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RIAA Suit Rejected With Prejudice
yfarren writes "According to cdfreaks.com the RIAA has lost the case against the mother of a 13 year old girl accused of file-sharing violations." From the article: "The case was dismissed with prejudice, which prevents the case from being advanced against the defendant. Finally, the RIAA tried asking the Judge to amend the judgment in order to allow them to sue the child through a Guardian Ad Litem. However the court denied [the] RIAA's request."
Mwaaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha heeee heeeeeee wheeeeeee. *SNORT* Bah ha ha ha ha *wheeeeeze!* *snicker*
In principal I agree that music theft is bad and in all honesty, none of my music is pirated, but you gotta realize that stuff like this just makes you guys look bad. Bad as in $#!theads, not bad as in cool.
Karma goes around and it comes around, so i'd say this is due.
Oh and Edgar Bronfman Jr: You say you want to hold the cheapest songs on iTunes to
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
They shouldn't have let it go to the court.
But good news for everyone else.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
While I feel this court ruling is fair, the opinions in the article are a bit off...
In my opinion, the RIAA should not be allowed to target young minors with lawsuits, especially since most cannot afford to purchase music as it is, let alone have a credit / debit card to use legal services.
So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
more reasonable approach would be first send a warning to their parents about what is going on, since in many cases the parents don't understand what's going on.
And when the parents are unaware of their child, it is bad parenting. Sometimes a warning isn't enough.
I agree that the RIAA's suit was unfounded, in this case. I also believe the RIAA has lost their battles and will only be wasting time and money on additional lawsuits (that will cost them, in the long run, far more than they will 'save' or 'gain' in judgements).
I'm not even sure that the RIAA can afford so many lawsuits. Sure, they're a multi-billion dollar "co-op" organization "defending" artists, but each lawsuit costs them something. Even with in-house legal staff, there are still filing fees, follow-up costs, and the like. I'm assuming their return-on-investment is calculated by how many people they assume will stop pirating their music out of fear of lawsuits? So they're assuming that they'll be seeing a return from people buying more albums because they are afraid to pirate because the RIAA sues pirates? Confusing.
The reality, though, is that they likely won't stop suing, and if they even win 1 out of 10 cases, it will likely cause them to fail even more.
So I say, sue away, RIAA.
...that such a strong dismissal would also include this part:
"While the case was dismissed, the mother had to pay legal fees as the Judge refused to award her attorneys fees. The reason is that the plaintiffs' lawyers had taken the appropriate steps in trying to prosecute the mother and that the mother used tactics to obstruct the Plaintiff to efficiently prosecute her."
So it's dismissed, but she still owes somewhere between a couple thousand and a hundred thousand dollars? She's fucked regardless.
RIAA's still making it's message heard: Either roll over early, or we'll fuck you for life.
I think I speak for us all when I say "What The Fuck".
What company wants to sue children? We were all kids once, we probably commited minor crimes (stole a chocolate bar or whatever). But you never hear a shop keeper going "lets sue the little kid! He's a right fucker him!", they slap them on the wrist, tell their parents and keep a closer eye on them.
I didn't like the RIAA before, but when they start to sue children.. you've crossed a line no adult should even think of crossing.
I like muppets.
While the case was dismissed, the mother had to pay legal fees as the Judge refused to award her attorneys fees. The reason is that the plaintiffs' lawyers had taken the appropriate steps in trying to prosecute the mother and that the mother used tactics to obstruct the Plaintiff to efficiently prosecute her.
The lesson learned: the RIAA needs to drag the cases out longer to overwhelm the accused with legal fees.
If a child makes a photocopy of a book he/she can't afford, then I think the described leniency should apply.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
She still had to pay her defence costs in this case - hardly unusual, but very much a threat against those who don't want to settle. Yes, they can use this case as precident, but the costs of any court case just won't be acceptable to most of the people here in the U.S., who are living in a constant state of debt. This leaves the threat of bankruptcy as a legitimate tool of terror in the hands of the content distribution organizations, and any other corporations that decide that preying on the weak to settle is a legitimate financial strategy.
We need some corporate anti-terror legislation to stop corporations from acting to terrorize citizens. We already have too much historic and current legislation running the other way around. Of course, we used to just call it organized crime when applied to corporations, but terror as a political label is in fashion these days.
Ryan Fenton
the RIAA tried asking the Judge to amend the judgment in order to allow them to sue the child
Were they going to sue for lunch money??
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Repeat after me:
/. should make a point of not linking to sites that are just that shitty. Maybe the site owners will get the point.
Never, ever, ever link to a site with that level of popups.
I really think
And when the hell is Firefox going to get functionality to block flash-based popups?
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
The parents' of this kid aren't fit because they won't let the RIAA sue her? They want a new legal guardian (again, only for legal matters pertaining to this case) appointed purely for the purpose of suing a child the parents' prevented you from suing?
These people are INSANE.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
the needs to come where the cost of defending your rights in court isn't trumpted by the fact you can't afford it. you can bet your ass if the RIAA found a multi millionare on limewire swapping music the won't proceed, since he won't just fold.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Going after 13 year olds... it's like some sort of electronic pedophilia.
Not so much pedophilia... It incredibly commonplace for any hunting animal to target the young or the weak, those who cannot fight back or run. In this case it seems most unfair. As others have pointed out, minors do not have credit cards and thus cannot buy music online, and the parents are often quite clueless. Anyhow, this doesn't help the prejudice that lawyers == sharks.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
At what point does the RIAA become so seemingly repugnant by trying to sue 13 year old girls, that the very piracy they were trying to discourage becomes a common form of political dissent and protest?
Letter To Iran
You can sue a minor, you just have to follow special procedure. Part of which is the appointment of someone of age to represent the minor (in addition to the lawyer). The interesting thing about the case is that after the RIAA lost on the technicality they asked for permission to represent so they could follow the rules. The judge said no, which strikes me as a recognition and rejection of the overall end-around tactic.
It would be interesting to review the cases where the RIAA has acted this way and see if they pick cases where the parents may not be of means or legal savvy to fight the way this woman did.
No, they would sue to attach her future wages and to make an example out of her.
The RIAA has never been above scare tactics to get their way.
after the RIAA lost on the technicality
Hardly a technicality. They sued the wrong person. Their suit against the mother was entirely without foundation. No technical change could fix that.
Your post would have been better if you knew the difference between theft and copyright infringement—the RIAA threatens and pursues copyright infringement lawsuits. Judges and RIAA lawyers know the difference, but the RIAA public affairs uses the wrong language.
Digital Citizen
Given the political power they and their friends are amassing, I not only don't agree with you, but I think that the public had better get better organized around what copyright law ought to say and how it should work so that we can better insure our needs.
Digital Citizen
Nonsense. The lawyers no have to file a whole new case, which means all news fees for whiting out a name on a document. Or did you think the RIAA lawyers were trying to do whats best for their clients? They're lawyers
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Here in my country the looser has to pay the attorney fees. This is really a crazy thing in American law.
The judge's name is Lawrence Zatkoff; sounds like a guy's name to me.....
Amazing.
At 16 I knew the difference between 'weather' and 'whether'.
I could also use the punctuation keys on my keyboard, and didn't randomly capitalize words.
To answer your question about why the RIAA should sue for this behavior.
It's very simple. The music you downloaded does not belong to you and you have no right to keep it. You stole the music, where stealing is the act of taking something away from the owner without their permission.
You are not old enough yet, but when you eventually move out and live on your own, will you steal cable TV ? Will you leech off your neihbors WiFi connection without their knowledge ? Will you bypass your electricity meter to avoid paying for your electrical service ? Will you work and yet still claim unemployment benefits ? Will you file fraudulent insurance claims ?
Of course not, all the above are clearly morally and legaly wrong and even at your young age you can still see that.
The standard defense here on Slashdot that you are not stealing because you have not encumbered someone elses ability to buy is also utter rubbish. Just because you wouldn't have bought it in the first place, or have not encumbered someone elses ability to buy does not mean you did not steal it.
It is theft.
If you like four of the songs, that's great, go to any one of the major legal download sites and cough up the $0.99 each for them.
But, if you keep up what you are doing you will get sued by the RIAA and all the 'lawyer aunts' in the world won't get you a clean record.
Their only legal recourse is the PR disaster of filing a completely new lawsuit naming a 13 year old girl? Up until this point, they've been trying to just sue whoever had their name on the IP address. If this trend continues and the RIAA tries to sue hundreds or thousands of children, the public might be enraged to the point that Congress would be forced to make changes to the laws that make the RIAA's witchhunt possible.
We let a lot of kids off with less punishment for accidentally killing another child than the RIAA wants from these kids for sharing music (and possibly unknowingly at that since the p2p apps are configured that way...).
I think it's important to keep sight of the fact that what is legal is not necessarily ethical (and vice versa). While it is perfectly legal for the RIAA to sue a single mom or her children, it seems rather sketchy in the ethics department.
I don't think that it is ethical to infringe on copyrights, and I doubt most people would disagree. At the same time, I think it's also unethical that an organization like the RIAA can pretend to be acting on behalf of artists that they routinely abuse. I think people are really starting to understand that buying albums doesn't really support the artists ($.01 - $.03 dollars to the artist vs. $12-$25 to the RIAA and retailers). Because so much money goes to this seemingly ethically devoid entity, people have no conscience dilemmas when downloading.
Every artist signing a record deal is gambling: chances are they're going to lose, but every once in a while someone makes it big. I'm much happier as a consumer and music fan when I purchase music directly from an artist. F*ck the RIAA.
Although your tone is one of anger, your methodoloy has stood the test of time.
Simply put, if you don't like the service or can't take all the terms and conditions then you take your money elsewhere.
I have a relatively short list of companies I will not do business with. Some because they are sleazy (paypal) and some because they drive me nuts (albertsons - incessant chatter from the new 15 inch "in store media network") and some because they do things I find really low-down (geico - they donate radar detectors to cops on the basis they use them to frequently bust people for speeding so that they might charge more for insurance) and incredibly rude and stupid people (TigerDirect.com)
I know that my business probably doesn't mean much to these companies, but I also let other people know my feelings about the companies of shame list and it does rub off on people.
I personally know already that I have cost paypal over $2k in business just because I have made my horror story public. Albertsons is $100 / week, Geico is over $3k a year from me (I drive a Porsche 911 C2, own a harley and insure my house and jetski all through the same people), TigerDirect, shees, well, I only ever once ordered from those people.
I do happen to agree with the RIAA though. The kids are stealing and that's not right. If you don't like the CD's then don't buy them.
You can't claim you don't like the CD's (so you're not buying it) and then still download the tracks.
I don't think that you can get yourself out of court-imposed debts through bankruptcy. Otherwise you'd have deadbeat dads, drunk drivers, and other scum doing it all the time to avoid paying up. I'm not sure exactly what kind of legal language prevents you from being able to do it, but my recollection is that even if you declare bankruptcy, that satisfies only PRIVATE debts -- as soon as you start making money again, the courts will garnish your wages to pay off the PUBLIC ones.
OT: The other interesting place they'll do this is if you owe a financial debt to the Military, e.g. for college tuition, and then skip out without paying or render yourself unable to serve. You can go bankrupt for as long as you want, but the second you start making any real money they'll come and take it to start paying off your debt. I don't know if it works this way for government-backed standard school loans or not, but I'm positive that it's this way with military scholarships.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Congress would be forced to make changes to the laws that make the RIAA's witchhunt possible."
Yes, Congress will make it possible to sue the parents. What, did you really think Congress was on your side?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I agree, that would be a better system. It would really cut down on the junk lawsuits.
However it might also make it easier for the RIAA and other corporations to bully people around, because they have extremely expensive lawyers, and that would just make the bill that they'd threaten people with even more catastropic if they should lose. It would create a situation where the RIAA could say "If we lose, we'll pay your lawyer's fees, we've got millions. But if you lose, then you have to pay ours. Hope you have a box down by the river picked out to live in, peasant."
The way it works in current U.S. jurisprudence is that the assignment of legal costs can be done retroactively, through a separate lawsuit, by the defendant of the first one if the original suit was obviously frivolous. Judges tend to be fairly cautious in allowing this though, so it only happens when the cases are really frivolous (and sometimes not even then). Guess they're afraid it might have a "chilling effect" on lawsuits...(wouldn't that be a shame).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The RIAA are attempting to contain the uncontainable - and it's their own fault.
No matter what they like to say many, many people do not believe that copyright infringement is the same as theft.
Combine this with a media format that can be copied in seconds and you have a problem.
How did the poor recording industry end up in this mess? Greed and shortsightedness.
They had a format that could not be copied easily. Vinyl was the clearly superior sounding format of the day. For music lovers a tape copy simply would not do. People could not afford to create their own records. Even the inferior tape copies could only be created from the vinyl in actual time. So people bought the original. They weren't buying the "rights to the song", they were buying the media!
Enter the CD. Better sound quality but people did not have the capability to copy it perfectly - at first. The CD came out at a price that was a PREMIUM over vinyl. Why? Because the format was BETTER QUALITY, we were told. The recording industry was happy to be selling "media format" when it suited them. We the consumers were told that the price would drop as the production costs of CDs came down. Well, I can produce a CD for about 25 cents in my house now. So why am I paying at least 50 times the price that I could produce the thing for? Where is the price reduction that was promised? It never came.
So now the RIAA have a problem. The media is now worth squat and we can make our own perfect copies for virtually nothing. Plan B - copyright violation and suing 13 year olds.
Great idea guys, sue your user base. Worse still, sue the user base who couldn't afford to buy the stuff now anyway but may be inclined to in the future IF you hadn't completely soured their musical experience when they were young by taking them to court for listening to Jay-Z.
Get a clue. Reduce your prices. Encourage artists to make money from concerts (wow, imagine, performers, performing!). Find a superior format again and make it worth buying. You are trying to contain a product that can be perfectly reproduced in seconds, from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, for free. People find it hard to believe it's stealing. Good luck with your business.
All we really need is judges with balls enough to throw silly lawsuits out the window. See IBM v SCO for an example. Any fucking two year old would have been smart enough to ask SCO "which code did they steal"? But they judge has let this suit go on for three years without once asking that question.
evil is as evil does
With both sides being partially correct the major problem comes in that neither side is willing to give a little up. Now that there are avenues from which to purchase individual songs(ITunes Music store, et al) there is no reason to still be pirating music, but people are still downloading without paying. The original defense for the pirating of music was that the content was lacking, that the albums only contained one or two good songs, that we'd pay for the songs that we like. If this were really the case, no one would be pirating music any more, but people still are.
As I said before, it's a really strange situation; from the outside one can see the merits of both side's arguments, but once you align yourself with either side you become almost blind.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Well, since you would be a criminal, you might not be able to draw welfare (actually, is there still any such things as welfare? I thought the neo-cons put an end to that?).
No, I think that since the RIAA are demanding the criminalization of file sharing behavior, the file sharers should oblige them - deal with the RIAA in terms they can understand: Gang fo thugz to gang of thugz.
E.g. Form an IP Theft Crime Syndicate and respond to each lawsuit with a couple drive-bys at some RIAA member corporate offices. There are more of you than there are of them, and they are highly visible wiht a lot to lose - right out there in the open. Vulnerable.
For the financially disadvantaged (those who can't just dash out and buy a tech 9 or mac 10 or whatever they're called - toss a couple of gasoline bombs thru their plate glass (wait til everyone has gone home if you're squeamish about offing the bastards - but a more useless bunch of dickheads I really have trouble imagining) - show them what "losses" are really all about...
And speaking of fininancially disadvantaged, hasn't anyone noticed that the RIAA/MPAA thugs only pick on middle-to-low income citizens? They seem very careful to avoid going after anyone who has the real financial oomph to give them a real legal fight. This Michigan decision is not too bad, but the war is far from over, and the people are losing.
The RIAA/MPAA will no more be stopped by legal means than any other group of entrenched gangsters.
If the courts and law enforcement won't stand up for the citizens' rights, the citizens have to do it themselves.
This girl's mother could obviously afford a lawyer, and was willing to take the chance - what about all those other one-paycheck-from-the-streets victims who are having to balance next a paying couple months rent in protection money to the RIAA thugs against the possility that if they give a similar amount of money to lawyer they *might* not get stuck with an even larger fine?
I figure if the RIAA/MPAA thugs had their families threatened in the same way - to the same degree - they are threatening the families of their victims they might at least begin to understand what's at stake.
Regardless of what protestations and representations the RIAA/MPAA thugs might make, file sharing as we know it is not illegal. The fact that they have purchased legislattion supporting the pretense of its illegality doesn't change that. To those victims without sufficient funds to purchase legislation to protect themselves from unjust action under the color of Law, force becomes the only possible response.
It's a rigged system. It's ime to shut it down and start over.
"The Internet is made of cats."