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RIAA Sues a Child
dniq writes "You may remember the previously posted story about a case against a mother, which was dropped by the RIAA right after her lawyers moved to dismiss the case.
Well, guess what? The RIAA has brought a lawsuit against the mother's daughter - now a 14 year old girl - and moved for appointment of a guardian at litem."
Am I a thief? yes.
Tell me again, since when copyright infringement became theft?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I did think that the McLibel case was the biggest PR disaster a corporation had ever got involved in ..http://www.mcspotlight.org/ .I do not think any media organisation is going to let up on this one .
Well done to the RIAA , they have just managed to out do McDonald's PR disaster .
I really did not think they would be that stupid , Even if they win their reputation will be completely destroyed
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
This only applies to the original motion brought against the mother. The RIAA was not allowed to amend that. Instead, they have to file a new, completely separate motion against the child, with a guardian appointed.
IANAL, obviously, since I am posting to Slashdot, but it seems that since the case against the mother was dismissed with prejudice, she cannot again be named in her daughter's lawsuit as someone liable for the daughter's damages. I guess we'll have to see how this turns out.
I'm reading a ton of comments saying that it's disgusting they're targetting a kid. They tried to sue the kid's parent, but coudln't, so of course they now need to go after the child that was the one that actually downloaded the songs.
Right or wrong, the child is the correct target.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
Well, the last artice on slashdot was gross misinformation. The judge basicly said "Continuing as the same case is more complicated and has no advantages. If you want to do it, file a new case." Which they did.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you don't want to support this kind of thing, don't buy any more music from RIAA labels.
Use RIAA Radar to find out if an album is published by an RIAA label. If that's the case, and you want it anyway, don't buy it new, but used (for instance at ebay, amazon marketplace or even a used records store).
Support independant labels and artists by buying their stuff!
If you'd still like to support a band that's signed with an RIAA label, go see them live (and maybe buy a t-shirt there).
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
Until then, I'd really suggest you not make blanket statements for which you are not logically equipped to back up.
Copyrighted works have value and, in the case of music, it is demostrated value (people pay for it). Because people are obtaining the music without paying for it, against the wishes of the copyright holder, when they would have had to pay for it
Used music purchases are often against the "wishes" of the copyright holder, do not benefit the copyright holder, and deprive the copyright holder 'income'. Copyright law wasn't about protecting holder's incomes, in fact it was really the opposite. Copyright law was designed to force things into the public domain, as the common law at the time allowed for the argument of perpetual copyright. It isn't until recently that there is all this crying over derivative works, insanely long copyright terms and instant copyright of everything without application and without application for extensions. These benefit the corporations, the holders, and do not benefit the people or public in any way. It undermines the public domain and reduces creative possibilities.
Unless you can prove that all the people who downloaded the work would never have paid for it, arguing that downloaders would not have bought the music does not stand.
Actually it is a valid argument. If those in favor of stringent copyright laws want to argue in favor of "lost sales" without providing any proof to the matter other than made up numbers, then yes, the otherside can say "I wouldn't have bought it anyway."
I'm not against copyright and I do believe that creators deserve protection. But there needs to modifications to take into account current technology, and the lifetime of a copyright needs to be severly reduced to encourage innovation and allow the public domain, and thus the public, to flourish. And, contrary to what people want you to believe, the point of the following line is to LIMIT the term of IP protection: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
No no no. Real piracy involves ships and assorted pirate accessories (for the modern-day pirate, that means small arms, for the more historically-inclined pirate, muskets, swords, cannons, eyepatches and parrots). And usually plenty of violence, keel-hauling and making people walk the plank.
If the child admitted to the activity at the parent's urging, then the parent would not have been acting in the child's best interest. That would create a clear enough conflict that the court should appoint a GAL.
Even if the parent did not urge the child to take the blame, there is still enough incentive for the parent to do so that the court should appoint a GAL to represent the child's best interest in the case.
The good thing about that is that GALs (in most systems) are lawyers, so it's a little bit like getting a free lawyer. Even a poor person is not normally entitled to a free lawyer in a civil case.
I definitely agree with you that the civility if the RIAA's actions is debatable. IMHO, the RIAA and MPAA are nothing more than a bunch of thugs extorting money from people who cannot afford to defend themselves.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Completely wrong. Guild and innocence only refer to criminal procedings, and is determined at the end of the trial rather than at the start. In civil procedings, the defendant can be found liable or not liable.
You have "taken" nothing but have commited an illegal act. You did not buy or hire the car and therefore should not enjoy it's use.
Yes, but that illegal act is not "theft" even if it is FAR closer to theft than "copyright infringement" is.
This still doesn't cover copyright infringement.
Theft of services means you agreed to have someone perform a service for you, like a doctor's examination, and that person expended their time and labor fulfilling that agreement. When you skip out on paying them, that is theft of service.
In the case of theft of service, the doctor has expended time and physical labor performing the service specifically for you, and there is external, independent evidence that that's the case. You have interacted with the person performing the service.
In the case of copyright infringement, there isn't necessarily any interaction with the copyright owner. The copyright owner has no way of even knowing about the infringement without snooping into your private life to uncover it.
Here's yet another way to look at it: service is a limited, finite resource. The doctor has limited time. The theatre you sneak into has limited seats. Like physical property, theft of service is taking away something the provider had (time, physical space to rent, etc.) and no longer has as a result of the theft. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, involves an infinite, unlimited resource. In and of itself, the act of making a copy has absolutely no effect on the copyright owner and deprives the copyright owner of nothing that the owner had before the infringement took place.
So, theft is truely the wrong word for this act and very misleading. That isn't to say that, because of its constant use in the wrong sense, it will not come to acquire that meaning (since language ultimately depends on common usage), but currently it is a biased and purposely misleading word when used to describe copyright infringement.
All of the above, by the way, has nothing to do with the ethics or legality of copyright infringement. That is an entirely different issue. But it is important to distinguish it from theft before such discussions even begin, if those discussions are going to be rational.
And there are other - perfectly legal - ways of doing this. For example, you can use Yahoo's streamed music to sample as much new music as you like, for $5 a month. When you find something you like, you can buy it - either as a CD (if you want DRM-free digital copies) or as a WM file (if you don't), or as AAC if you want digital plus an iPod.
$5 a month. You get to try out as much music as you like, legally. Isn't that a price worth paying?
Wrong. "Theft of services" is an actual defined crime. "Criminal infringement of copyright" is not theft - see how the word "theft" doesn't appear anywhere in that phrase?
The Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement is not theft in a 1985 case, Dowling v. United States
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Wow, talk about spreading FUD! A guardian ad litem is "A guardian appointed to represent the interests of a person with respect to a single action in litigation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_ad_litem.
No one is taking this girl from her mother.
Find me in ~/.sig
Wish I had mod points. People saying "I copy music illegally because the RIAA are evil" drives me nuts; all they're doing is re-inforcing the RIAA's arguments that music piracy is a major problem. If you want to make an actual impact, neither buy nor copy the music. Same goes for people who complain movies/video games/etc are overpriced; stop copying, start going without, you'll make an actual impact.
Theft or stealing are the words used to describe the common law property tort of conversion, which involves infringing a person's right to a chattel (that is, personal property). The crime of theft involves unauthorised use and the intent to deprive.
In copyright infringement the copyright holder cannot be deprived. His positions before and after the instant of the infringing action are identical, as no damage (that is, real loss) has been suffered. In Dowling v United States the US Supreme Court found that "the rights of a copyright holder are 'different' from the rights of owners of other kinds of property". In other words, copyright infringement is not theft. This is one of the reasons that the phrase "intellectual property" is a misnomer.
Direct copyright infringement on the other hand is a strict liability tort. Liabilities that arise are the responsibility of the person who performed the act, irrespective of where the fault (culpability) lies. Strict liability does not necessarily make an action a crime.
So simply having an unlicensed copy of a work is sufficient to demonstrate the tort of strict liability, but possession of stolen property is insufficient to demonstrate theft.
The problem is determining what the liability is. In some countries the liability for copyright is determined by statute, and this is part of the problem behind the RIAA's actions.
First, there is a huge distinction between income and potential income. If person X copies a song, this is not evidence that person X would have bought the song in the absence of the option to copy it. Even if we assumed that it was, the actual damage to the copyright holder is limited to the net profit that would have been made off the purchase of one license (not the retail value of an album, as the RIAA would have you believe). Furthermore, noone other than the copyright holder has a claim -- retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers and publishers may not have benefitted from an album sale because of the infringement, but they are not entitled to a strict liability tort.
US law provides for statutory damages of "at least $750" per work. Compare that to the estimated $1 net profit the copyright holder will make per copy sold. It pays the RIAA enormously to claim the infringement of (say) 829 works with associated damages of either $30,000 or $150,000 (depending on how they make the claim) ... compared to the $829 their members would make from legitimate sales of the same works.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Yes the RIAA is a trade organization, but for the most part they represent the music studios, not the artists. See, the studios got an exception put into Copyright law which says that musical works performed by an artist belong to them, not the artist. Normally copyright is assigned to the creator/author/artist, unless it's a work for hire - I commission you (pay you) to create a piece of text, software, music, and it belongs to me even though you created it. Except the music studios didn't want to pay the artists so they bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobbied some Congressmen for a change in copyright law which says that audio recordings are a work for hire even if you don't pay the artist. That way they get the copyright, the artist gets "paid" a percentage of the album sales, and the costs of producing the album get taken out of the artist's cut. In other words, the artist pays for making his own album, but the studio gets the copyright.
So yes the RIAA is composed of members, but the members aren't the ones creating the music. They're simply the ones distributing music, and they're scared out of their wits because the Internet drops the cost of distributing music so close to zero that they children they're suing can do it.
Um, your joyride analogy doesn't work.
You HAVE taken something. You took a car for a period of time. The fact that you returned it is irrelevant. You were physically in posession of the stolen merchandise. It's irrelevant that the owner didn't need to use the car at that point in time.
Copying something can not be equated with physically taking an object. Ever. It's just not the same thing which is why the laws are written the way they are.
Seems like that definition would suit him nicely.
You'd expect someone complaining about language to use that language correctly and spell words of that language correctly. But, what actually happened, was that he didn't do such things.
Modern piracy laws allow for planes as well (both as the attacker and the victim). So parking your missile cruiser in international waters and shooting down 767s is piracy though it'll most likely be considered an act of war.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Actually, you pretty much hit the nail on the head, though it might be more accurate to call a GAL a "legal representative" rather than a guardian. A GAL is supposed to represent the interests of someone who is incompetent to stand trial...
If you're in a coma, and someone breaks into your house, falls down the stairs, and sues you, they'll appoint a GAL to represent your interests in court. It's more interesting in this sort of case because it becomes challenging to suggest that a person who has committed a civil offense, but is incompetent due to age, should be tried to the same standard as an incapacitated adult.
Were I the judge, I wouldn't touch this case with a 10 foot pole. It's a lose lose situation; either you're going to piss off congress and big business (at this point that grouping is almost redundant), or you're going to piss off everyone else.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The fact that the lawsuit *existed* was not a problem. The fact that Big Tobacco is going down in flames is not, per se, a problem.
The fact that it was phenomenally profitable for the lawyers involved (I've seen numbers quoted for up to a sixth of the payout going to lawyers involved, which is insane) *is* a problem. It encourages lawyers to take on class action and other suits for *anything*, which results in companies doing utterly stupid things "to avoid liability". I'm not talking about common sense things like "don't sell addictive, cancer-causing things to people", but things like "No, I can't have an employee drive you to the airport because of *liability*."
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Intellectual Propert - A product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes.
You just lumped copyrights, patents, trademarks (which you call "appellations of origins"), and trade secrets (which you call "business methods, and industrial processes") into one category. Those rights are more different than alike, and for this reason, many critics discourage use of the umbrella term "intellectual property" to conflate them.
Intellectual property is a term used by a great many people to cover well, all of intellectual property.
The term "intellectual property" is not used in the United States Code, and for a good reason: the different exclusive rights that make it up have different purposes and raise entirely different sets of public policy issues.
Let's look at the ways to possible hear content:
...
1. CD's and cassettes (if they still exist) that you purchase at the store.
2. Legally Downloaded music from a store like iTunes.
3. Television and Radio with the host of radio stations and the few television radio stations.
4. Illegally downloaded music.
it items 1-3 money gets back to the RIAA, in element 4 it does not. This means that the RIAA is being deprived of income.
You forgot live shows. Do you claim that live shows should be just as unlawful as element 4 because like element 4, they don't result in a lot of revenue going back to the label?
Now if our fictional person X (and more importantly the multitudes of persons X) is downloading music and not listening to the radio or watching MTV (or VH1 or whomever), they are collectively hurting ratings for stations and networks.
No, they are hurting the ratings for Music_Radio_And_Music_TV_In_General. Those services that are full of illicit file-sharing have their own ratings.
So to re-hash, the courts and legal system seem to be against you when it comes to this idea of the actual quality of property that IP has.
But they are against you when it comes to the conflation of different legal traditions into "intellectual property". For instance, the court in Sega v. Accolade ruled that you can't use copyrights or trademarks to simulate a patent, and this was upheld post-DMCA in Lexmark v. Static Control.
sharing music in the P2P manner is ILLEGAL.
Is it still prohibited even if such noncommercial sharing has been authorized by the author using a license such as CC by-nd-nc? Or do you claim that independent authors of musical works do not have the authority to grant such a license because they can't prove that their work is original?
Capitulating that you have not taken anything from them (we'll stay away from the whole lost sale thing) you have still violated copyright and that is wrong. While I am not one to excuse the ??AA's actions, I also attempt to follow the law of the land to a reasonable extent. If you really feel that way, buy your format of choice from allofmp3 and really piss them off. As I recall allofmp3 does, in fact, pay for the songs you download, it's just not as much as the ??AA would like to get, thus pissing them off more.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
No. Copyright is based in law and is granted to the creator of the work by "the people." As such, infringing on a copyright is a violation of the law, not a contract tort. The law says you can't refuse to uphold your end of a contract (modulo exceptions), but it also says you can't copy copyrighted works to which you don't own the copyright (again, modulo exceptions).
exactly, only a very very small amount goes to fledgling artists... like $4000 out of a $250,000 deal. Here is a link with how the RIAA does 'buisness' with real artists http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic. html
I love to slaughter the english language.
*) punitive damages can be small, but need to be multiplied by amount infraction: for example, McDonalds loses a case about hot coffee. their legal fees will be far more than the damages---but if they continue despite losing, they get fined for each cup of coffee they sell, the state gets the money. So they better clean up their act within X days or they will be facing some large damages----and the state profits by enforcement.
*) special rules for citizen vs corporation. the corporation has to fit the legal bill or something like that. If its such a threat to them, then they can afford to pay double the legal bill. We must stop this corporate terrorism in our courts. (yes I used the T word because thats what it really is.)
*) Lower courts, a local judge who is picked from the community to serve for a month. Cases go thru there 1st, and don't cost people anything, sort of a moderation filter before entering the system. other countries to this to save money & on load. Its great experience for the people being judges. I'd also not allow lawyers. Its a kind of a small claims court. Citizen judges learn about reality and cost less than a local judge. So what if the moron down the street messes up your day in court? Then you move to a higher court. (but it costs you) I'm sure it will save the system more than it costs to run it.
Legal fees are motivation for most lawyers. capping it too low will stop decent pro-bono work. Perhaps a requirement system for firms for doing pro-bono work? The REAL problem is the system is so corrupt it can't be fixed. Lawyers are the judges and politicians who control 2 branches, and usually get whatever they want from the executive branch as well. There is a huge bias. Many provide benefits for their firms while in power.
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Parents are almost never, if at all, responsible for the torts of their children. If the child has infringed and owes damages, then the plaintiff cannot force the parent to pay up. They'll have to collect them from the child. This is why people usually don't bother suing children.
the GPL is not a contract, it's a license.
I really don't know where this meme came from. I assure you, there's no difference. The GPL has an offer, a means of acceptance, and consideration. It functions perfectly fine as a contract, which is what a license is.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.