Slashdot Mirror
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."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
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 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
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
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.
You forgot to mention that your not a lawyer. Doing pro bono work does not mean your doing it for free. It means your doing the work for free if you lose and for money if you win your client money. Of course they will try and sue for lawyers fees, its the right thing to do. Lets say the ACLU wins a lawsuit of a case they did pro bono. This means the winning party now has to penny up the money but thankfully the ACLU goes after the wrongful party for money and does not panalize someone they defended just becuase they won.
Basically what im saying is that by sueing for lawyer fees after winning pro bono work to protect people's civil liberties they are also protecting your pocket book.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.
I'm not a lawyer either, but are you sure? I think what you're describing is "contingency", where you work for free if you lose and take a cut of the winnings if you win.
As far as I can tell "pro bono" really is "for free". At least in the US it's not common for the judge to award legal fees; it has a chilling effect on poor people suing rich people. It's SOP in Great Britian, IIRC, but IANAL.
Things were so much easier when we just used ducking stools and pointy sticks to decide innocence or guilt.
One wonders if the law exists to keep lawyers rather than the other way around.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
From what I understand contingency fees are for when the layer is represnting a plaintiff who is suing somebody else for money -- and the lawyer gets a portion of the award (if any). The lawyer getting paid is contingent upon winning.
Pro bono (pro bono publico) means that the lawyer is not charging the client. Pro bono does not mean that the laywers can't get attorney's fees awarded to them by the judge.
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....
When the RIAA learned that the person they sued was probably innocent, they switched their claim. They now claimed that she was liable because she owned the internet connection over which the infringement occured.
So, I have a wife and two adult university students living at home. The RIAA asserts that I am responsible for their online activities. That means that I have to read all their posts and emails. I don't think so.
The RIAA has already lost their case. What we are arguing about here is that they should pay the defendant's legal fees. What we need is for the court to decide that the RIAA's theory about secondary liability never had a basis in law and that their case is essentially frivolous.
On Groklaw there has been some discussion of frivolous cases. There are punishments for lawyers who bring frivolous cases. If the RIAA's lawyers were sanctioned for cases like this, that would really make them think twice before going after the obviously innocent.
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.
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.
Wow. 18,000 people sued, settlements between $3K and $11K. That's over $100 million!
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.
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.
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'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.
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
You (and all the moderators, and most of the repliers) either missed the line saying "amicus curiae brief" or more likely didn't understand what it means. The ACLU, EFF, et al, are *not* Ms Foster's lawyers. They are outside parties with no direct financial stake in the outcome.
However, they do want a particular outcome: sticking it hard to the RIAA. Therefore they have filed their own legal statement trying to aid Ms Foster (and her lawyers, whoever they are). Whether they succeed or not, they don't get any money from anyone in the case.
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
They're suing for the Rights Holders, which is a different beast- and they're suing people indescriminately
left and right over this BS. No, I don't think that illicit file sharing (and there's a distinction there)
is right and that "Music should be free!) but in the same breath, suing the customer is rarely a good thing
especially when the person in question obviously didn't do what they're claiming. They're setting the
financial bar high enough that people just "settle" out of court instead of defend themselves.
Who do you think gets to pocket the money from these settlements and lawsuits? The people making the music?
If you think that, you'd be mistaken- it's the lawyers and the RIAA member organizations that see this
money. That's not going to the bat for anyone save themselves- and it's not about the violations, it's
about control.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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
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 numberIMHO, 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.
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.