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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."
If they had just looked at the case, and dismissed it when they realized it had no merit, they would have been fine. Dismiss much, much later, and the harassing nature shows through. No one but themselves to blame.
All is paradox. Retired lawyer, so this is just one more layman's opinion.
What effect will this have, if any, on the other RIAA cases currently going on?
NOt living in the US, I'm not sure how the legal system entirely works in the States, but could this, assuming she wins her suit, have an enjoining effect on the RIAA in other cases that have brought with similar (lack of) evidence?
Would be fantastic to see them crushed down.....!
The RIAA lawsuits indicate an underlying problem with this legal system. A lot of cases, not only regarding copyright infringement, are being settled out of court, because a defendent hasn't got the capabilities to fight back. Any company with sufficiently deep pockets could launch any bogus case, and leave any defendant powerless to react.
/very/ slim chance any artists will see a penny from that money. It's corporate bullying. Why won't US senators and pressure groups worry about that instead of a computer game (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/11 /000227)?
For instance: How many people are presently incarcerated without having had a fair trial (not counting any Guantanamo Bay style prisoners of course, that's a different story).
How many people have ponied up cash to SCO because of their outrageous claims about Linux IP? This sounds a lot like the bullyboy who takes your lunch money.
Yhe RIAA can't honestly think they will stop filesharing because they will have to sue millions for this message to effectively be driven home to Joe User. And the few thousand quid they win on each case will barely cover the administrative and investigative costs they make, so there's a
Too bad, the US federal law doesn't have any provisions against SLAPPs.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Didn't anyone else realise that to prevent an organisation bullying the defenceless, one must group together. Just like a Workers Union (in their original form), the only way to defend yourself is safety in numbers. Lets not forget that the RIAA is essentially a union for the already powerful music companies, they become more powerful by uniting.
By uniting the elements opposed to them the RIAA loses some of its advantage, even more so by breaking the back of one of it's most pointy sticks, the dodgy litigation techniques, so far no one has had the knowledge or money to attack this but lets hope this is the beginning of an effective counter-attack.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
If our "modern democracies" were modern and democratic, maffia organizations like RIAA, MPAA, and every country's respective digital terrorists should be illegal. Only those profiting from these pests want them to exist, but who cares for what's good for citizens, let alone what citizens want.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
In a fair legal system, an innocent man should not feel the need to pay a fee for something he didn't do.
In England they bill people falsely imprisoned for their room and board. Commit a crime, get free room and board. Have the state commit a crime against you, get a bill for 100K pounds.
Things actually could be worse here; and I'm sure they will be -- soon.
KFG
But you have to admit, the RIAA's position on the issue paints them into a corner that practically forces them to act in this manner (not that I'm in any way sympathetic!). Think about it; if your legal argument is essentially that a 'culture of piracy' is making devaluing your work product through unlicenced non-fair use copying culturally acceptable to the point where Joe and Jane Citizen don't think much of it, and piracy itself is almost trivially easy despite attempts at copy protection, what option do they have except to sue everyone?
Put another way, say they did find Jane Citizen downloaded two songs and say they decide not to sue, based on the 'let's be good corporate citizens' principle, or the alternative 'let's not be total dicks so that the PR dept. don't all kill themselves' principle. Then, they sue the aforementioned (and mostly fictitious) 'Pirate Kingpin'. If pirate kingpin's lawyer is not a moron, they will show cause to subpoena tons and tons of records of other 'pirates' that the RIAA have identified, and then ask pointedly why Jane Citizen wasn't sued. And ten seconds later, case dismissed w/ prejudice, and RIAA probably smacked around for selective defense of their copyright.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
It's funny, I was actually thinking about the other side of the injustice that court settlements encourage: failure to fully prosecute people for crimes. With a settlment, especially a plea bargain, never get the satisfaction or the social benefit of the guilty being fully punished for their crimes.
Worse yet, we lose the notion of a person being specifically innocent or guilty. As the parent alluded to, plea bargains / settlments encourage a justice in which people are rarely treated as exactly guilty or innocent, but rather innocent-ish or guilty-ish. Punishment ceases to be a binary thing, but ends up being applied with a sliding scale depending on how strong the prosecution's/plaintiff's case appears (which translates into bargaining power during settlement/plea negotiations).
Equally bad, perhaps, is that it masks the problems of a system in which the current legal processes / rules lead to such expensive lawsuits / criminal proceedings that only rich individuals or corporations can typically experience a fully fair day in court. And as the RIAA has shown, in civil cases a rich plaintiff gets something far beyond a fair day in court.
Has anyone figured out a way, either a simple tweak or radical change, to provide civil/criminal justice without these attendant problems?1. The **AA has filed suit against more than 18,000 individuals for copyright violation.
2. The amicus curae is only for award of legal fees to one of the defendants, who was declared not guilty.
3. A lot of lawyers are going to get rich, since a big proportion of the 18,000+ will win.
4. The legal system allows a single rich entiry, the **AA to go after thousands of individuals... many of whom often settle despite being not guilty, because of the costs involved.
5. It is illegal for a large group of individuals to join together and engage in disruptive activities.
6. This brief does nothing to set right points 4 and 5.
7. And so, while lots of lawyers might probably get rich, nothing else significant is likely to happen.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Can they get Cravath, Swaine and Moore to provide some input into the brief also? They've provided several wonderful briefs in the SCO vs IBM case. If anybody can present a watertight legal argument, CS&M can. I'm just a bit worried that the brief as it stands contains too much emotive language and spends too much time appealing to the judge's sense of "the greater good".
IANAL, but IMHO judges don't care about "the greater good" unless it's a claim before them; I expect this judge will ignore all the emotive arguments and get right down to the question of whether it's legal to award attorneys' fees to the defendant, including whether the appropriate standard for awarding has been met.
I also expect the judge to try very hard to make the narrowest possible ruling. Judges don't like setting precedents; the bigger the precedent, the less the judge likes it. This brief strikes right to the heart of the Adversary legal system, namely that poor defendants have little access to the courts and can be easily abused by rich plaintiffs. The judge will want to stay way clear of upsetting that status quo.
To answer your question, "they don't dare." If they do anything at all to interfere with corporate power they get their "campaign contributions" cut off and can't get elected.
The technical term for this relationship is "Fascism."
Get used to it.
BillyDoc
First, why do people in the US have to fight for legal fees when they win a lawsuit? When will it become an automatic part of american civil law? Responsibility for all legal fees when a case is lost will certainly put the brakes on the litigious culture of the US and all its frivolous lawsuits.
Second: "Though the RIAA has the right to enforce its copyrights through lawsuits and settlements, it does not have the right to do so against people it knows or reasonably should know are innocent."
The RIAA may be stupid, but that doesn't mean it is entirely wrong, and not all of its lawsuits are misdirected. Copyrights put paycheques in peoples' pockets, including software designers, game designers, graphic designers, and countless others.
In a sense, the RIAA is going to bat for all these people, and that is a double-edged sword. Their idiotic approach to defending copyright has caused at least as much damage as it has prevented. They need feedback from people/industries with a vested interest, feedback other than "RIAA sucks!" or "Music should be free!", and they need to listen to that feedback.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Recently, when I appeared in court in Warner v. Does 1-149 in Manhattan, Judge Owen said, in words or substance, "so they want to find out this person's name and address so they can take his deposition, what's wrong that?" I responded, in words or substance, "No, judge, that's not what they're going to do. They don't want to take this person's deposition. They are going to sue these people, bring lawsuits that wreck people's lives." The judge then said to me "what are you talking about, wreck people's lives?" I proceeded to tell him how these lawsuits affect the poor people that are targeted, and he cut me off, did not allow me to finish, and said that because I used the term "wreck people's lives" he wouldn't believe anything further I could say.
It was therefore quite gratifying to me personally to read the following passage in the amicus brief:
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I've said it once, I'll say it again:
Americans spend $30 billion a year on lotto tickets.
We could buy a record label every year with that kind of money.
Why do we have to be "informed"? Someone start a website buysony.com and start soliciting donations. Turn donations into stocks held by all donors equally. Make it fun, have polls, but always encourage the continual donating of money to buy stocks, which you hold in a trust. Then you can all act as a single interest in Sony's stake.
Eventually you can probably actually influence Sony. Tell people to stop buying lotto tickets and start buying Sony. Then THEY can pick out the movies they want to make, the artists they want to support, and get FREE CDs, MOVIES, PLAYSTATIONS, DIGITAL CAMERAS, COMPUTERS, PLASMA TELEVISIONS
Buy a company - win fabulous prizes!
Consumer power doesn't need to be informed, it just needs to be manipulated for the power of good, not evil.
I've always wondered what would happen if you saved yourself the money for attorneys' fees etc. by just showing up in court and telling your side of the story in 100% not-fancy language.
Say you're the JMRI guy, being sued for patent infringement. If you were allowed to speak in plain English, the case would last 5 minutes and cost nothing:
"Your honor, you can see that my software was released before their patent was even filed...""Hmm, that seems about right. KAM is pretty-much owned and should pay $100,000 in punitive damages.
I know; the team of lawyers buries you under a mountain of papers, discovery motions, etc. Why can't you say:
"Your honor, they're burying me in discovery motions, etc. to intimidate me into settling. Please make them
stop."And so on. Just wondering.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Having lawyers on staff like the RIAA does is probably much cheaper than hiring one ad-hoc like most people have to do.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Too bad the notion of Civil Disobediance is so unknown to Americans.
... all insisted on going to jail. Civil disobedience wasn't something they invoked in their defence, it was something they proclaimed not only as their right but as their duty. The whole point was to suffer the punishment to show the injustice. Otherwise, instead of staging sit-ins, MLK would simply have published articles and given speeches.
Too bad, indeed! You show a remarkable ignorance of it yourself.
The essential notion of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws openly and with the intention of submitting to the legal punishment, in order to show the unjustness of the law(s).
When Thoreau was imprisoned (I think for refusing to pay a sort of poll tax) he was visited in prision by Emerson, who asked "Why are you here?". Thoreau asked Emerson, "Why are you not?".
Regardless of the merits of the case being discussed here (and I have already stated my sympathies, above), it's very clear this has nothing to do with civil disobedience. Thoreau, Gandhi, MLK
What happens if a precedent gets set that the RIAA must pay legal fees is you get attorney's offering to defend the people being hit with these frivolous lawsuits right and left. If there is a reasonable chance for them to win, and they have a good chance of getting paid for it, there are enough hungry lawyers that would jump at the chance.
You seem to be propagating the fallacy of simple majority rule. The law exists, in part, to protect the minority from the majority. The Courts have ruled, time and again, that so long as the nativity scene is not the only religious display, it's permissible. The problem usually arises when a municipality puts up a nativity scene and someone says, "Do you mind if we put a menorah up as well, seeing as Chaunakah is right around the corner?" and the municipality refuses to do so. That's showing favoritism to the majority, and that's why it's not legal.
A paid holiday (which in many places can 'float' if the employee would like) is given to every city employee regardless of their religious preference or lack thereof.
Public life needn't be devoid of any reference to 'god' or religion... George W. Bush makes plenty of Christian references while standing behind a podium with the Presidential Seal on it, but they're generally acceptable because he is not advocating that the government support one religion over another. You're welcome to talk about your religion in public, as a private citizen or as a non-government supported organization, but the government cannot establish or support any one religion over another.