New Dismissal Motion in File Sharing Case

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A new motion to dismiss an RIAA peer-to-peer file sharing case has been made, this time in Brooklyn federal court, in Atlantic v. Huggins, reports Recording Industry vs. The People. As in Elektra v. Santangelo, the RIAA had served a boilerplate complaint alleging generally 'downloading' ,uploading', and 'distributing', but without naming any specific acts. Defendants' lawyers argue that "the Complaint alleges in conclusory fashion and upon information and belief that defendant used "an online media distribution system" to download and distribute certain alleged copyrighted recordings to the public, and/or to make such recordings "available for distribution to others." but "makes no attempt to describe the specific acts of infringement or the dates and times on which they allegedly occurred.""

Comments

Re:Exactly. I'm waiting for a case.

[saucercrab]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't death a pre-req for becoming a martyr?

Re:IANAL, but...

[Larmal]

no, they're handing a printout with what files were available to be shared - there's no proof, however, that anything was actually shared - which is the point of the grandparent. If memory serves me correct, this is exactly why the judge in Canada threw out the case (i think - can i get a confirmation on this?)

Re:So basically

[cpt kangarooski]

This just brings us back to your needing to get more familiar with the law. All this stuff is covered in 17 USC 501 et seq.

For copyright infringement, there are a couple of different remedies: injunctive relief, damages, seizure and destruction, and costs and fees.

Injunctive relief (i.e. a court order whereby the infringer is told to stop infringing) has no connection with whether there was one infringement or a thousand. A plaintiff is satisfied with a single injunction.

Damages are calculated one of two ways, at the copyright holder's option. First, either the actual damage caused to the copyright holder, plus the net profits of the infringer. In your typical downloading case, these are too negligable to care about. So the second option is statutory damages. There, the infringer has to pay an amount set by the court, within a range set by the statute, and which goes up or down depending on whether the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was willful or the defendant can prove that the infringement was in good faith. But this amount is determined, not per infringement, but per work infringed! If you upload one copy of an mp3 or a thousand copies of the same mp3, it's all the same. The statutory damages can only increase in you're infringing multiple works.

Seizure and destruction are usually more aimed towards professional infringers. The copies they've made, and the tools they've made them with can be confiscated and destroyed. This is unlikely to be applied to John Filesharer, however.

And finally court costs and reasonable attorney fees can be imposed on the loser, if the court wants.

So there's no way for the RIAA to increase the amount of damages just by downloading more than once. Now, if there are multiple works being shared, then that can increase the damages spectacularly, but it's difficult to see why that's an inherently bad thing. After all, RIAA would _not_ be the party responsible; it's the defendant that put up all those different files for download.