i read an article recently about/by a guy from this band Coalesce who i listened to in high school:
http://www.lawrence.com/blogs/iamthi.../peoplescourt/
he owns a print shop that makes t shirts/hats/hoodies for bands primarily. he did 2000 shirts for a band on credit and they didn't pay so he brought them on there and tried to sue their manager. manager says it's not his fault, end of story, case dismissed.
the most interesting part of the story though, is that the people's court ( or presumably any of the TV judge based shows ) will pay what you owe if you are found guilty on their show, as a way of getting you to appear on tv in the first place.
this reminded me of a case that i have, which i will now explain:
about a year ago, i was in boston hanging out with a few friends of mine who are in a fairly popular punk rock/hardcore band. they had to rent a car for the weekend to get to virginia to play a show since their van was in the shop ( they were sharing equipment with another band for that show ). i went with them to the rental agency for no particular reason.
when they got there they realized that no members of the band had a credit card on them. i offered to let them use mine to rent the car if they would pay me in cash for the amount it would cost then and there. it was like 300 dollars, they paid me, and that was that.
unfortunately one member of the band ended up having to keep the rental car for an extra 3 days. he didn't inform me of this at the time, and i ended up finding out from the rental agency when they called and asked what the problem was. i talked to him and he said that he would pay me the money back within 2 weeks ( it cost like an extra 300 for the extra 3 days he kept it ).
in addition to that, they managed to run 7 toll booths on the tour, which i obviously got the bills for. 7 x 50 dollars = 350. i was pretty upset about this, and had no clue what to think as to why they would do that. i later found out that another person who was in the band was the one who ran all the tolls. he has since left the band, and i [censored] hate him, but that's another story all together.
anyway before i was able to get the payment for the extra 3 days of having the rental car ( this was before i knew about the tickets ), the band got their van broken into and had over 3000 dollars in cash stolen from them. i didn't really feel like i should ask them for the money at that time, so i waited, and then just sort of forgot about it. it wasn't that i don't care about the money so much as that going to boston/contacting the singer ( who is in charge of the finances ) would be such a brutal pain in the ass that i just kept putting it off.
anyway as you can probably tell, my idea is to bring the singer on to the people's court. we are still friends despite all this, and it would obviously be great for both of us.
1) i get the money.
2) he doesn't have to cough up the money himself if i win, since the show will pay for it.
3) we both get to be on tv, which would be funny and a cool experience.
that is assuming they would accept us on the show. i'm pretty sure they would, this case is more interesting than the one i linked to above. if not, i'm pretty sure that judge judy/judge mathis etc work the same way.
does anyone think this plan is stupid? the only real problem i can see is that the rental agreement states that only the person who rented the car is allowed to drive it. i blatantly broke that rule, so do you think that would negate my chance of getting the money returned to me? he broke our verbal agreement by keeping the car for longer than he said he would, do you think that will be good enough to let me win? same deal regarding the toll booth tickets i suppose, i wasn't there and that breaks the rental agreement.
any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks.
edit: i am well aware i am an idiot for letting them rent the car in the first place, i would never do it again and definitely learned my lesson.