Temporary Restraining Order Against Brock Pierce Indicates Settlement Problems
April 30th, 2008 by Benjamin Duranske
VB has obtained the Temporary Restraining Order against Brock Pierce (.pdf) granted to Alan Debonneville earlier this week.
The TRO prevents Pierce from “failing to comply with the terms of the settlement” of his bitter legal dispute with Debonneville (one of the co-founders of his virtual property company “Internet Gaming Entertainment”) over certain business deals associated with IGE. For the complete background of this at time highly personal suit, see VB’s complete coverage of Debonneville v. Pierce.
Specifically, the TRO states that the court, after reviewing the record, restrains Pierce from “contacting any bank for Debonneville or his attorneys for purposes of reversing any payment Pierce made to Debonneville under the terms of the parties’ settlement agreement in this lawsuit [...], attempting to reverse any payment made to Debonneville or his attorneys [...], taking any action to sell, assign, [or] transfer [...] any asset owned directly or indirectly by Pierce, unless such action is performed solely to raise funds to be paid to Debonneville, [or] filing any suit relating to the settlement, Debonneville or his attorneys, other than a personal bankruptcy suit.”
The court found that “unless Pierce … is immediately restrained from [these] acts, Pierce will commit these acts, thus causing immediate and irreparable injury to Debonneville.” The harm would be irreparable, the court said, because the acts “would be part of a wrongful scheme by Pierce, already commenced, to attempt to illegally recover settlement payments already paid to Debonneville or to avoid paying Pierce’s settlement obligations.”
A hearing as to whether the restraining order should be made permanent is scheduled for May 5 at 10:30 AM.
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Here’s something that apparently used to happen a lot in the gold farming business:
1) Company A finds itself in competition with company B on a server.
2) Company A creates a dummy user who buys gold from company B, paying by Paypal.
3) As soon as gold arrives in company A’s inventory, company A immediately reverses the Paypal payment.
4) Company A sells the gold it bought from company B to regular players.
The result of this kind of practice is that the less aggressive companies were bled dry: their competitor made the money from the gold that they had farmed.
It’s nice to see that the people at IGE have learned something from this nefarious business practice.
Richard