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First RIAA Lawsuit to Head to Trial
mamer-retrogamer writes "Out of 14,800 lawsuits the RIAA has filed in the past two years, none have gone to court - until now. Patricia Santangelo, a divorced mother of five living in Wappingers Falls, New York, found herself the target of an RIAA lawsuit and vows to contest it. Santangelo claims that she knows nothing about downloading music online and the likely culprit is not her but a friend's child who used her computer. The RIAA disagrees."
Would this lawsuit set any type of precedent, or is it unique in any way?
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
You, the voter.
The voters elected a Congress with no concern for their enumerated and severely powers. Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Independents are equally evil.
The voters continue to vote, robbing everyone of their basic rights. The crazy majority has given their power away to a government more concerned with growing its power.
Don't confuse the RIAA with evil. You, the voter, are evil. They just followed the letter of the laws you wanted.
This is a civil case, not a criminal one. If the RIAA loses, they will simply appeal. Then it doesn't go to a jury. It goes to a judge. Furthermore, it's highly likely it will go to a judge the first time around. Judges have no problems coming down on mothers of five because they truthfully don't care. I hope she wins on the merits of her case. I would love to see someone stick it to the RIAA. The sad thing is though, she will probably spend upwards for $200,000 litigating this. It's sad when citizens can't afford to defend themselves against large corporations.
Why? Does being a divorced mother of five make you immune from having to obey the law?
I'm not saying that I agree with the RIAA on this issue, but the burden of proof in civil court is "preponderance of the evidence," and has nothing to do with
Jury nullification notwithstanding, the jury must decide for the plaintiff or defense based on the evidence presented in court, not the ideology, for or against, pertaining to downloading music on the Internet.
My two cents, and IANAL, but I have spend a LOT of time on the witness stand as an expert witness.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
In addition to saying "It wasn't me," she should challenge the constitutionality of the law which allows the RIAA to obtain her identity and examine her (allged) bandwith use habits WITHOUT A COURT WARRANT; illegal search and seizure is inadmissable in a court of law and the constitution is supposed to protect us against this sort of thing.
She could ask the ACLU to defend her on that basis and they might very well jump at the idea.
I've always hated that provision of the law (DMCA), which allows them to just bypass the courts and hire the cheapest lawyer/firm on the block to use their very deep lawyer funds chest to threaten the average joe with massive suits and see them capitulate, regardless of whether or not they are guilty.
You can't use a badly formulated law to punish the unjust and expect complete compliance from the masses.
Further, when copyright (copywrong?) can be extended to insane lengths of time far beyond what was intended (e.g. steamboat willie) and fair use takes a back seat to corporate profits, can we be very surprised at the disrespect/disobediance thses laws are receiving?
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Have you been selected to jury duty? I remember being screened for a jury in a trial where one of the lawyers asked the jury whether they would pass a guilty verdict for battery if a defendent had touched the toe of someone that had asked them not to touch it. Everyone, but me, said they would. Felony conviction for touching someone's toe. I think you grossly overestimate the free thinking capabilities of your fellow citizens.
no missing step:
1. Monitor P2P network
2. set up settlement hotline
3. Sent threatening letter (something like hundreds of thousands of dolars if you go to court, a more "resonable" ammount if you settle)
4. Profit!!
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
There could very well be people getting into trouble who did nothing wrong. I service lots of residential machines and their loaded not just with spyware, but trojans and viruses that make their way into these machines through remote and browser exploits. Some these machines need complete re-installation even though I clean up all local machine and user specific startup entries.
These I suspect have been root-kitted to act as zombies or proxies. These people have no idea what kinds of traffic is running through their machines and connection. It sounds as if such people are getting sued in some instances, but probably don't the know well enough to realize what is happening.
It doesn't seem to me that a list of bittorrent peers associated with a copyrighted file proves guilt. The environment is too insecure to guarantee who the actual source is. It seems to me the RIAA should have to prove a couple things:
1) That they downloaded the file with the copyrighted name and verified that the content is actually the copyrighted material.
2) That the activity from the IP address of the peer being charged actually represents the activity of a particular machine's owner. They would probably need to confiscate the machine for this - is this feesible? Just charging the owner of a connection seems unreliable, many machines can sit on a home or business network. Can one be held responsible for hijacked traffic running through their pipe?
Where this is headed it seems is a battle over regulating net communication. The RIAA will begin to push technical mandates through congress to make the internet more "secure," which will be difficult at best without implementing lots of centralized control and monitoring. How long till we have sign our packets with keys? Then how long till "sponsored" packets become free, while others cost?
A recent slashdot story featuring Doc Searl's opinion piece, Saving the Net from the pipeholders" sum's up this position very well. It's kind of long, but but offers an insightful view of what's ahead, and is worth reading for anyone with interest in the future net as a decentralized, unprejudiced peer to peer medium.
RIAA for shame. Crows about "rights" while fueling the festering problems. 30+ yrs is enough, put up or shut up and get out. The current regime is simply an obnoxious, parasitic force begging to be slapped down hard by an angry public. I am kind of morbidly curious to see the public reaction if and when the court system fails again.
My god I had to scroll forever to find someone that brought up this point. How can *any* single entity file that many lawsuits and not be considered as abusing the system? Doing simple math, that's like 20 lawsuits a day!!!
No wonder it takes two years for a murder suspect to stand trial, 23 months to deal with the paperwork of RIAA lawsuits, one month to pick a date everyone can agree on that ain't a holiday.
I love America, but baby, sometimes you make my blood boil.
-- I have fans? Wow.
This is mostly guess work on my part so if you have any corrections please tell me.
As far as I know the average settlement cost is $3,000. After 14,800 lawsuits that's $44.4 million. I don't really know the law in this area but is that $44.4 million even taxed? Or did they just make $44.4m sans some minor legal fees? And if they did just make this huge sum of money, how much of it is going to the artist who was 'starving to death' because of 'piracy'? $44.4m over 2 years would be about $61,000 a day, or about $2,500 an hour, that's a crazy $0.70 per second.
I could be totally wrong though.
The phrase "a jury of your peers" has nothing to do with the American legal system, really. It was an English Commonlaw right that guaranteed a nobleman couldn't be tried by peasants. The only holdover I know of that it still has is that an officer facing a court martial can choose for his jury to only be fellow commissioned officers and not enlisted personnel or warrant officers.
All's true that is mistrusted
disclaimer: IAAE (i am an economist) (god i hate acronyms)
I actually did a study like this, and though i doubt it was one of the ones you read, i did indeed examine the relationship between sales and new album releases. in fact, my final model found three statistically significant variables that accounted for most of the variation in record sales (at the 95% confidence level).
those three variables were %change in GDP (year on year), Personal Consumption Expenditures (which helps account for people's changing spending habits in times of economic uncertainty and such), and New Album Releases.
I ran dozens of different models in an attempt to capture the "piracy" effect, and after two years was forced to conclude that this effect, if it exists at all, is indistinguishable from random noise. in other words, it is insignificant.
I am continuing my research into this area and I have actually recently found a couple of additional economists interested in helping my research, so hopefully we will be able to contribute more to the literate on the subject in the future. regardless, there is already an awful lot of evidence that at least makes us seriously question the veracity of the industry's claims, and makes us wonder how the flying fuck they justify their rather ridiculous conclusions.
education
That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
~a.bierce