even to the client that half the cases are bogus, or non-winnable. So the businesses who authorize this think they are going after legitimate claims only.
As a legal tactic, it's effective as hell, which is why a certain sort of lawyer loves it. But as a business tactic, it's really really really short-sighted. When you inadvertantly create fifty extortion victims in this internet age, a few of them are going to turn out to have the communications and marketing skills to make you look really bad. For a high-class porn business with a really cool reputation to suddenly come off as a bully -- and a pointless bully, at that, since there are friendlier ways of achieving the underlying legitimate business and legal goals -- well, that can't be good for long term business.
Second disclaimer: There's no data that Lightspeed is doing this. It's possible their lawyers identified 200 cases, and sent letters only to the fifty sure winners. We'll probably never know. But if I was the keeper of the Lightspeed business rep, I'd be concerned about how this looks.
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