Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Sues Woman Who Has Never Used a Computer
boarder8925 writes "Marie Lindor, a home health aide who has never bought, used, or even turned on a computer in her life, was sued by the RIAA in Brooklyn federal court for using an 'online distribution system' to 'download, distribute, and/or make available for distribution' plaintiff's music files. She has requested a pre-motion conference in anticipation of making a summary judgment motion dismissing the complaint and awarding her attorneys fees under the Copyright Act."
How they managed to find this woman and sue her is beyond me... It just goes to show you that you can't get away from the RIAA even if you've never used a computer in your life. They managed to find one of only a handful of people who has never used a computer and sue her... I should be scared for my parents right now.
Reminds me of a colleague back in the UK who was taken to court for not paying his TV license fee - when asked what his defence was he responded "I don't own one".
Apparently the judge was not amused with the prosecution for not having bothered to do even this minimal check!
If this is the case (pardon the pun) with this action then I hope the RIAA get a really embarrasing and well publicised dressing down. Shame on them.
I can't even begin to figure out how they would identify her as a "pirate". I thought they usually went by IP addresses and such, but how can you tie one to someone who doesn't have a computer?
Has anyone been convicted? I thought that all of the RIAA cases were either settled or dismissed. Has any of these cases gone the distance?
Cow Cube
She has never used a computer?
Does she have internet access?
How could she use the 'online distribution system'?
Questions over questions....
The only one who knows is RIAA.....
So if the lady has never used or purchased a pc, what grounds is the suit filed on again? I mean, what, was she pirating music the way it was done BEFORE the age of computers (namely with a boombox, a blank tape, and the trusty record button)?
oh wait...lemme guess...some kid next in the lane next to her at a red light was playing a burned cd full of pirated music at full volume and thus she's listening to pirated music? This is ridiculous...the RIAA has gone beyond the wildest stretches of "you gotta be f*cking kidding me" with this one.
Kinda makes me WANT to priate music, just so when they haul me into court I can look them in the eye, verbally crucify them, and then spit in said eye for wasting my time, the judges time, my lawyer's time, and tax dollars.
When the hell are all these companies going to learn that piracy isnt going away, EVER. I mean, they can complain about DVD piracy, but what about back before DVD's when all it took was 2 VCRs? or previously stated music piracy method?
I'm starting to think the pirates are viewing the way they RIAA has come down on piracy as just the music industry "thumbing their nose" at them.
Name similarity.
My mother used to get all kinda of harrasing phone calls
because there was a women on her street with the same
first and last name. The collections people would
see on in ,
and that was that.
And they would always assume that what she was telling them
was a lie to get them off her back.
emt 377 emt 4
My in-laws (67 & 72 years old, born in Malaysia) have never used a computer of any kind, other than pressing the walk button at traffic lights, playing poker machines and playing video tapes and DVD's on normal consumer equipment set up by myself or another relative.
Maybe you were joking and I missed it. Lots of older people that I can think of would never use any kind of personal or work computer.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I remember reading about someone working for one of the big record labels in Germany letting something slip about the RIAA's tactics.
He hinted that it was in their interessed to create such absurd cases so their "hunt for pirates" stayed in the news. If nothing like that happens, people will forget the whole thing and start downloading again, as the papers will not print headlines "RIAA still hunting!" a few month after the first anouncements.
Presumably the RIAA actually offers "overwhelming evidence" against the people it brings to court, which probably amounts to a fast-talking lawyer. I wish she would have waited until the last possible minute to disclose this piece of information before court, once the RIAA had its (marked) cards on the table she might have caught them lying through their teeth. Actually, I'm not quite sure how the process works, it's probable the RIAA needs to submit that evidence in order to accuse her. In which case, I hope the judge looks over the RIAA's papers very carefully...
Sendou Wave Kick!!
How can one supervise what one cannot understand (excepting Management et all)? You'd think there would be some sort of "contextual mental age" measurement for determining who was more lucid of the dangers present.
See the thing about people who follow the law blindly and don't realize that it should always be followed in spirit not letter is that they act holier than thou while at the same time breaking almost as many rules.
Somewhere in your dark little mind is the niggling sensation "At least I'm not as bad as..." as you break EULA's don't read legal agreements, break driving laws, don't file every item on your income taxes... etc.
Have you had your car checked for emissions? Might want to do that EVERY day...
These law suits are charging people who wouldn't be buying the product anyway and unlike stealing they aren't costing the recording industry anything except better publicity and a few initial sales.
The truth is Britney is a big star on radio and TV but she won't be on the internet, while these people are downloading music from these mainstream artists they are keeping their industry alive instead of building it's replacement.
These lawsuits are very much like witch trials, charging people for something society doesn't really know anything about and hasn't decided what to do about because they're afraid it's going to get out of control.
In this case the music industry is done,it's over,finished, kaput... so people aren't going to stop pirating until the next musical economy starts up.
The chances of that new economy having space for lexus driving, music hating, marketting statistic driven executives is pretty slim and for most of the people on slashdot... We don't care. We won't miss them, they're not on stage they aren't doing sound checks and they aren't really helping to encourage artists who are great.
What they are doing is building a marketing machine to ensure only their music reaches your ears... these lawsuits are just a continuation of that.
My father (who is 55), had never used a computer until 2 years ago or so (sorry for poor grammar. "paster than past" tenses were always a nightmare for me). He just didn't have a reason to do it. Right now he's on the PC for most of his spare time, reading news, watching stock market (and making transactions), doing e-banking, searching for a new house (apparently that's not a task that might be accomplished faster than in 3 years), etc. I used to encourage him and now I have to pay for it. Whenever I visit them on weekends and try to do some work, all I hear is "are you done?", "would you please let me sit for a second?", "go help your mother" or "can you remove the snow from the driveway? now would be a good time". Last night he called asking whether he should restrain from logging into windows today (I can't get Skype to work under Ubuntu @ their place... some weird stuff happens). You know, that file-overwritting virus that's about to strike.
The point is: he's not 80 and he was perfectly fine without ever touching a computer as recently as 2 years ago. It's just not a thing that a regular person can't survive without. Yet.
From a legal point of view, that method could prove fatal if proven true.
Filing frivolous lawsuits is already a good way to get in trouble with the judges yourself, filing lawsuits which you know to be completely baseless cab get lawyers disbarred or worse.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm pretty sure the only embedded processor my dad (58) uses is in the telephone, and that's only because I gave a him a digital model with answerphone to replace his old one. He doesn't have a microwave, I seriously doubt either his oven or washing machine have a processor in. He doesn't have an ATM card; he gets money out at the till. Partly because he's a builder, and partly because he wouldn't trust an ATM card (and given this is a slashdot, are you saying he's *wrong* there?), not to mention that he'd probably find it very hard to remember a PIN.
As for medical devices, you generally have someone use them on you, you don't use them yourself, unless you guys in the US regularly conduct your own ECGs or something? (I'm in the UK).
He knows of the existence of email and has asked me to send some for him in the past. But he didn't realise that I could email someone while they were away from home.
Now this guy has a degree from Cambridge University, and speaks two languages fluently and two passably. So let's say he's above average...
Now, how do I explain to my dad what I do at work?
Ben
And yes, the OP didn't check facts, but then they're not sueing someone in a court of law.
bang goes my karma... again...
Reminds me of my boss, who goes by the name of John Shuttleworth. Now, he lives in a flat on the ground floor of a house which he owns. He rents the flat above to his nephew, who goes by the name of *drumroll* John Shuttleworth. We call the nephew "Junior" as a rule. Anyway, Junior went bankrupt due to some bad business decisions, and suddenly John Senior found himself not being able to use his credit cards anymore. He only managed to get them back after several heated phone calls...
They did give him £50 (I think that was the amount) when they found out they'd got the wrong guy. I can sympathise with the bank though - same name, same address, must be the same person, right?
One good turn - gets all the covers.
Good illustration with the pipe bomb example.
:)
:)
The only thing I disagree with is the lynch mob because we simply don't need it, society already does something much more effective: blatantly ignoring misconstrued laws. It's not even civil disobedience simply the aggregate of common sense. Imho RIAA lost close to a decade ago and have since been involved in a protracted harakiri as they continue to sue willy-nilly while not managing to follow their own rules and seeing major artists publicly state their support for ordinary filesharing.
I know it's little comfort for those unlucky enough to be affected by the death throes of RIAA. I know the justice system and most politicians are lagging at least 20 years behind society but that has always been the case and isn't any kind of surprise. If one tries to speed things up one should be very wary of doing more harm than good.
Rant warning!
RIAA really had/has no reason to fear individuals filesharing and should have jumped at this gratis opportunity for broad artist exposure and recognize the market for high-quality reasonably priced unobstructive digital formats. Instead of their centralized campaigns for a handful of artists they could have taken advantage of everyone promoting everyone for free and let the naturally popular artists rise instead of trying to manufacture them. If they had any business sense they would be actively promoting filesharing, making it easy for fans and casual listeners alike to support & pay those they enjoy, making it easy for artists and consumers alike to find each other and create communities. If they did all that they would be doing their job which boils down to having a living thriving music industry, as it is they're doing the opposite. They could still change course but they wont because they do not understand anything about their customers or the market. Businesses that have no clue about their own market disappear over time, I doubt the RIAA will exist in their present form come 2016.
Wow I've got to add a rant warning at the beginning lol
MPAA has tried to learn from RIAAs fiasco but the whole bizarre strategy of DRM, DCMA etc. is so fundamentally flawed that they can't have learned much. At the least they have not understood that the only people they punish with such strategies are their lawabiding customers and as such they're in practice fighting for "piracy" even if that's not their intent.
RIAA & MPAA shooting themselves in the foot is too much of a mild description; they're repeatedly stabbing themselves in the chest and have been doing so for years -- noone survives that but luckily it has nothing to do with the continued existense of great music and movies as eventually the cash flows will just end up being rerouted around them.
I'm eagerly avaiting the day a senators or congressmembers child/familymember is hauled in to court by the RIAA or MPAA, they share too. Hell, I'm pro-Bush but I'm sure there's at least one track on his beloved iPod that's "pirated" lol
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
On the relevant side, this my google quote of day:
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
- Hunter S. Thompson
Everyone has illegally downloaded before, right?
Hmmm... No. I haven't. And I don't intend to ever download songs illegally. As an ex-DJ, who always made sure the clubs I worked at had paid their license fees, I see little reason to do download illegally.
But this is my personal decision.
I go out and buy what I want.
I have never copied/downloaded a movie DVD or a CD. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Just my 2 centimes.
If you can stay calm, while all around you is chaos... then you probably haven't completely understood the question.
The RIAA has already sued a lot of parents over the actions of their kids. So far, "I didn't know my kids were using my computer to break the law" has not been an effective loophole.
Well, if I remember the case about Brittany Chan (search google or slashdot if you don't remember) it seems the parent will get off. Of course, then they'll sue your kid instead, which makes it sooooo much better. Either the parents will a) be held liable for negligence b) pay the kid's bill so s/he can have a life or c) have a debt slave kid who has absolutely no incentive to get a real education or job, since the money will just be taken anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That said, it's amazing how many slashdotters think that playing dumb and ignorant of the contextual or common meaning of a word or phrase makes them appear really smart.
While I want to agree with you, I'm going to have to call you on that. I suspect they make a lot more money by grooming particular artists and therefore knowing where their money will be coming from. To use an analogy, look at the state of animal husbandry. In medieval times, it was not uncommon to let your pig or cow free range for food. It was considered cheaper than providing for feed. Nowadays, I'm sure people would argue that it provides for a survival of the fittest, much as you state your idea regarding music. However, what typically happened was that there was little control over your animal and its productiveness. Your cow might be stolen by bandits. It might be shot by an errant poacher (or an earnest one). Even when it survived, you had no idea what it had been eating and who it was breeding with. And average production for those cows was small. With modern animal husbandry techniques, we now keep the naimals penned and well fed, control their breeding, and we wind up with cows who have easily 50 times the milk production of medieval cows. Right now, the RIAA has those penned and bred cows. They know they can milk those cows and be assured of a rich bounty because they bred them that way. And you're asking them to free range their artists? It's just not a smart move for them.
I'm eagerly avaiting the day a senators or congressmembers child/familymember is hauled in to court by the RIAA or MPAA, they share too. Hell, I'm pro-Bush but I'm sure there's at least one track on his beloved iPod that's "pirated" lol :)
Feh! Do you think their lawyers would let them get that far? I would not be surprised if they have a database of names which they automatically remove from consideration. At that, they probably do make a non-token effort to ascertain who's actually pirating out of the people they prosecute. It's only due to volume that we're getting these "never touched the Internet" people. If the RIAA were at all smart, they'd come out publically and state that this person was all a mistake and award her $500 worth of music from RIAA artists. It would be good publicity, the "we made a mistake and are making up for it" kind, plus it will cost them all of $5 plus shipping to do so, since they own the CDs.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I moved to a friend's place some years ago, and when he decided to move out, he transferred his phone line and DSL service to me. As can be expected, the ISP did not do the transfer properly (even though it is a division of the phone company), and for about 2 years, I accessed the Internet under my ex-roomate identity.
Then, a spammer I LARTED several times took up a fight with me, and complained to the police for "harasement" (sic). The police went after the wrong guy (who was long gone abroad) for very long before eventually getting my real identity, thanks to phone company stupidity. I eventually learned that they did not press charges against me because they were overworked and underbudgeted...
I finally changed ISPs when the ISP dumped me because I was running a website on my DSL line, and I went to a co-op.
It wouldn't get the exec whacked though. He'd suddenly have union troubles and every last thing he'd ever done that was remotely illegal would have local cops investigating it. It'll all go away when he drops the suit AND pays a handsome penalty.
A bigger truism is don't whack a guy when you can extort him for some cash.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Ahhh, English, so few tenses to choose from... in fact, a blessing. In my mother language (Spanish, but I believe this applies to most languages derived from Latin), we have "almost past", "paster than past (refering to an action that happened before the one you are telling, which was also in the past)", "almost paster than past", the subjunctive tenses, the "future-past" (something that will have finished when THIS other actions takes place)...
I have known that what the RIAA was doing is morally wrong. However, I (ignorantly) believed that I was safe from their evil because I don't trade music online. I don't visit any peer to peer sites, and I have no peer to peer client software on my computer. I figured I just won't show up in their lists, and hence they wouldn't sue me.
I hoped that the possibility of my computer or IP address being hijacked by a trader were low, since I am pretty security-savvy, and have a good setup.
No dice. If they are suing people who don't even use a computer, then they could sue me, too. It could happen this very day. This would cost me a lot of money, time, and frustration. They would further present me with this difficult choice: maintain my right to privacy on principle and refuse to let them search my private computer (and risk loosing even though I am innocent) -or- roll over and expose my underbelly to the bigger dog.
I am not happy.
When we bought a house we had an escrow account set-up with the mortgage for paying things such as property taxes and home owners' insurance. Well it turns-out that the banks that do the mortgages often farm out the duty of handling escrow related matters. So the processing company that worked for our bank paid our property taxes for the first year. Unfortunately the company that handled the escrow accounts for another bank also did because someone at their company mis-entered some number in their system. Now the county returned the money once to the company for our bank and once to the company for the unrelated bank. Years later we get a bill for a couple thousand dollars plus.
By that time we no longer had the same bank for our mortgage and both companies that handled the escrow accounts had been absorbed by larger companies. This all was a large pain in the butt to work out. I actually had to pay a lawyer to look over the terms of a settlement between all of the parties in the end.
The worrisome aspect was that the county clerk told me that it is very common for this sort of mix-up to happen. You would think that if that was the fact the county would mail a letter to the homeowner on record if they got two checks for paying the property taxes as a heads-up, but no we don't get that sort of service even though it is our taxes that finance the county.
"Kind of like the old adage that goes something like "Discipline your child often."..."
OMG that is the most horrible piece of advice I have ever heard. I hope you were using it sarcastically, because if you actually did that to a child you would have the most horrible miserable child on the face of the planet.
Have you ever been punished for something you didn't do? You NEVER forget it, and you NEVER forgive either. It eats at you till you can find some way of revenge. I'll prove.... (most likely that I can do something really bad and get away with it, to balance out the unfair punishment.)
And even if they did do some minor thing, if you constantly discipline someone, they never learn to discipline themself. You never trust them, so they never trust anyone else, and they never learn to contain themself either.
At the most extreme you get kids like that elf on harry potter - they do something bad, and punish themself, then do something bad again. They never learn that it's bad to do something bad - all they learn is that if you get punished then the bad thing is neutralized.
-Ariel
I have a friend with a name similar to "Bob Smith." Turns out another Bob Smith was born on the very same day in a different state. That other Bob Smith eventually got his license suspended in PA. Well, that makes things tough on my friend Bob Smith, because the national database of shitty drivers has only birthdate and name as identifying information. So in order to get a license, my friend has had to negotiate with the DMV in two separate states swearing that he was not the Bob Smith of PA, and that he in fact living in completely separate state at the time. If ever one feels glad that the Social Security administration has blessed us all with truly unique identifying numbers, I guess this is it. And as the John Shuttleworths in England might learn one you all start paying for your national ID cards, credit agencies just love using your SSN.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Maybe they need to be taught that *everybody* do not have computers, and *everybody* with computers are not using them to l33ch mp3s.
Nonsense. To a crook, all people are crooks.
Therefore, to the RIAA, we're all MAFIA goombas.