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RIAA Sues the Wrong Person
Cildar writes "In the 'oops' category, the RIAA was forced to withdraw its suit against a 66 year old computer neophyte (read Apple User for god's sake) when they discovered she thought 'Kazaa' was a magician playing at local kids' birthday parties. The story is as reported in the Boston Globe." Update: 09/24 15:19 GMT by T : Note, the magician crack is a joke ;)
I bet the RIAA will be back with a vengeance once they "discover" that granny had a haxx0red version of Kazaa able to run on the Macintosh. After all, you can use a mac emulator.. are you free to go then?
Hm.. maybe that would be a good use for VMware or similar... "I dont even have Kazaa installed on my computer".. And your VMWare installation is ofcourse - gone...
// instant - "I for one welcome our new Decaff Coffee-Flavoured-Coffee Overlords"
Abolishing copyright would make various open source licenses unenforcable..
Trolling is a art,
> (read Apple User for god's sake)
Although a great many Apple users are not neophytes, the fact that a neophyte can run an Apple is a testament to their ease of use.
So there.
If the US wasn't $$$ orientated towards its policies, the US government would have cracked down on the RIAA itself.
The RIAA is a lose cannon at the moment, it thinks it can do what it pleases, without any consequences for itself.
What takes the piss more, now that RIAA is cracking down on all these things, and with copy protected CDs - the RIAA still expects levies on CDRs etc to compensate for lost revenue. RIAA must be laughing - free money.
This is gonna become more and more frequent as the lawsuits pile up. Without having to get real warrents and go thru a real legal process, these harrassment tactacts will continue costing normal people lots of time, money and agravation.
At this point it should be made very easy for this woman to sue the RIAA, but without the resources of a large corp. it is just going to seem like an impossiable task for her. Thus the lawsuits from the RIAA will just continue with the harassment and scare tactics.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
Please note, however, that we will continue our review of the issues you raised and we reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant," Colin J. Zick, the Foley Hoag lawyer, wrote
What an asswipe.
This is the reasoning behind checks and balances, due process and other protections provided under the Constitution.
Pre-US European governments used to be notorious for going after people without a leg to stand on. But it didn't matter. All that mattered was the witch-hunt-like frenzy. That was enough to get them hung or at least imprisoned.
That's when my good pals Hancock, Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson, along with a few other buds, got together and came up with this whole fair trial system. And that was pretty cool up until a few years ago when people really started using the internet.
Thats when, well everybody in congress, who's names are too many to mention, (and not worth mentioning considering what they did) overturned two centuries worth of a tried and true system.
And where does it get you? Sueing grandmas.
I guess those old guys really had some stuff figured out. Their system isn't really silly or outdated like some people might think.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Good answer. Someone is abusing something, so let's just scrap the whole idea altogether. Let's see how this idea applies to other things: Someone is using a computer to steal money from a bank. Abolish computers, and this won't happen ever again.
Someone is using a car to getaway from a bank robbery. Abolish cars, and this won't happen ever again.
Someone died trying to get high by sniffing carpet cleaner. Abolish carpet cleaner, and this won't happen ever again.
Twit. Just because you never had a creative idea in your life, does not mean copyright does not serve a purpose.
It hurts when I pee.
Use a Mac and run Kazaa in VirtualPC. When you get served. Remove VirtualPC and say: "It can't be me...Kazaa doesn't run on my Mac!"
Note that Orrin Hatch wanted to give these people rights to blow up people's computers. And how do you think the RIAA got her name from an IP in the first place? My guess is through a DMCA subpoena. This is Not Nice(TM).
If 12 year olds and people who don't even have file sharing software installed are being targeted, then the "wosrt offenders" list must be pretty big. :)
I've been thinking about these RIAA suits, and have realized that not only are morally reprehensible misplacements of blame, but they are legally unjustifiable when looked the suits are looked at as a whole.
The suits claim damages of $150,000 per song. If one music company stole a song from another company, and published it separately, this may be a reasonable claim. The RIAA could claim maybe $150,000 TOTAL lost sales, plus whatever was made by the infringing company.
The problem is, they are holding EVERY FILESHARER liable for the entire amount of lost sales. This isn't just double-dipping on their damages, this is n-dipping. I can imagine that the company might lose $150,000 in total sales of a single song, but if only 1000 people shared the song (an extremely conservative number, probably only relevant for unpopular songs), their claims in total are $150 million in lost sales per song, which is just ludicrous.
This absolutely reeks of the record companies trying to capitalize on filesharing and count each share as a purchase. If the judges awarded the RIAA what they are asking for across the board, they stand to make orders of magnitude more money than they could ever dream of by their own devices. This puts huge questions on their claims of mitigating their damages - they allowed filesharing to go on for many years before starting lawsuits... to build up their claims of lost sales??
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Nice write-up, I like how you managed to make up the bit about the children's magician, slip a nice anti-Mac troll in the middle there, and still make the front page. That takes skill. Now if only you could have shoe-horned the phrase "M$" in there somewhere.
As for this being yet another PR disaster; the RIAA knows almost everything they do these days is going to be a PR disaster. They simply do not care:
Clearly, record companies and the RIAA had some concerns about backlash before going into this. Certainly the story about the 12-year-old in public housing who was sued hit the headlines fast and hard. Are you at all concerned about public relations backlash?
We knew that this was not going to be a good PR experience from the get-go. But the (record) companies were of the view that this was something we had to do without regard to the PR implications. If PR were the dominant consideration, we would not have taken these actions, and the problem would be continuing unabated, and people would not be thinking twice about the legality of what they're doing. If bad PR is the price, it's a relatively small one compared to the size of the problem.
It seems to me that if someone could demonstrate how to use a common P2P client like Bearshare or and make it look like someone else was using it, it would throw out RIAA's entire case. If I could share my files through my computer, but make it look like it was you doing it, your defense would be "I was hijacked", but I don't know by who. If you could claim that you were hijacked, suddenly everyone else could claim that too. Presto! No case against anyone! They could no longer prove that an IP address is really associated with a particular Verizon (Comcast, Road Runner, etc.) customer. Reasonable doubt could prevail.
Sure.
But I'll expand my anaolgy using your own example.
What if your window got broken during a Little League baseball game and you weren't really sure who broke it or who is really legally responsible, so you filed suits against all the players and coaches individually?
Only you didn't know all of their names and culled them from newspaper articles.
One of these names turns out to be a 66 year old who was just mentioned in an article incidentally, wasn't there, doesn't have any grandkids and doesn't even like baseball.
It wouldn't be unreasonable, even for a lawyer, to do a quick check of her story through publicly accessable means, then send her a letter saying, "Ooops, sorry," and then procede with the other 260 cases you have pending.
Especially since actually hauling a 66 year old in front of a judge claiming she's a Little League player who broke your window, with all the pissed of townspeople there watching, could be highly embaressing and prejudice your other cases.
KFG
...Let the next mistaken target be a Senator's son/daughter.
"Please note, however, that we will continue our review of the issues you raised and we reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant," Colin J. Zick, the Foley Hoag lawyer, wrote to Beeler.
Huh? This is equivalent to saying "Sorry I pushed you down the stairs, but I reserve the right to do it again!"
This is complete and utter lack of respect to Beeler, but tells you alot of what it thinks of its own customers!
The lawsuite will be quitely withdrawn and none of us will ever hear about it
karma : former act as leading to inevitable results
OJ Simpson was found innocent of the criminal charges of murder leveled against him, but he was still sued successfully in civil court.
Notice that the civil suit was AFTER the criminal one? The state gets first dibs on felons. If he had been convicted, then proving culpability in the civil case would've been a slam dunk.
there isn't enough evidence
The police are quite good at collecting evidence. In most of the RIAA music-trading lawsuits that have been filed so far, it would've been possible to assemble enough evidence for a criminal conviction ("Beyond reasonable doubt"). If the plaintiff could reach the 51% margin of guilt needed to win a civil suit, then handing that evidence to the police would've brought them to the the even lower degree of proof needed to get a search warrant. Then they could kick in doors, seize hard drives, and do whatever else is needed to build an ironclad case.
The chance of any nonprofessional infringer managing to wipe her hard drive before the police cut power is minimal. And computer-forensics can recover stuff like that. A hard drive full of 3000 MP3s, with no sign of owning the CDs, and corraborating records of P2P transfers made by the defendant... that's more than enough to convict someone. The evidence is there, if the cops are interested in grabbing it.
If we change the system so that you can only sue in civil court someone who is convicted criminally,
I'm not talking about all the non-crime, non-felony things lawsuits can be based on. I'm saying that if something is clearly a crime (as the RIAA claims), then the police should be eager to arrest someone. Or at least make an investigation. Instead, they only care about commercial infringement.
And let's look at it from the PR aspect. Who does the (flag-waving, Bush-voting, PATRIOT-supporting) US Citizen trust more? The government, or a corporate consortium? More importantly, who do they fear more? If they could get a half-dozen P2P sharers dragged to jail in handcuffs, it would do wonders for the chilling-effect.