Opinion ID: 1224924
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: RMG's Status as an Aggrieved Party

Text: Attacking the injunction from a third direction, the defendants argue that RMG failed to prove that it is an aggrieved party under the Illinois Cable Piracy Act and therefore should be unable to sue under that statute. The defendants' objections are essentially evidentiary. They contend that RMG deliberately falsified some business forms that reported why subscribers ended their relationship with RMG to make it look as if those subscribers left RMG because of defendants' misconduct. The district court, they argue, improperly admitted and relied on this evidence in concluding that RMG had lost business because of the defendants' unfair competition, then compounded this error by not giving the defendants sufficient opportunity to challenge that evidence. These objections are without merit. The forms that RMG supposedly took pains to falsify were introduced into evidence not by RMG but by the defendants themselves. RMG had produced them in discovery for the preliminary injunction hearing and even included a few of the forms in its binder of potential exhibits for the hearing, but RMG did not move for their admission or question any witness about them until after defendants offered them. The defendants suggest in response that other evidencedocuments summarizing RMG's lost business and the testimony of an RMG witnesswas tainted because it was based on the allegedly falsified forms. But even if there were some danger of deception in RMG's evidence, the district judge was aware of that possibility. From the beginning of the preliminary injunction hearing, he said he was open to evidence of deceptive practice. Judge Darrah further made clear that if the defendants could show that the disconnect forms had been falsified, he would entertain a motion to strike any evidence that's derivative of these documents. The defendants introduced the forms into evidence and pointed out the discrepancies between the two copies, but they did not move to strike. RMG, meanwhile, elicited from its witness a plausible and uncontradicted explanation for the discrepancy: RMG's Chicago office had followed up with former subscribers after mailing originals of the disconnect forms to its home office, so that only the Chicago office's copies had the additional information obtained by telephone indicating that the subscribers had left RMG for Cable America. Moreover, RMG introduced a great deal of other evidence that defendants' misconduct had hurt RMG's business. That evidence included summaries of the large numbers of lost subscribers based on the original disconnect forms, testimony that building owners had completely excluded RMG from their buildings after Cable America's arrival, and circumstantial evidence of causation based on the timing of RMG's lost subscriptions. Given the abundance of independent evidence sustaining RMG's claim, the district judge did not abuse his discretion by cutting off further challenges to the disconnect forms offered by defendants themselves.