A Los Angeles screenwriter called SBC to come and install high-speed Internet on his computer. The cable guy showed up (probably 3 hours late) and, in the process of installing DSL, deleted three screenplays from the guy’s computer.
The Judge has had his fair share of bad experiences with the cable guy (screw Adelphia), so it seemed like sweet justice when the writer sued SBC for the lost scripts and punitive damages. Bad news for SBC: the writer had a $2.7 million deal in the works with a Hollywood studio for one of the scripts.
In a reversal that could have come from the laptop of the laziest Hollywood hack, the jury awarded the writer a measly $60,000. The jury faulted the writer for not taking his computer into the shop immediately and they didn’t seem to care about the writer’s Hollywood deal. They probably also felt that being dumb and irresponsible was all part of a cable guy’s job. In his defense, the cable guy claimed he merely sat down on the writer’s computer and started deleting random things from the laptop (a perfectly reasonable thing to do when on someone else’s computer).
Act III: An appellate court takes away $33,000 in punitive damages from the writer saying that the dumb cable guy didn’t show intent when he deleted the files. The happy ending is that the cable guy got fired.
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