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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."
What? No Limp Bizkit? No Britney Spears? No Kanye West?
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
When you're in the buisness of fear-mongering, backing down from things - even when it's completely irrational - just isn't an option. They'll keep repeating their truth until everyone believes it.
Every cloud has a silver lining, but, then again, so does every cigarette packet.
Sure they would. Just not on a female mother of five. If she were a male, they definitely would screw him over.
From TFA:
And as for those who claim they didn't download any music, the RIAA says that if defendants got a letter in the mail saying they or someone in their house illegally downloaded music, chances are it is true.
"The chances of it not being the right person or someone in that household are slim," said Stanley Pierre-Louis, senior vice president for legal affairs at the RIAA. "Let's face it, what we're doing is on the right side here. What these users are doing is violating the copyright laws."
I call bullshit.
This is exactly why I have a second unsecured access point in my apartment piped to the internet. Plausible denyabilty. Who know who's using it? My modem's IP address could be connected to any one of the 50 apartments in my building.
Why do they always seem to pick on the "little guy"? A divorced mother of 5? How can they possibly make themselves look good by doing this? They would probably be more liked if they were to sue the 20-year-olds with gigs of music instead of the divorced parents trying to make ends meet, or the old granny. It looks as if they are trying to play the "Big mean bad guy", though I can only see this hurting them, am I wrong?
Where's the paypal button to her defense fund?
I love the RIAA lawyer's quote, "Let's face it, what we're doing is on the right side here."
We're back in that universe where shaking down divorced moms with five kids for $3,000 - $4,000 or the threat of tens of thousands in court fees and damages, all as punishment for the heinous crime of the download of six songs, is "the right side." It's even more fun when you consider the possibility it wasn't even her who did it. I don't know, how popular is Godsmack among that demographic?
The RIAA interoffice memos on these cases must read like tobacco company internal communications.
Those are my 2 cents, and they're free.
Don't confuse the RIAA with evil. You, the voter, are evil. They just followed the letter of the laws you wanted.
Uhm, no. They are following the letter of the laws they purchased through a Free Market Government.
"Evil" is not in elections, or anything else. Evil is the willingness to fuck over someone for your own gain. Pure evil is when that gain is just for your own enjoyment.
The folks at the RIAA are willing to fuck over as many people as they can to ensure their own position in the distribution of music, a very profitable position. File sharing is dangerous, not just because people can download the latest lame Metallica song, but because it will allow people to distribute their own music. Yes, there's a lot of really, really bad stuff out there for free (some of it worse than Metallica's recent stuff), but as review sites progress, and the truly independent music scene evolves, people will be able to find the music they like, and the RIAA is cut out completely.
Independent music is doing to the RIAA what free software is doing to Microsoft-- making them stay up at night, even if it doesn't appear to be a real threat at the moment. P2P is essential for a solid independent music scene. The RIAA is trying not just to eliminate file sharing of copyrighted works (which is wrong, no matter how heavy-handed the bad guys are), but to paint all file sharing as evil.
If they can do that, they can destroy the truly independed music scene before it even gets started.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
1 out of 14,800 lawsuits.
Gosh that sounds like organized crime....RIAA shaking down 14,800 people for money...extortion is what it sounds like to me...sounds like the RIAA should be concerned about The RICO ACT
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
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.
(Obligatory IANAL) They (the RIAA) can appeal the a jury's decision only if they can find an error of law in the case (e.g, the judge has to make a reversable error). Furthermore, the appealant court cannot make a determination of facts in the case (under the 7th ammendment to the constitution, this right is resevered to juries in cases of more than $20 unless both parties wave their trial-by-jury right) - judges can only rule on matters of law.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
If the record industry loses the case then they will have no legitimacy, if they win parents will pressure their representatives to change the laws that give them legitimacy. Copyright protection is a legislated right, not an inalienable one.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
That's the beauty of law. You can always find SOMETHING to contest. The jury is purely a finder of fact, but if the judge does not allow them to consider something they shouldn't have, or if he does allow them to consider something they shouldn't have, that alone is basis for appeal. There are tons of other reasons to file appearls, but the RIAA has enough time and enough money to litigate that woman into bankruptcy 500 times over.
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
Juries have a little used function whereby they can render a not guilty verdict by refusing to acknowledge the validity of the law itself. The concept is called jury nullification and is searchable if you want to read more about it. The high priced monopolisitic BAR lawyers guild and judges hate it, frequently threatening people in juries who even mention it.
Just another one of those things that isn't taught in US public schools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
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.
I congratulate you on being the first person I've ever seen who compared illegally downloading music to rape
You must be new here.
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.
It's a civil case, and people are not found "guilty" or "not guilty" in civil matters. The jury will be ruling either with or against the plantiff, and it is up to the jury to determine the amount of damages.
There are plenty of cases where juries have ruled with the plantiff but refused to award damages of more than, say, $1 - a token amount that indicates while the plantiff was correct, the jury did not feel they should be awarded much money.
-bugg
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occured at your IP address. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why single out the IP address as such a watershed in the chain of accountability that the burden of proof flips? To see what I'm getting at, what makes IP addresses so special, as compared to (for example):
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occurred in your city. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occurred under a screen name you frequently use. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
--MarkusQ
Just not on a female mother of five. If she were a male, they definitely would screw him over.
A male mother of five has bigger problems than the RIAA.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The woman is being accused of commiting a crime.
No, this is civil court, which hs a different legal standard and no possibility of jail time.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
In p2pnet's interview with Patricia Santangelo, she said she's "stressed" about funds for her defenses, but doesn't have an account for donations.
However, Santangelo is listed, in case anyone wants to snail-mail her some help.
Santangelo lives about ten minutes from me. I'm going to try to round up some friends to picket and toss eggs and CDs at the RIAA scumbags on her day in court!
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
In addition to this, it should be noted that the standard of proof in a civil case is not "beyond reasonable doubt". It is a preponderance of evidence, which simply means that there's a reasonably high probability (some estimate it to be around 60%) that the defendant committed the act of which the plaintiff accuses them. In some other cases, the standard of proof is "clear and convincing" evidence (some say around 80% probability). Preponderance of evidence is the lowest standard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_Defense (actually it was only on a google cache version)
However, I do have something to add: a link to FIJA, the Fully Informed Juror Association.
Basically, if you disagree with the law, as a juror, you do not have to decide based on the law. You can say "not guilty" even though the prosecutor has pictures of the accused taking a toke from a bong.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Let's assume the RIAA is 100% right, and the defendant has done everything they are accused of. The concept of damages will be interesting. I seriously doubt that the defendant made songs available for download that were not already available via P2P. The "lost" revenue is really just the money the defendant would have paid, IF they chose to buy the songs. Yahoo music service is what, $5/month? So if she paid Yahoo $5/month, she could have downloaded all of these songs (and the P2P underworld would have had all of the same songs anyway). I'd love to know how the RIAA thinks they can prove damages in excess of $5/month.
IANAL, but I am a law student.
The case would set precedent. The strength of the precedent, however, depends on how far the case goes. If the district court says "X," then it needs to be consistant with "X" in the future (unless it has a darn good reason not to be). But the case might get appealed. The court of appeals sets precedent for itself and all courts lower that are in the same circuit. The Supreme Court sets precedent for all circuit and districts courts.
This is how it would work in application: The district court rules "X" regarding the case. If "X" is favorable to the RIAA then it will bring future cases to the same district court. If "X" is not favorable to the RIAA then it will bring the next case to a different court that does not need to pay attention to the decision of the first court, or the RIAA may appeal the decision of the district court.
If there is an appeal, the the same scenario as above applies. If the decision on appeal is favorable to the RIAA then the RIAA will bring future cases to any district court in that same circuit because all of the district courts are bound by the precedent set by the court of appeals.
If the court of appeals decision is not favorable to the RIAA then it will bring future cases in an entirely different district because all of the district courts must follow that same unfavorable holding. Or, alternatively, the RIAA may appeal the unfavorable court of appeals decision to the Supreme Court.
The courts of appeals and the Supreme Court all have the choice as to whether or not to hear arguments on the district court cases. The vast majority of cases never make it past a district court.
Really it's all more complex than this, but that's the basics.
The jurors are supposed to and expected to vote based on the laws. That's why the judge's instructions specifically instruct them to consider the evidence and detemine whether the defendant broke the law.
From the Juror's handbook found at the above referenced fija.org:
"As recently as 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the jury has an " unreviewable and irreversible power... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge.... (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972))
Or as this same truth was stated in a earlier decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland: "We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision." (US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969))."
The loophole is that there is no punishment for jurors who blatantly disregard the law when considering their verdict. Therefore, jurors do have th power to decide based on their conscience, or their political viewpoint, or their mood of the day, or a flip of a coin. (Perhaps someone should set up a website describing your right and duty to flip a coin to decide a verdict - then that would make it the right thing to do!)
Jury nullification is not a loophole, it exists to remind the government that it has a fourth branch..."The People".
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
"How the hell are they going to do that based on an IP address?"
/. and thinks poorly of the RIAA. It's possible the jury will be stacked with people with hundreds of records who will want to fry anyone who hasn't spent half as much as they have on music or believe some RIAA claims that "piracy"(ARRRG!!!) *not* price fixing is the cause of high CD prices.
First thing to do is challenge how they got the IP, oh wait, it's IPA now, they're trying to hijack the use of "IP". We all know they're not doing any of the work themselves, they're just hiring "agents" who secretly enter people's computers to search for music files. If another company said it's true, then it must be true because large corporations and their contractors would *never* ever even think of saying anything that isn't true or do anything moraly questionable, like . It's possible they're borrowing the server IP logs of some RIAA bashing message boards, adding a couple songs, file sizes and time stamps and suddenly it goes from "you said something bad about our cartel" to "you're stealing sound". Ok, so it may not happen that way, but does snyone really know how the RIAA gets that information? People are challenging breathalizers because the firmware use closed source. It's all about the money, places in Vegas used, possibly still try, to rig slot machines to pay out fewer jackpots resulting in fewer payouts and more PROFIT. It may be unlikely, but still slightly possible.
And the claims of lost billions due to what they call "piracy". I'd like to see some proof of that too. Yes, there are people who borrow audio files using the Internets, but does anyone really know how many and how much revenuse is lost because of it? I know people with large music collections they didn't buy, but I know more people with hundreds of pounds of records and CDs. My favorite stats are $250billion lost and 3% of sales lost. That's like claiming 3% of their sales is $250billion, do a little math and see that those "stats" are very questionable, they may be large corporations, but I don't think they're worth that much.
They make up stats of lost PROFITs and inflate claims of "piracy" and like to pull a SCO and sue people to offset lower sales due to poor quality products. Their cases need to be thrown out until they produce some real proof.
As for a jury deciding for defendant, not everyone reads
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
I'd really hope the defendant's lawyers do a good job during the discovery process. They should be able to request all the records the RIAA has concerning their various investigations into alleged infringements, not just the cases they have been prosecuting. When they produce a list of corporate infringing IPs, it's going to seem odd that the RIAA is only going after shallow-pocketed individuals. If I remember correctly, to enforce copyright you are required to pursue all known violations in order to maintain the copyright. Maybe this case will force the RIAA to start filing many, many more lawsuits, including going after large companies as well. What happens once a Microsoft, Google, or .gov IP shows up on their hit list?
In the mid-1950's, Zenith engineers created the first wireless TV remote control, eliminating the need to have a child.
Go after the people selling the pirated music!
Just because its ridiculously expensive doesn't mean that you can call it 'pirated music'. Jeez, people these days call anything at all 'piracy'.
The correct term for this crime is 'price-fixing'.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
It isn't a constitutional right it is a tort preceeding. common law if you must. It is in the same manor of how a judge can decide this law is meant to be applied in this way and thereby creating a different law all together. It is built into the fabric of the judicial system and is the basis of how a guy can shoot someone stabbing his wife and yelling your next in a state with no self defence laws and not be convicted of a crime.
Ohio for instance, untill reletivly recent, didn't have any laws pertaining to self defense. If you punched a guy that was clubbing you, you were just as guilty of asault as the original asaulter. Jurry nullification has basicaly made the asault laws unenforcable or at least weakened them to the a point were a prosecuter couln't win a case by charging a man being beaten for fighting back. In that situation, the law was deam unjust and unenforcable. This still leave someone the burdon of proving the facts were as claimed though. It isn't an out for someoen to provoke a fight and then pretend to be inocent so it can still be enforced.
Jurry nullification in this case could come in the form of you have to be certain a said person was the one actualy responcible for the copyright infraction. In a civil trial you have a lot more roo for dougbt then a criminal trial so nullification could actualy just implse stronger requirments for proof while keeping the laws enforcable for those blatently violating it. Analogies suck in these situations because you can change what parts of the laws that can be applied by the actions of the jurry. Copyright law is pretty specific in that the person violating it is the one causing harm. The store that let sold you the cds or cassete tapes even though it was likley you were going to copy somehtign doesn't get charged with anyhting. Simularly, you providing your computer to someoen else, shouldn't automaticaly mean you are guilty of somethign thye might have done or somethign that a mistake might have made people think you have done.
This will be an interesting case to watch unfoled. I'm sure the evidence and the weight the evidence carries with be questioned and it may become somethign admissable but unenforcable by the rulling of the jurry. IE, ip logs and screen names (with auto logons) are not enough to prove you were at your computer at a certain time and participating in ceretain activities or had control over those activities or if the listing of names of copy protected material actualy means the protected works were availible and the copy was actualyt being violated. (garage bands cover songs and create thier own songs with the same names and song already names and can distribute them) If the jurry negates or nullifies any of this evidence it will be hard to prove anyone did anything.