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ACLU, EFF, & Others Fight RIAA for Debbie Foster
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a landmark legal document, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen, the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation, and the American Association of Law Libraries have submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the motion for attorneys fees that has been made by Deborah Foster in Capitol Records v. Debbie Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma. This brief is mandatory reading for every person who is interested in the RIAA litigation campaign against consumers."
Of course she should be awarded legal costs. Why? Because, no matter what side of the debate you are on, you must agree that the RIAA is using the lawsuits to harass people. That is an abuse of process.
The ACLU is one of the few organizations that works pro bono, and then expects to get legal fees from the state if they win. To me, that is very shady business.
It may seem shady business to you, but that is the way the rules are written for cases involving . . .
(C)ivil (L)iberties.
And the ACLU did not make those rules, the state did. And I'm glad they made them that way.
KFG
If you take a step back from the whole shebang, one can't help but be astounded at how badly the RIAA has screwed itself over in this particular situation. How do you take a situation where any other party would be completely and absolutely in the right if they said they didn't want you stealing their labor/product and turn nearly every sensible person aquainted with the matters at hand against you?
It's like a rape victim taking the rapist to court and proving to be so vile and vicious as to turn the public in favor of the rapist (real mass pirates, not individuals, in terms of metaphor), and get pro bono law groups to back up the sonofabitch too! Astounding, I say. Well, that's what happens when you screw over everyone you come into contact with and try to crucify the innocent instead of behaving civilly about the matter and going after real pirating rings. Silly suits, instant gratification in greed and money will mean your doom... particularly when you have nothing to do with music itself, aside from litigating and controlling it for profit.
I tell you what, if I were in charge of any company with a product line that could be easily pirated, I'd be suing the RIAA for making piracy more publicly acceptable through their corporate grotesqueries of lawsuits and such. I'm sure you could find a lawyer with a sharp enough tongue and wit to word it quite well.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
This is a lot like the McLibel case in the UK. McDonalds were using the UK Libel laws to shut up various media outlets including the BBC and some newspapers by threatening to sue if they published information that painted McDonalds in a bad light. All these organisations decided to not publish or broadcast the information. Then a volunteer organisation wrote a pamphlet about the things that McDonalds do wrong, and got sued. Two of the members of that organisation refused to settle out of court, and decided to defend themselves against the million dollar lawyers that McDonalds hired to take them to court.
e x.html
What proceeded was the longest ever court case in British legal history and in the end the court agreed that indeed, McDonalds do, quote: "exploit children with their advertising, falsely advertise their food as nutritious, risk the health of their long-term regular customers, are "culpably responsible" for cruelty to animals reared for their products, are "strongly antipathetic" to unions and pay their workers low wages."
From http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/verdict/ind
So not only can uninformed consumers not make a good choice, but when people try to inform consumers of FACTS, money-laden corporations can shut them up most of the time. So on the whole, markets don't work properly in these cases because no consumer can be adequately informed about absolutely every product that some corrupt corporation is selling.
Likewise with the RIAA Mafia, most people cannot afford to defend against them or have the money to inform the public of the other side of the story - i.e. how the damage that RIAA claims P2P causes is largely exagerrated.
It's only the free market fundamentalists that think markets are sacrosanct, and "informed" consumers can defeat corrupt organisations through consumer power, despite the wealth and power of some of the players involved. Unfortunately, there appears to be rather a lot of those in America. No wonder the Middle East thinks America's corrupt.
Bingo! We need to form the MCAA - Media Consumer's Association of America, get Congress to insist on a levy on blank tapes and CDs and DVDs etc in order to to allow the members to participate in [rampant piracy] exercising their rights and be indemnified for all their legal costs!
There are two major problems with this...
a) Cities are GOVERNMENTS that are quite capable of
dealing with the "burden" of a lawsuit.
b) An American GOVERNMENT has 0.0 business showing
any sort of public favoritism to any particular
religion, PERIOD.
Sensible Xian fundies are actually the FIRST people
to object to the sort of shenanigan you are defending.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...I'll do one better.
The social cost of suing or prosecuting individuals for non-commercial copyright infringement of music far outweighs the social value of having copyrights on music to begin with.
Metallica is not worth the ruination of lives involved, or the interference with other industries (namely mine) that the RIAA dreams of implementing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I used to buy $200 or more of CD's a month. I have over 1500 CD's in my collection. I used to make dubs to tape and then to other CD's when I upgraded my tape player to a CD player in my car. I did it for 10 years or more.
I used to listen to music all the time, a diehard avid fan. Then, in say 2000, 2001 when music content started taking a nose dive into the trash and the possibility of getting arrested for listening to music that I copied from my own collection of CDs, I gave up music. Do you think I want to spend $200 a month or more to eventually get aressted for it?
If you could get arrested for watching TV, would you continue to watch TV? With Tivo that may be possible one day and then I will give up TV also.
Who are these RIAA, MPAA rocket scientists b@st@5ds, that can't understand that?
Nathan
From the motion:
And inevitably, that would be the fatsest way to deal the **AA a blow -- if everyone sued wrongfuly joind together in a class action civil suit and sued them for an outrageous amount of money. They wouldn't get the outrageous amount of money, but the trouble with this whole process has been that there's really no mainstream publicity of the matter. A class action suit might change that. Of course if you really wanted to stick it to the **AA, sic NY Atty General Spitzer on them.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Who's paying these legal fees? Right, the members of the RIAA. When they have to pay defendants' legal fees more often, they will find it is no longer close to profitable to chase individuals.
At that point, these frivolous lawsuits disappear.
Now, the problem is that no court has ruled that the primary lawsuits they've been using as threats for people to settle are frivolous. This is based upon the second lawsuit involving the defendant. What is needed is a watershed case where a judge legally tosses the RIAA out of court for its frivolous suit, and for that case to hold up on appeal. Then there is precedent, and the RIAA will have to screw itself, because even they can;t afford to pay legal fees for thousands of defendants they are wrongfully suing.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The downside to your proposal, You do minor damage to my car,, say $200.00, I have an attorney on retainer, for my business, so I have my attoryne spend 200 hours procecuting the case ath $300/hr, so you owe me after I emerge victorious, $60,200. and I just saved myself two monts retainer, And no I won't use small claims because I cannot use my attorney there, and the whole point of the law suit is to exceed my retainer. (the actual damages are just incidental.
Many people suspect that your proposal would lead to litigation that is aimed at reducing legal costs,
Work bio at MMWD
I really don't understand your first paragraph at all. The ACLU is an organization with a long history of fighting for civil liberties. Why would you slam them because once in a blue moon they actually get paid a small portion of the expenses involved in their work, instead of the money having to come from their contributors? And why is it wrong for someone who is proved to have violated someone else's civil rights to have to pay all or part of their attorneys fees in vindicating their rights? And why is it wrong for our laws to occasionally shift the attorneys fees to the guilty party, in order to give legal aid lawyers, litigants, and others an incentive to take on a cause where the other side has much more money? Attorneys fees statutes are equalizers between big and small, which is what our country -- and our courts -- are supposed to be about. Contingent fees, and fee-shifting statutes, are the one small exception, one small dent in the rule which otherwised prevails more often than not in the U.S.: whoever has the most money has the best chance of winning in court. I.e., they are a step up from the law of the jungle, that might makes right. Would you have us step down? If not, you shouldn't slam them for fighting the good fight and once in a while getting a little bit of their fees paid back.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
If you pay the lawyers $250k/yr on salary you can have 72 of them full time.
18,000 lawsuits / 72 lawyers is only 250 each over three years is about 83 per year, or (with a 240-day work-year) is a little more than one every three days.
Ok, but there's other people involved, and I'm sure that since they work in bulk I'm going to estimate that the last three years looks something like:
Half a dozen 'techies' at $80k = $1,440,000
Hot line (no idea, just guessing) = $3,000,000
Legal Team (half dozen, plus assistants) = $5,400,000
Grand Total: $9,840,000
Profit: $8,160,000
But that's just a guess...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Christmas is a Christian holiday. Anything they do to acknowledge it would be showing favoritism. How is giving city employees a paid couple of days off any different than putting up a nativity scene? Or putting up Christmas lights around town?
If the majority of people in a city want a nativity scene they should get a nativity scene. It's no more an egregious expenditure of public funds than a dog park (ie. a place where people can take their dogs and play with them off leash.) Or a skate park. Or flying flags on the fourth of July.
Atheism is a religious view. Allowing the lunatic fringe to demand that public life be entirely devoid of any reference to god or religion is just as much a violation of people's 1st amendment rights as requiring prayer in schools.
I always thought when people talk about "loser pays" it means "if someone file a suit and loses, they pay". So in your example, court costs would only be a risk to you, because you brought the suit rather than letting insurance handle it or the other guy just pay for your repairs. That puts the onus on the one filing the suit. Now there's arguments against that (who's going to sue a big company if they may lose as a result of some idiot jury/judge and owe millions of dollars?), but that's a whole other can of worms.
You are allowed to make copies of music you own for the purposing of listening to them, that's an important part of fair use. The record companies would rather that you weren't aware of any fair use provisions, but if you own a CD you have the right to copy the data on it into any other format and listen to it. What's illegal is taking the CD, making copies of it, and giving (or selling) those copies to other people.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I don't think these organizations should be illegal, just reigned in a little bit (OK, a lot). The RIAA was actually started for a good reason -- to create standards for phonograph records. The "RIAA curve" was developed by engineers from different record companies so that 33 1/3 and 45 rpm records would have the best sound possible. All record companies created their albums according to this standard, thus ensuring any album from any label would have a consistent technical sound quality (of course, the quality of the artist is not assured).
Hilary Rosen was actually a popular figure around college campuses before the whole mp3 thing started. Back in the early to mid 90's, there was a move in Washington to censor what was being recorded. Hilary and the RIAA fought this and "took the fight to the people." The end result was the warning labels that are found on some cds.
That said, both the RIAA and the MPAA are way out of line when it comes to copyright, and have been for years. Jack Valenti compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler (the VCR ended up creating one of the most lucrative markets that the movie industry ever had) and the RIAA has fought digital music tooth and nail. These lawsuits are the worst -- instead of actually addressing the problem, they have hurt innocent people and have turned their customers into the enemy.
I have no problem with organizations that exist to make things better for both their industry and their customers, but when said organization attempts to abuse either or both in an attempt to prevent the market from evolving, then it is time to penalize (or disband) said organization. Perhaps trade organizations in Washington should be treated like Fraternities at University -- obey the rules and all is well, get out of line, face sanctions or even closure. The way the RIAA is pursuing these lawsuits definitely should warrant a review.
Beware of Sleestak
Additional considerations:
- 18,000 is just the number of lawsuits filed. How many "settled" by paying some kind of greenmail before a lawsuit was filed?
- From TFA, the range of settlements was $3,000 to $11,000. The average is probably closer to the low end, but might be a few thousand dollars more, which would bump the revenue by 30% ++
- Most likely, there are several attorneys on staff but also law firms in every state that do the actual filings, appearances, etc.
- In-house attorneys probably don't make $250K even fully loaded (benefits, overhead, etc.), but this is offset by the previous point.
It may be just a guess, but who thinks RIAA didn't do a cost-benefit analysis of their strategy before they started down this road? Of course, part of that analysis would have been the revenue they think they're losing (including future revenue) by not contesting file sharing. No idea on that numberMy question is how much of that $100 million actually went to artists? You know - those people that the RIAA is claiming they are protecting by filing these lawsuits.
Redundancy is good And also good.
IMHO, they need to treat copyrights like sewage that leaves no room for free speech in the information age, rather than some honorable law that just needs clear boundaries set. The RIAA understands this is an all or nothing game and they are acting off that understanding, and so should we. We never got rid of the 55 speed limit by proclaiming that it was an honorable law that just needed better boundaries set, no we got rid of it because millions of people treated it like the worthless burden that it was eventually forcing the system to change.
The real problem is (as I understand it) that just plain english is more often than not highly ambiguous. The specialized language is here to make sure everyone talks about the same thing. Of course, 90% of the population doesn't speak the language, so it is pretty much a shot in the water. But at least the lawyers and the judge know what they are talking about.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
To the extent that the ambiguity of everyday English is an issue, it is primarily an issue for written arguments, not oral arguments. It's also less of an issue than people think -- see the work of the Plain English Campaign on legal jargon.
Where a lawyer can be genuinely helpful is, surprise surprise, in understanding the law: precendents, statutes and the like. The question is not simply "what are the facts?", it is "what does the law have to say about the facts we've established?"