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Fighting RIAA Without an Attorney
2think writes "Yahoo News is reporting that Patricia Santangelo of New York will be taking on the RIAA in court without an attorney. It seems that Ms. Santangelo has committed over $24,000 due to her case and simply cannot afford to continue with the services of an attorney." From the article: "Her former lawyer, Ray Beckerman, says Santangelo doesn't really need him. 'I'm sure she's going to win,' he said. 'I don't see how they could win. They have no case. They have no evidence she ever did anything. They don't know how the files appeared on her computer or who put them there.'"
Nonsense, Judges read briefs from normal folks when they represent themselves in the US and the UK. Remeber that in September 1990, McDonald's sued Dave Morris and Helen Steel, activists with London Greenpeace, for producing and distributing a leaflet titled "What's Wrong With McDonald's." McDonalds went after them, they represented themselves and it went around and around but they won.
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http://www.organicconsumers.org/politics/mclibel2
Furthermore, in the United States, you have a Right to self representation, any Judge who would refuse to read a brief from someone self representing would be overturned on appeal, something no Judge wants.
More recently, the Supreme Court has expounded the right to represent oneself, holding first in Faretta v. California 422 U.S. 806 (1975) that the power to choose or waive council lies with the accused, and the state can not intrude, even as it later held Gidinez v. Moran, 509 U.S. 389 (1993) if the state believed the accused less than fully competant to adequately proceed without council.
The circuit courts have narrowed the right to exclude appeal procedures as in Martinez v. California Court of Appeals 528 U.S. 152, 163 (2000), and again by reference in US v. Moussaoui (4th Cir. 2003) (No. 03-4162); however, this restriction is new, inconsistent with precedent, and has yet to be tested in the Supreme Court.
Did they raid her house for a civil suit, or do they have some sort of remote monitoring software?
The RIAA used a modified version of Kazaa Lite to access the Kazaa network and track down people who shared copyrighted music. Kazaa Lite is an unauthorised version of the Kazaa client, which is why Sharman Networks is suing the RIAA for copyright infringement in a separate suit.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
How many times is it necessary to say this? "Proof beyond a reasonable doubt" applies to criminal cases only. There is no finding of guilt or innocence in a civil case, only a determination of legal responsibility, a judgment for the plaintiff or defendant based on the simplest and most plausible interpretation of the evidence.
The DMCA passed with bi-partisan support. Congress was one thing, the Senate was another, as far as control by each party went at the time. The President was a Democrat, but was wasting an enormous amount of time fighting utterly ridiculous claims of "sexual harassment", "Whitewater fraud", and finally "Lying about something that was irrelevent to the first case but was brought up in that court anyway in order to create embarassment." I think it's sad he didn't stand up on the job, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about it having anything to do with cozying up to Hollywood.
It is false to use a lack of Democratic opposition to the DMCA to pretend that a claim Republicans support this shit is false. It is 100% true that Republicans support extreme copyright laws. Both the DMCA and the Sonny Bono (R) Copyright Act were Republican proposals, with bi-partisan support.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There are a lot of falsehoods and misleading information being reported about this case. A full set of court documents is available; scroll down to "Elektra v. Santangelo".
First, Ms. Santangelo is not being charged with just downloading. The complaint actually says that Ms. Santangelo used Kazaa "to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others." As evidence for this charge they present a series of screen shots of Kazaa showing an account that is offering thousands of songs available for upload. Their claim is that this account corresponds to Ms. Santangelo's computer, although no evidence for that has been presented yet at this stage of the proceedings.
They did not inspect Ms. Santangelo's computer, which supposedly is in her ex-husband's possession and has had the disk wiped due to virus infections. They got the data from Kazaa by looking at the files which were (supposedly) being offered by her computer for upload.
So this is not a case of "downloading", it is a case of downloading and/or offering to upload. If that account actually does correspond to Ms. Santangelo's computer, the simplest explanation is that her kids were doing it, and she is responsible for their actions.
Even if it is the kids' friend, it's unlikely that he downloaded thousands of songs onto their computer without the kids knowing it. And even if he did, Ms. Santangelo could still be liable herself, and then she would have to sue the friend to recover damages on her own. In other words, she would owe millions of dollars to the RIAA, and then she would sue the friend for millions to cover her debts. But the RIAA would not depend on her success in suing the friend.
In short, instead of paying a few thousand to settle this and make it go away (and punishing the kids for getting the family into this mess), she is now out many times that already, and is likely to end up owing an astronomical sum. Her only recourse will be to declare bankruptcy.
There are two lessons from this. The first is that parents ought to keep better track of what their kids (and their kids' friends) are doing on the family computer. But the deeper lesson is that even with cases like this in the press, the odds are still so much against any given person being caught that most parents still don't worry about it. Unless or until we reach the point where most people have personal friends who have been sued, or at least friends of friends, nobody is going to take these threats seriously. At this point it's still like being struck by lightning or killed by bears, a theoretical threat that is so abstract and rare that few people take it seriously.
This is correct, but it's not the only reason.
The legal system functions like a club. Even if you're fully aware of your rights and the laws, if you're not in the club, you will grossly mistreated no matter how right you are, and when all is said and done, you'll end up screwed.
When I was a broke college student, I tried to represent myself in court one time against a minor offense I was accused of. I thought it was going to be open-and-shut, with me being the beneficiary of our fine system of justice. I had incontrovertible proof that I was 100% right. (Incontrovertible proof in the "photographic evidence" sense, before the days of digital cameras and desktop photo editing.) I was up against an assistant prosecutor who was obviously trying to get a promotion (aren't we all, right?) and two police officers who flat-out lied on the witness stand. (Again, I had incontrovertible photographic evidence that they lied.)
While I was testifying, the prosecutor objected to my pictures because she hadn't seen them. (I'm sorry, since when does the prosecution have the right of discovery?) The judge cut me off while I was questioning one of the officers about how he knew where I was at a particular time (which was the crux of the case against me) because it was "irrelevant." Before the case, the judge told me that I was not entitled to a jury trial, and after the case, when the judge said, "Guilty," she literally leaned over the bench as I was walking by and said under earshot of everyone else in the room (including the court reporter), "You know, you never really had a chance."
I saw the prosecutor a little later, and she said, "You can appeal if you want to, but they never overturn these cases, and it will cost you thousands of dollars. You should just pay the fine and be done with it."
If I had money backing me and a lawyer with me in the room, I'm 100% sure it would have been a totally different story, and I'll never set foot in a courtroom (or a police station, for that matter) without a lawyer representing me. Not because I think they're particularly smart or because I don't think they're scummy like everyone else does. In my estimation, the vast majority of them are not providing a valuable service, they're just bottom scrapers who leech off benefits from a crooked system.
Needless to say, I have a very grim view of our (lack-of-) justice system to this day. While most people are so worked up about how a miniscule number of guilty people walk free because of it, I'm much more concerned about the opposite problem, which is how many innocent people get screwed by a system that is geared to find everyone guilty regardless of the truth, and how many people get extorted by this stupid system. Now, whenever I hear of someone who's been accused of a crime, especially a poor person, who pleads not guilty and is convicted, I keep a much more open mind to their situation. I'm just glad that I found out how it works on, as I said, a minor offense that ended with a fine, and not something serious.
Thanks, Judge Nancy Campbell of Cobb County, Georgia. I used to have a lot of respect for the law and for judges. I really appreciate you showing me just how naïve I truly was.