The RIAA vs. John Doe, a Layperson's Guide

Grant Robertson writes to tell us that he has made a pass at translating a recent guide to surviving an RIAA lawsuit from technical lawyer-speak into a much more easy to understand layperson's guide. The law, being complex and sometimes cryptic, allows ways for the RIAA to tilt the odds in their favor forcing unsuspecting victims to settle rather than fight. Take a look at Ray Beckerman's tips to survival translated into words anyone can benefit from.

Comments

More such as this.

[mcai8rw2]

I wish there were more 'guides' like this. Usually the corporations hide the true meaning of their T's & C's behind so much confusing babble that the end user usually has zero idea of what is actually going to happen to them in certain scenarios.

Its like contracts...I read them. Over and Over again...it doesn;t mean I understand what they mean. We all need pet solicitors.

Re:More such as this.

[Agent00Wang]

The confusing babble is part of the reason why we have lawyers. Nearly everything can be argued in court and lawyers just make more (paid) work for themselves by having the T&C be confusing in the first place.

Re:More such as this.

[Denial93]

It is also a clear explanation of why RIAA legal tactics are grossly unfair, awill hopefully draw some attention to this fact. Do you honestly believe the target audience of this is just the couple of people who get sued?

Re:More such as this.

[dwandy]

The confusing babble is part of the reason why we have lawyers.

The lawyers is part of the reason why we have confusing babble.

There... fixed it for ya.

This John Doe guy had it coming IMO.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's always in the shit with John Law.

I hope they sue his ass off.

Well...

[cpt kangarooski]

There are some minor errors in it, and I'm busy right now, but hopefully I can go through line by line and post about them this evening.

Still the main piece of advice he gives -- immediately get a lawyer who knows what he's doing with regard to these sorts of cases -- is good advice. Waiting too long, or going without one for a while can irrevocably screw up your defense if you don't do the right things, in the right order, at the right times.

I am less than a layman

[Don_dumb]

I read TFA and still didn't understand parts of it, despite that it is well written.

However, I would be grateful to know how this compares with the RIAA's attempts in other nations, especially here in the UK. TFA did allude to Canada and The Netherlands but only a mention. Some of the tactics outlined did seem to be only possible in the US (in particular the limitations of state laws)

Useful guide, but not to survival

[Clovert Agent]

Great piece, but it's far from a guide to survival. It's a translation into Laymanese of how you're going to be screwed by the RIAA's gaming of the legal system.

1) You're going to lose a motion and not be told how or why
2) You're going to be sent legal documents but will not be able to get a lawyer to defend you because the lawyer won't have the information he needs
3) You're going to have your information handed over to the RIAA and there's nothing you can do
4) You're going to land in a civil case and the precendents are murky enough that you may well lose, but it's certainly going to cost you a bundle anyway

What I'd like to see is a real survival guide on the back of this. For example, when you get the notice that you've lost that first motion, what should you do? What can your lawyer do to get up to speed and file a motion to dismiss in time? What can you present to the judge to show that the case, on the evidence to hand, is baseless?

Good article, and a great starting point, but it'd be so much more useful with some real advice rather than just being a well-written explanation of exactly how screwed you are.

Re:Useful guide, but not to survival

[Pieroxy]

It is all in the blog entry my friend. Your best course of action is to get a lawyer with two qualities:
1. FAST !!!!
2. Knows about the RIAA tactics.

Re:Useful guide, but not to survival

[westlake]

it's far from a guide to survival. It's a translation into Laymanese of how you're going to be screwed by the RIAA's gaming of the legal system

I tend to a somewhat different take on things:

1 The RIAA only has to show that is more reasonable than not to believe that you downloading without a purchase or uploading without a license to distribute.

2 The chances are pretty damn good that you or someone in your household has been making heavy use of BT and the P2P nets. It's your account and your responsibility.

3 The evidence doesn't have to be rock solid, just persuasive enough to argue for a settlement out of court.

4 Talk of "malacious prosecution," abuse of process, is so much hot air. You won't be able to prove malice in a legal sense and it will be very expensive even to try.

5 You are not a hardship case. You not going to become the next poster child for the EFF.

Re:Useful guide, but not to survival

[DavidTC]

1 is completely wrong. Under no interpetation of copyright law can they bring a lawsuit against you for illegal downloading. None at all.

Your confusion is understandable, however, as every single news story gets this wrong, talking about 'p2p downloaders', when, even if it was demonstrated that they were downloaders, that wouldn't be the slightest bit illegal. It's akin to calling muggers 'pants owners'...almost all muggers do, indeed, own a pair of pants, and even use it during the commision of a crime, but they aren't being arrested for that. It's fucking PR by the media companies that are owned by the same people doing the lawsuit to try to make people think downloading is illegal.

Anyway, what the RIAA is bring suit on is the idea that you distributed copyrighted files. Aka, that people downloaded from you. As there is no way on a p2p network to know this, not even, in most cases, by the server, that seems a little unlikely for them to be able to prove.

Bittorrent is a little different. The RIAA is still doing mainly traditional p2p stuff, and, frankly, very little music is traded using bittorrent, but it might be a reasonable legal assumption that any file downloaded by someone via bittorrent has also been uploaded by them to someone else. OTOH, various forms of caching have been found legal, and arguably that's really all you're doing...the person running the torrent is the one who actually put it in the system. And they'd have to demonstrate that you actually allowed your client to upload anything.

However, as the article pointed out, as they don't even have any evidence you have the files, just files with names that imply they are copyrighted work, their case is incredibly weak and if they actually ended up in court, they'd lose, period. At minimum they'd have to demonstrate that you actually made their work available, and a screenshot produced by someone in their employ is not a demonstration of that, or even a screenshot produced and witnessed by an independent party.

Then they'd at least have to prove some likelyhood of someone having gotten that file, in whole or in part, from you.

See, the problem with the RIAA's lawsuit is that they could do all this before sueing people. They could match up username and IP, demonstrate to the court's satifaction that said user was violating their copyright, and then have a slam dunk case as soon as they tracked down that IP, which isn't anywhere near as hard with a court order as the RIAA is apparently having with it, suing people who don't even have computers.

Instead, their sole purpose seems to be to make the news fighting 'downloaders', which ike I said, isn't even illegal, and producing a word-of-mouth intimadation campaign.

If they were actually trying to fight piracy, they'd be going after the binary Usenet posters, which would be, incidentally, infinitely easier to fight in court, as none of them unknowningly shared their music directory and didn't know they were pirates, the result of their activity can be check from a multitude of places so it can't be fake, Usenet providers already retain a history of posters for abuse purposes, they post whole albums in lossless formats, including cover and disc scans, which are a exact-same-quality replacement for the album, etc, etc.

No, they're going after p2p 'downloaders' (Despite the fact they have to attack them via their uploading) for PR about how evil downloading is, and nothing else.

my RIAA survival guide

[MrSquirrel]

My RIAA survival guide: 1. Go to the RIAA headquarters 2. Use fire... and lots of it 3. Sip drinks with those little umbrellas in them on a beach

Re:my RIAA survival guide

[digitrev]

So you suggest the Milton defence?

Re:my RIAA survival guide

[MrSquirrel]

I believe you have my stapl... mp3's

Re:Send it to all the judges !!

[doctor_nation]

Part of the point of the article is that the judges can't do anything if you don't show up. And the RIAA makes it very hard for you to show up. But when you do show up, the judges seem to be in the favor of John Doe.

Rumsfeld vs. Sagan

[shani]

In TFA: As Rumsfeld put it, "absence of proof is not proof of absence."

Sad that Rumsfeld is getting credit for it, when the idea actually comes from the original BHA, Carl Sagan:

http://www.fatemag.com/wordpress/?p=103

Re:RIAA Honeypot

[pete6677]

It wouldn't be illegal at all, but you would get the privilege of paying thousands of dollars to defend yourself. And no you wouldn't be able to sue for attorney fees since you set up the files for the purpose of baiting a lawsuit.

Dissemination!

[scottsk]

There's a LOT of misinformation about what the RIAA is suing people for. I wish the article had said it more forcefully, but it did make the point that the RIAA is suing people who disseminated their members' songs illegally. (I.e. "to scatter far and wide; spread abroad, as if sowing; promulgate widely".) They're not suing you for downloading songs, they're suing you for sharing their songs illegally by being a distributor of copyrighted material. They know which IP address shared the songs on the P2P network at what time (do you know what your IP address was a year ago? last month? right now?) because that's public information on most P2P networks. Note that the RIAA can't bait you, by disseminating their own songs on P2P networks and letting you download them, because they'd be giving away their own songs and it wouldn't be a crime then. If you're sued, about all you can do is prove it wasn't you who committed the crime. The IP address wasn't yours at the time (most ISPs don't keep logs as I understand), or that your IP address was pirated by a hijacker who used it. I do not think anyone has ever successfully proved it wasn't them -- most of these cases are thrown out on technicalities and not on the actual issues. Is what the RIAA is doing -- asking ISPs to turn over who had which IP addresses at what time -- legal? I don't think this has ever been decided (in the USA). Hard to say this should happen, because it's just a civil suit by an entity that isn't in law enforcement. If it was a law enforcement agency getting this data for an actual criminal case, that would be different... The burden of proof is on the RIAA, but if they have the ISP say an IP address allocated to John Doe who is paying the bill for Internet access did the P2P disseminating, it's hard to see how that could be proven any more solidly. Great lesson for civics teachers to bring to class!

Re:RIAA Honeypot

[grimwell]

Maybe he was just trying to help the RIAA by poluting the P2P network with bogus files? Maybe he is just trying to determine how the RIAA gathers their info? He can't help it if the RIAA didn't believe him when he told them he wasn't "making available" any copyrighted material belonging to their members.

I am curious about the "baiting a lawsuit" bit. Could you point me to some law and/or cases(USA based)? I think a RIAA Honeypot could be an interesting. A network of them passing files around would be even more interesting.

If the copyright on the file the RIAA downloads belongs to another, are they now infriging that copyright and can the copyright owner sue them?

I think the original sources are the best reading

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Personally, I think (a) the people at Slashdot are a pretty intelligent lot, and (b) the best things for them to read are not what a commentator has to say, but the actual court records.

I have seen some spirited, high-level debates in these pages where people cite to different parts of different litigation documents.

That is why my site is the way it is; it is information, not entertainment. The key elements are (a) the index of litigation documents; (b) the directory of lawyers who are fighting the RIAA; and (c) the posts highlighting significant level events. The post, How the RIAA Litigation Process Works, which Grant Robertson describes as being as 'dry as a bread sandwich', is merely intended to be an accurate summary of what is going on out there, not a substitute for informing onesself and forming one's own opinions. (I hope punkr0x is right, that it is not quite as poorly written as Grant makes it out to be.).

My site is intended to serve the following readers: (a) people who are being targeted by the RIAA; (b) lawyers who are representing or would like to represent these folks; (c) journalists looking for primary rather than secondary sources; and (d) other intelligent people, lawyers and nonlawyers alike, who want to understand what is happening here, and who don't need to be told what to think.

I think the 'laymen' at Slashdot are pretty good readers.

Re:I'm surprised nobody's cashed in on this

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I've been trying to build such a directory of lawyers who are fighting the RIAA:

http://info.riaalawsuits.us/directory.htm

My list tries to include only lawyers who will definitely fight, rather than try to steer you to settling.

And the EFF has a broader list of lawyers who have expressed an interest in helping the defendants:

http://subpoenadefense.org/legal.htm