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RIAA Wants to Include Song Files it Can't Produce
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In UMG v. Lindor the RIAA is trying to include song files it doesn't have copies of as part of its 'distribution' argument. The defendant Marie Lindor is asking the Court to preclude them from doing that. She points to the RIAA's own interrogatory response in which the record companies swore that their case was based upon their investigator seeing a screenshot and then downloading 'perfect digital copies'. They produced eleven (11) copies of song files, but want to be able to prove twenty seven (27) other songs for which they can't produce the files."
Sounds like they're going down the same road as Chief Justice William Stoughton's acceptance of spectral evidence...
http://www.justworksnh.com
How about starting that donkey and downloading them? A copy is a copy, isn't it?
Why don't they share with us what format they got the first few "perfect" copies... Monkey Audio?
How about someone sue the RIAA for having kiddy porn on the RIAA web server? No, I can't prove it. But I just said it was there didn't I?
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
If I were them I'd really like to beat my hands against my chest and cry "innocent until proven guilty, mother-fuckers", however this is civil, so they basically don't have to prove anything. We have a broken legal system.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
Evidence isn't needed when you aren't expecting to win. The RIAA doesn't care about winning the case, they care about scaring people. It still works.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
"Our investigator saw a screenshot of an IP address we traced back to them."
:D Oh, I can't wait!
"We used a reverse DNS lookup to find out that this was the computer used for the downloading."
"Our investigator downloaded a perfect copy of the file downloaded by the defendant in a process of reverse spectral resonance."
"We figured 'To hell with it' and crossed the beams. Once we realized the universe didn't end, we found a burn mark that resembled the offending computer's IP address."
What new wonders of the universe will the RIAA educate judges on next week?
The lady was using eDonkey or whatever. The RIAA downloaded 11 songs from her and filed a lawsuit. They have a screenshot showing that she was sharing 27 songs and want all them included in their lawsuit, even though they didn't actually download/verify 16 of the songs. That's my understanding, at least.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If the copyright cartel enforcers are required to have downloaded copies from the alleged infringer in order to maintain a suit, then something like Peer Guardian becomes more effective: p2p'ers can be seen online, yet they're safe as long as they can succeed in blocking connections to or from all the enforcers' addresses.
Hardly. Peerguardian can only ever block IP addresses that are known to belong to *AA agents. Nothing prevents them from using cable, dialup, wifi, etc. to get online.
In fact, to the *AA it would be interesting to see that a certain peer can be contacted from an untainted IP address, but not from a tainted one. That way they know you're using PeerGuardian. If I were them, I'd go after those people just to scare PeerGuardian users. They can even use the fact that you used PeerGuardian to argue that you knew you were doing wrong.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Perhaps these 'songs' were recordings of the Plaintiff saying 'Bite my shiny metal ass' ?
Using a screenshot which may easily faked showing names of songs that may never have been RIAA property is about as legally compelling as sworn testimony from an alcoholic wifebeater who claims that his TV talks to him and tells him to molest small animals.
The RIAA should have their asses handed back to them on a plate with a heft fine for wasting the courts time.
Shoudn't the RIAA start to sue themselves ? They downloaded copies of songs to there computer, and now they are shareing them with a judge...
not even videos are allowed as evidence in courts, how do they think "I saw a screenshot" could be allowed as evidence? allowing this as evidence in court would be dictatorship!
do it like the german chaos computer club and pirate party, BOYCOTT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! LISTEN TO CREATIVE COMMONS MUSIC! it's great music and it's free and the damn music industry can't prosecute you for listening to it for free!
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators
http://www.garageband.com/htdb/index.html
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
If on the other hand, the enforcers can maintain a suit without showing that they downloaded copies from the alleged infringer, then they really have no logical way of proving that what the p2p'er was sharing was infringing, rather than something with the same name and maybe filesize.
I'm sorry, but there is a very logical way of establishing what the "p2p'er" was sharing was infringing, and it's called an inference based on circumstantial evidence.
Let's be quite clear
1. The plaintiff's agent, "the enforcer", obtained someone's IP address and a list of shared songs.
2. The plaintiff's agent actually downloaded 11 of the shared songs, so that the plaintiff was presumably able to verify that the songs actually corresponded to the file's name and/or metatags.
3. You have a list of shared filenames and quite possibly metadata tags, and concrete evidence that items on the list actually are what they purported to be.
4. You can quite logically draw the conclusion that the shared filenames really are what they purport to be.
The burden of persuasion on in a civil case is not "beyond a reasonable doubt," but a "preponderance of the evidence." If you can stand up before a jury or ordinary people and convince them that it really is more likely than not that each file downloaded from this source was really something other than what it claimed to be, then you need to start your own law practice. Also, the defendant in the case is arguing that they shouldn't even have to make that argument to a jury, simply because "the enforcer" did not download each and every file.
I'm reasonably sympathetic to the defendants in these cases given the haphazard manner in which the license holders are initiating their lawsuits and the excessive penalties, but one you get beyond matching an IP to a subscriber, the arguments that the defendants are making quickly start to become ludicrous. Open wireless access points are attractive nuisances. Children using the office computer to amass a thousand songs are negligently supervised. You can surely argue against these points if there is a de minimis infringement, but when someone is building a trading a library of a thousand songs, it's hardly tenable to argue that ignorance is an excuse.
Feel free to argue that you must have all the evidence you need to win a trial before filing a lawsuit, and to argue that you must have actual copies or physical specimens of each an every infringing work or device. When a corporation is a defendant, it will be more than happy to use those ludicrous arguments to its advantage to make it even more difficult for individuals to prove and obtain relief for copyright infringement, patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, and the like. It won't actually happen, and the defendants are going to lose these types of arguments, but the intellectual breadth of the typical Slashdot legal analysis continues to astound me.
Perhaps a good defence would be to hand over a CD with 27 audio files saying just that (make sure you get the file size correct by padding the end with sufficient random white noise). It would be good to get some audio file of "RIAA are fucking arseholes" heard as evidence in court.
I presume, as part of discovery, the defendant could ask for a copy of the files the RIAA downloaded?
They don't have the copyright on the songs, just the 'sound recording copyright' on these particular recordings of those songs.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
What's really funny is that the RIAA themselves seeded all sorts of fake files mislabelled as songs on the p2p networks. So how is the court supposed to know that what they think are real copyrighted songs are actually songs at all, when the RIAA didn't download them to find out?
Well, I'm safe because right now I've made it very clear that I'm not sharing anything with copyright. A screenshot would look like this:
This is not Metallica - Enter sandman
This is not Madonna - Confessions On A Dancefloor
This is not King Kong (Peter Jackson)
I agree with you. I've been collecting a list of links to sources of non-RIAA music which I call Liberated Music. I've added garageband.com to it (I already had Creative Commons in there). Incredible the wealth of music that's out there once you liberate yourself from the monotony of the 4 big record companies.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Wayyy back when, somewhere in the middle east - David saught out Goliath.
In the US - Goliath seeks out David...
It goes to damages. The damages are determined on a per-violation basis. The RIAA is arguing that they don't need the actual files to be obtainable to prove damages. I have evidence that says that they do:
From:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/04/081226
and...
So yes, they need the actual files given this track record especially when they are seeking $150,000+ per file.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
We locate the spam-seeder - take a screen grab of the file names - report them to the RIAA and watch them sue themselves.
I want to see exhibit B.
They seem to target blatant file sharing such as idiots who use Kazaa and the like with no counter-measures. I don't think en masse content piracy is OK, but the extreme measures they're using to fight it is killing the nature of entertainment media. Music and theater used to be enjoyable things to partake in, but nowadays, you have to put on a guilty conscience and resign yourself to the potential, unknown consequences of everything you hear and see.
- I should be able to share all my music and movies with my immediate family
- Using my computer should not be a gauntlet legal run
- Non-profit piracy should NOT have such severe consequences. People aren't selling crack or guns on Kazaa.