$506M To College Wrestlers For Nude Locker Room Tapes
Well, I suppose it beats the hell out of flipping burgers for minimum wage, eh? Besides, I'll bet some of those guys look pretty hot in those tight shorts....
The plaintiffs in a case against companies that sold nude locker-room video on the Internet have won a $506 million judgment, NBC5's Marion Brooks reported.
The case involved 46 wrestlers from various colleges, including Northwestern University, who were taped without their knowledge and then exposed on the Web.
"Interestingly, the plaintiffs won this case by default," Brooks said. Because the people they were suing did not fight it."....
The court fight began three years ago, Brooks said, explaining that some of the video in her report was intentionally altered because it shows some of the plaintiffs nude, in a locker room.
In 1999, Brooks said, college wrestlers from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois and Illinois State University, among other schools, first found out that there was videotape of them naked and that it was being sold on the World Wide Web.
"It is horribly humiliating to find out that you have been filmed in a locker room naked," said [plaintiff attorney] Fluxgold. "And (it's) worse yet that it is being sold over the Internet."
Last month, a judge ordered Franco Productions in Florida to pay the 46 plaintiff's $11 million each for compensatory and punitive damages, along with attorney's fees. The judge also stopped any further sale of the video.
"The judgment is the court's way of sending a clear message to the public out there, the bad guys, (that) we are going to come at you," Fluxgold said. "They are not going to allow people to go out there and use the Internet as a cesspool and go unscathed."
Fluxgold said she isn't sure she will be able to collect the $506 million awarded to her clients, but the defendant does have assets, she said, and she plans to go after them.
The Internet? A cesspool? I resemble that remark....
