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."

Comments

This sort of thing...

[CdBee]

..only reinforces my determination not to pay for content.

Am I a thief? yes. but it sits easier with my conscience than paying an industry which shows so readily all the worst tendencies of big business

Re:This sort of thing...

[bentcd]

When someone cuts your hair, there is an actual person spending his own time attending to you specifically. When you run off, his time was spent for naught. This is why such an example might be called theft. When it comes to copyright infringement, it is usually you spending your time to make a copy onto your storage media. Noone has spent any of their time or resources on you specifically and so not paying them is nowhere near what can be called theft. The word is only used in an attempt to evoke an emotional response in the audience.

Re:This sort of thing...

[sjwaste]

in IT you are tought truth. in the legal profession you are tought to lie your ass off at every chance you get. and who drives these legal suits against people? Lawyers. do the world a favor, vote to have all lawyers killed today!

I'm a law student, and let me tell you, we're not taught to lie. And in the end, its the RIAA management that drives this first, then the lawyers involved. The bottom line is there'd be no litigation if RIAA management didn't want it. Besides, the lawyers here are working for the RIAA to stop people from downloading music they didn't pay for. The RIAA may be all that is soulless and wrong in how it operates, but you can't sit here and tell me that their desire to have people pay for their music is wrong. Suing a kid might be wrong, but the parent should've taken responsibility long ago.

Would I personally choose to plead this case? Absolutely not, I don't think its right to sue a family into oblivion for this. That would be economic waste, in my opinion. So while I disagree with their method of action, I don't disagree with them trying to prevent filesharing of their copyrighted works. If I were the RIAA's counsel, my advice to them would be not to sue, but to get with the times and update their business model. It's quite outdated, and that's what's driving this.

Contradiction?

[DrEldarion]

Wait a sec, the other article says "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.".

What gives?

Lawyers and fault

[typical]

I'm a law student, and let me tell you, we're not taught to lie.

I agree. But you *do* work in a field where it is very beneficial to use loaded rhetoric. This is not your fault -- as long as juries are going to respond to emotional arguments instead of being coolly factual, if you don't do it, the other side is going to do so, and there's no mechanism in the legal system to dissuade lawyers from using loaded rhetoric.

The real complaint (why people tend to transfer a lot of their anger onto lawyers) is that it's fucking hard to build a perfect system for resolving issues between people. Pull juries out of a system, and you establish a class of judges as incredibly powerful. So, given that, it's really hard to take Joe Average and make him intelligent, analytical, and thoughtful to the point where a guy whose professional is to convince Joe Average of one side of a case can't make his point. Now, what's the guy on the *other* side of the case going to do? Be purely factual and keep losing cases? No -- that's an unstable system. He's going to use rhetoric too.

The masses see that something isn't perfect and choose to focus on lawyers, because they're the most visible target. Hence, "Lawyers are Evil". It becomes a common mantra after a while.

If I had to make one suggestion that would improve the quality of our legal system immensely, it would be to change two things (both of which lawyers would oppose, so not likely to happen):

*) Plaintiff never gets punitive damages above a certain (small) amount. Any punitive wins in this class get used by a state-run organization to help avoid future problems of this sort. This eliminates the massive, multi-million dollar "lottery" wins for plaintiffs and lawyers that make abuse of the legal system so profitable.

*) Indirect and direct profits to lawyers in class action suits get capped. Yes, in very extreme cases, this *could* limit the likelihood of some independent law firms going out against some big corporate-backed lawyers with tons of funding, but, for instance, the Big Tobacco lawsuit was absurd. Class actions should not be a lottery system for lawyers.

I'm not against lawyers making a good living -- they work in a highly specialized field and have to be knowledgeable and skilled. They're important to the functioning of society. What I *don't* like is that a select few make phenomenal amounts of money through abusing the legal system. Putting social pressure on lawyers to not do this is useless, because it doesn't matter what the masses of lawyers do; only what the few that cause problems do.