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RIAA Wants to Depose Dead Defendant's Children
Exchange writes "In Michigan, in Warner Bros. v. Scantlebury, after learning that the defendant had passed away, the RIAA made a motion to stay the case for 60 days in order to allow the family time to "grieve", after which time they want to start taking depositions of the late Mr. Scantlebury's children. Recording Industry vs The People have more details"
The RIAA needs to lay off of the dead guy's kids. Seriously. He's DEAD, RIAA. What else could you want? A cookie?
Part of the inheritance, of course. The fact that they guy was rude enough to die before they could get to him doesn't change that he did grave damage to the coffers of the RIAA. Well, at least that's likely their thinking.
Army Attorney General Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, 6/9/54:
"Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Surely, if Ken Lay could get himself acquitted on technical grounds, then this poor guy should also be.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Seriously. Why aren't the major news outlets making a big deal out of shit like this?
Do they want a part of your ashes after cremation too? :-p
RIAA's actions consistently shows the world some corporations show absolutely no emotions. RIAA is ready to walk over corpses, quite literally, to cash in what's to them a ridiculous sum of money. I wonder what's more scary -- this action alone, or the fact that actual people make these decisions.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Although the second part of the comment is exactly what I was thinking, at the moment the anti-piracy brigade has a fair amount of public ambivilence which is fine for the RIAA, as long as people dont care they can throw their weight around. The RIAA dont even need support to practice in this manner, just a lack of real awareness and comdemnation.
If they continue like this, large sections of the public (many of whom dont buy CD's) will become aware of the RIAA and form a very negative view.
Could this be the beginning of more desperate acts from an apparently up to now irresistable force?
How many more parents will just settle out of court as soon as the writ (I think it's called) from the RIAA turns up in the post. "Dont even try to fight us, we can still get your kids after you die".
And I dont reckon that was a troll, but perhaps I just bit.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Just proves the joke about lawyers and hookers is actually true.
Also I love how the word "grieve" is in inverted commas, as if the OP questions on whether or not the children will actually grieve.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." -- Henry VI (Part 2), Act IV, Scene II.
Expecting morality from an amoral organization or its lawyers leads to disappointment. The RIAA exists to maximize profit without concern for anything else be it fair play, Fair Rights or human decency. One has to wonder just what kind of person would work as a lawyer for the RIAA, since they must know as does anyone who's been following along on Slashdot that their lawsuits are unfair and an abuse of the legal system by a very powerful organization funded by multinational corporations against comparatively powerless individuals. They must be either atheists or fools to not fear the cost of abusing the bereaved for profit upon their souls. The person is dead. Find an unrelated living person to extort money from and leave the poor grieving family in peace.
*shudder*
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
The truly sad part about this? It's not surprising at all.
As someone who's lost a parent, I can tell you that 60 days (only to face the RIAA landsharks immediately afterwards) is not only not long enough to grieve, it is an absolute insult to the dead chap and his family.
The idea that there is anyone out there - anyone at all - who considers this "reasonable" (presumably at least one lawyer does) convinces me that the person in question must have had their soul surgically removed shortly after birth.
Generally speaking, it is respectful to give the family some time. And realistically court cases before do need to be brought before a judge before someone has finished grieving properly.
However that isn't taking into account that this should have been dropped the second the guy did. The fact that the RIAA is continuing negates any "gestures" they might make.
This kind of behaviour is much akin to that of creditors and collection bureaus. They seem to view their targets more as debtors than as someone they accuse in a civil lawsuit. At least sometimes the debt can be nullified due to death with a real credit agency. Not an all time moral low for the RIAA, but a different low among the same levels it's been reaching for.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Everyone is bitching about the industry, but enough keep buying. Are these people addicted to the crap they sell? And if their practices are really so despisable, why aren't there other companies with better practices getting more and more successful?
My impression is that people just love to bitch but 99% will end up in a record store and buy the latest copy protected crap anyways. And that is exactly why DRM solutions are more and more becoming an everyday reality too.
My first reaction was, I guess if you've lost the trust of your customers you have nothing to lose.
But thinking about it, we aren't RIAA:s customers. Nothing any of us do or say will affect RIAA directly. Their customers as it were are the copyright holders, and their business is to maximize return to these people. The copyright holders (usually the recording companies) don't have us as customers either; their customers are radio and television stations and other broadcasters, and retail outlets from Amazon and Wal-Mart to record stores to gasoline stations.
They provide content produced by artists - and it's the artists we are customers for. We don't go to Amazon to buy the latest Sony Music album, we go to buy AC/DC (or Jessica Simpson, or Luis Armstrong, whatever your taste is).
It's this disconnect that keeps RIAA in business. We don't connect their actions with our favourite artists. The artists, in turn, have little incentive, and a huge downside, to raising their voice (most are, after all, not big enough to actually influence their company). The recording companies have no incentive to change RIAA's actions from their customers (Amazon et al) since those customers don't feel any backlash from us either.
The solution? I don't see one. In my case it has gradually soured me on music altogether. I haven't bought a CD in years - but neither have I downloaded anything either. Most people will never make any emotional connection between music and this legal harassment, however, and so RIAA will never have a reason to change.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Where's now the faction that usually screams "Oh, would someone PLEASE think of the children?" when it comes to ripping away some liberty? How about thinking 'bout them NOW?
It's been said before, the RIAA doesn't give a rat's rear 'bout public image. Their business partners aren't normal people, their business partners are companies. And companies have no morals. The people in a company may have morals, but morals are easily brushed aside when you have someone else to blame. "I have to do it, or else I get sacked and someone else does it" is the usual comfortable excuse.
To invoke Godwin, that excuse has worked before. All too perfectly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(Time to burn some karma)
Call me cynical or whatever you wish, but I just had a rather disturbing thought. Would it surprise ANYONE if, somewhere down the line, it was learned that the RIAA was actually responsible for Mr. Scantlebury's death just so they could inflict as much pain and anguish as possible? They're already suing dead people, so this doesn't seem to be much of a stretch. After all, the dead don't fight back...
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
These guys have been out of control and beyond "immoral" for quite some time and yet they are allowed to exist and operate. Could there be a strategy to disband these thugs? They do nothing to help artists and everything to harm the public interest.
One must truly understand what the RIAA is trying to do here. Their goal isn't recoup lost revenues. Their goal is "shock and awe" through scare tactics. Basically, their lawyers are instructed to take no prisoners, go for the jugular, and show no mercy. It's to send a message meant to scare people into thinking that if you file share, the RIAA mafia will be after you like a rabid bulldog with lockjaw. Any respectful prosecutor would lay off and drop the case out of respect. After all, the accused party is dead, so there's really no point. But no, the RIAA is going to find some way to press onward and make it the whole family's problem now, and they know it'll bring negative publicity. They want it. They want to be feared, and for young little "sharing is caring" tykes to be looking under the bed for the RIAA boogyman at night if they so much as dare think about doing such an evil thing as sharing. This ruthless and heartless behavior is soooooo going to bite the RIAA on the ass someday, hopefully violently.
RICO...the same laws passed to deal with the Mafia. Extortion is extortion, no matter whether you're using the legal system or bands of thugs. It'll never happen though as the US government is in the pockets of the entertainment companies.
In most other countries, accepting lobby money is called Corruption, in the US it's accepted, nay, encouraged.
There is a lot of outrage expressed over RIAA tactics (as there should be), but I still think a lot of people are missing the essential point. There are many comments along the lines of 'How can the RIAA screw their customers like this?', and 'Don't they care about their PR?' etc.
The point is - no, they don't care about their PR, and they certainly don't care about their customers or their clients (the 'artists' who will in all likelihood never see a penny of the loot from the RIAA). The RIAA, like us, have seen the future, and like us, they know that it doesn't include them. They're not stupid - they know that electronic distributions systems will only get better, faster and easier. They know that an artist will soon be able to bypass the RIAA completely and reach the public directly. They know that the teenagers of today (who will become the consumers of tomorrow) find the notion of paying for music odd and outdated.
What we are seeing here, from DRM to pointless lawsuits to egregious congressional lobbying are just stopgap solutions, all of which will eventually fail, sooner or later. So what's an organization to do when they see their cash cow headed for the slaughterhouse, and know that there is nothing at all that they can do about it? Simple - they make as much money as they can before the inevitable happens. They know there will be no RIAA in the future - so in the meantime, they are abusing the system way past the breaking point in order to garner as much cash for the Executives to retire on when the time comes.
When seen from this prespective, the actions of the RIAA make sense. They don't care about their image - they care only about squeezing the last drop of blood from the stone before technology renders them obsolete. That doesn't mean we should give up the fight - we should continue to do all that we can to hasten the 'Day of Reckoning' - (shameless plug for Lizzie West's album 'Holy Road').
Goodbye RIAA - we hardly knew you. Not that we cared.
That's just the thing: they never started as "regular" people.
About 1% of the population are psychopaths. They have no empathy to start with (or rather, they _do_ read your body language very well... but then at most use it to shaft you).
They're essentially living in a single-player game, surrounded by NPCs which are expendable and don't matter. Think of the last time you've played a game. Did you care about the NPCs? Did you care if the hooker you've brained in GTA maybe has children, or maybe is only doing that to pay for her father's surgery, or whatever? Did you care about her feelings, goals in life, etc? Or were you in a frame of mind that NPCs by definition don't matter, and any lies, deceit, even murder, are ok as long as they keep you entertained? It's just a game, and the smart player does whatever works to get ahead, right?
Well, think of people whose approach to RL is just that. Everyone else doesn't matter. Causing any harm is just fair game, if it keeps them entertained. (And indeed a lot of them aren't even motivated by monetary gains, and do outright counter-productive stuff just because they find it entertaining to shaft someone hard.) Most of them are also nigh impossible to threaten, presumably as an effect. At any rate, for them you don't matter. They can tell you to jump off a building with a straight face, if they think you might buy that, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day.
The dumb ones become robbers, gangsters and serial killers, and society eventually puts them behind bars. The smart ones become CEOs and politicians, and get worshipped by Wall Street.
Most of them had no life-shattering trauma to blame it on. Most of the white collar psychopaths come from rich or middle class families, led good lives, had the best education, etc. The only trauma in their life was the one they've inflicted on others.
Some of them will _invent_ some rags-to-riches story, to gain sympathy. It makes people easier to manipulate. But almost invariably those stories aren't actually true.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's the Prisoner's Dilemma. Actually, it's a case of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma to be more specific. As long as the big labels all stick together they maximize the results for the group. Sure, one of the labels could break ranks and would probably maximize revenues in the short term. But on the next "iteration" they would suffer the retribution of the rest of the group. It would be akin to corporate suicide.
Unfortunately, I don't see this madness ending unless the government steps in and declares the RIAA's actions illegal. There are probably other solutions, but I'm late for work and don't have the time to consider the problem further.
Suffice it to say, the chances of one of the big labels breaking ranks are slim to none. And yes, I realize that another poster mentioned Nettwerk in another reply, but they are not one of the "Big Four" and so their influence on the industry is much less than that of EMI, Sony-BMG, Universal, and Warner. Those are the "prisoners" in this case. It is their decisions that move the industry, such as it is.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
In all seriousness, if you're going to go and do something...do it right. Go big.
:)
Ann Arbor's a college town with 30,000+ students. Between the sheer size of the campus and the fact that the College of Engineering is a target perfectly suited for this, I bet you could whip up a very nice protest. You could definitely organize something big enough to get the Detroit media's attention, and if done right, it could go farther than that.
And if you do, I'll be there. After all, when you go to the college in question, it's easy to get there.
Goo goo g'joob.
I have this theory about huge business. It's like a new animal, evolved from more complex "cells", but demonstrating an intelligence of it's own. It is motivated by the instinct to "survive", which means bringing as much money to the shareholders as possible, and each of its members is constantly faced with a dilimma:
Increase the bottom line, by whatever means possible. The stockholders don't care how you do. They don't want to know, and if you fail to do so, they won't care why. They'll just replace you with someone who can improve the bottom line.
So, each organization is made up of people who follow company policy, even when they, personally would never make such a decision on their own, and who do what they must to get by, because either A). it's their job or B). "It's business".
So if you run a company and steal from people (Ken Lay), if you die your heirs (with their stolen money) are exempt.
If, on the other hand, you're just a person, and you do something wrong in the eyes of the music industry, the punishment is due your children.
Does anyone else see a HUGE problem with the justice system in this county?
We the people have no control. God Money has spoken.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
I am not a constitutionalist
That's interesting, because that's just the sort of question a constitutionalist would tend to ask.
Not all constitutionalists are great scholars of the US Constitution.. but sometimes, knowing which questions to ask and when to ask them are all that is required.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
It's how you know who you know.
Ken Lay rapes the Enron shareholders and creditors, goes to trial, manages to get himself convicted and when he dies before sentencing, the court drops the whole shebang; as if it never happened.
In this case, the RIAA wants to go after the heirs for the alleged crimes of the deceased.
Yeah, everything's right with the world.
-- .sig allowed
No
The RIAA had a [completely bullshit] claim in progress against the decesased.
Just as if the deceased had outstanding debt, there is now a claim against his estate. Ignoring the absurd basis of the original lawsuit, this is a perfectly normal and legitimate legal claim. An outstanding lawsuit is no different from having a hospital bill, burial fees, outstanding credit card debt, a mortgage and so on.
Again, I agree that the original RIAA claim is bupkis, however, they are not 'suing the children', they are filing a claim against the estate just like any other debtor.
What's next, degrading vultures by comparing them to RIAA lawyers?
Do keep in mind that we are talking about RIAA lawyers, though. There are MANY lawyers who wouldn't do this kind of work and actually repect the intent of law.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
If you make me fear you, I will soon hate you. You have become a problem & my first reactions are to avoid you or to destroy you. That's my experience. If more people start to avoid their products (since destroying them is not, unfortunately, a realistict option) then the RIAA & MPAA need only to go to the nearest mirror to find out who is responsible.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Leave me out.
The purpose of the RIAA lawsuits is not to make money from settlements. It's to scare people away from engaging in copyright infringment. As such, it's not in the interests of the RIAA to appear to have a heart. Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do.
No, it's not working they way they want. People see the entire RIAA represented music industry as a greedy dinosaur that's enacted a bunch of really bad laws which they are abusing beyond the intent of any legislative intent. It's backfired on them big time and they are going to lose the basis of their suits and might even face long overdue copyright reform that will eliminate their obsolete business model.
The IRS tried the intimidation approach once and what they got was Ronald Reagan and a twenty five year bitch slap. It's been a long long time since the IRS has confiscated property from anyone but blatant scoff laws and real criminals. The purpose of the IRS is revenue, not ruin. Anyone who thinks the RIAA is more powerful than the IRS is deluding themselves.
When you act like they are acting, retribution is swift. Me telling my friends all about the RIAA's behavior is going to do two things the RIAA really does not want. People are going to be that much less likely to buy music and people are going to rethink copyright law. These cases make the copyright lawyers look really stupid and none of this talk is fun. People don't want anything to do with party poopers like the RIAA. Music is supposed to be fun, unifying and shared.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
actually, they make no revenue off of people listening to their songs on the radio. even setting aside payola and contests that they run on stations, they're losing money on radio just in the cost of sending out a trillion free copies so that every station has one. if the money that they invest in radio publicity doesn't get them sales (e.g. if someone is boycotting sales and only listening to radio) then their investment didn't pay off.
You are under the misconception that the RIAA is in the business of MAKING music. The parent post made the important distinction that the RIAA is in the business of MARKETING music. P2P is competition because it is free marketing. It completely destroys the RIAA and the major record label's business models, and it violates copyright law, but it does NOT stop music from being made.
Why do you think artists sign with labels? To get their music distributed. They want their music distributed because they want to make money. So if p2p comes along and makes it hard to make money with the old distribution method, artists will have to make money in a new way. The times they are a changin, and you are one of the many people who still believe music can only be made if huge amounts of money are thrown around by middlemen.
It is also fallacious to say that the music industry shouldn't be afraid of independant artists because they aren't popular now. It's not the artists the industry is ever afraid of, because that isn't important to them. They control distribution, thats where the power and money comes from. We take that away with p2p and we get the artists back.
Fuck the RIAA, fuck the major labels. I "steal" music and I'm proud of it. You'll thank me in 10 years when people have realized that you don't need a cartel of 3 multibillion dollar corporations to tell you what to listen to.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket