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RIAA Defendant Says Kazaa Settlement Bars Case

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the can't-have-it-both-ways dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The defendant in Arista v. Greubel has filed an answering statement. The statement says that the RIAA's case against him, since it's based upon his use of Kazaa, is barred by the RIAA's receipt of $115 million from Kazaa. Mr. Greubel also challenged the constitutionality of the RIAA's $750-per-song damages theory, saying damages should be limited to $2.80 per song. See the previous Slashdot discussion of that issue and Judge Trager's decision in UMG v. Lindor."

9 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Has the RIAA won any court cases by ClaraBow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    against individuals or have all of them been settled out of court? This has been going on for so long that I've lost track!

    1. Re:Has the RIAA won any court cases by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They haven't won any actual cases against people, though they have won a number of suits against the companies running the file sharing software.

      This is an interesting defense, though I don't think it'll fly. I think the record companies will argue that the settlement against Kazaa was for creating the file sharing software, and not for actually infringing on any copyrights.

      I do think that the arbitrary value per song is long over due for a re-evaluation. 750 is nothing more than extortion unless they can prove actual value lost (which they can't) or until they actually force someone to settle for that amount, which they haven't yet.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    2. Re:Has the RIAA won any court cases by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Interesting

      On the first point, I agree with you. Plus, that kind of argument doesn't fly anywhere else. Generally if more than one group commits an offense of some sort (civil or otherwise) against you, you don't have to pick just one of them to sue.

      As far as the second goes: as cpt kangarooski points out, the $750 is what is legislated, not some arbitrary figure the music industry has pulled out of it's rear.

      Moreover though, saying they should prove actual value lost is a nonsense and precisely that reason why a figure was legislated in the first place. You don't know how many people downloaded the song. You don't know how many of those people passed it on to others. You do know that the person put the music up for download onto a network where it was effectively available, without control, to millions of anonymous strangers.

      As if to make matters worse, putting that music up for download also increased the value overall of an piracy-oriented peer-to-peer system, making it a more practical and attractive alternative to legal music. If someone can expect to be able to use such a system to find an arbitrary song that they would otherwise have to pay for, they're likely to do so.

      And we haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Some have argued, for instance, that the 50-70c per song the content producers gets from the iTunes Music Store should be used as the "actual" value (as if putting up a single song to be downloaded 2,000 times works out at 70c of lost revenue.) The fact is though that this is a royalty paid for music that's already crippled using DRM and therefore of already limited utility. Would the industry have negotiated a rate that low if it were higher bitrate unencrypted MP3s that will never need to be complemented with versions on other medias?

      The bottom line is that I don't actually think the $750 is quite as extortionate as people claim it is. As a fine for putting someone else's music up for download by potentially millions of anonymous strangers, it's not exactly out of line.

      Do I think that it'd be fair for, say, a charge of copying a music CD for a friend to listen to? Absolutely not. But that's not what we're talking about here.

      I think both arguments look like bad lawyering to me and I wouldn't be surprised if the defendant gets into more trouble as a result than if they'd just kept their mouths shut and taken a settlement. The legal fees will pile up, and someone will have to pay them.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. Piracy Tax? by Thansal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    hmm, does this sorta set a precedent for us to use our Zunes to hold pirated music? After all, MS Basicly setteled it premptivly by paying off one of the major labels....

    --
    Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
    1. Re:Piracy Tax? by HappySqurriel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Essentially that is what happened in Canada ...

      The Recording industry lobbied the government to introduce a tax on recordable CDs (and MP3 players IIRC) which was then paid out to the recording industry; later the recording industry wanted to sue individuals in Canada for downloading music and it was ruled that people had already paid for the music through this tax.

    2. Re:Piracy Tax? by zxnos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      silly questions but... ...do the artists get an automatic percentage of this tax collected by the music industry in canada?

      --
      always mosh clockwise
  3. Greubel Has Sugar Daddy by cmholm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It would seem that Mr. Greubel has been given the wherewithall to fight the case by a Vancouver-based music producer who is looking to create a proper test case to challenge the RIAA "John Doe" lawsuits.

    --
    Luke, help me take this mask off ... Just for once, let me butterfly kiss you with my own eyes.
  4. Re:Umm... by shark72 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "That's $750 PER SONG. Share 1(one) CD? $7,500+."

    Good point. I think the "$750 per work" language is a remnant of the old days of piracy, where people tended to pirate entire albums, books, or movies at once. It's from before today's song-by-song piracy.

    "That's a hefty fee for putting something on Kazaa. (Compare to fines for reckless driving and the like.)"

    Yet if your sharing that song with 10,000 people caused the rightsholders a loss of $750 of business, then it's just. Yeah, yeah, I know, the rightsholder might not need the money and might be a cocaine addict, but rich cocaine addicts have the same rights under the law as we do.

    "Given the bandwidth most people have it's extremely unlikely that they've uploaded to more then 50 people. (The song itself may be shared more then 50 times, but not by just one person.)"

    You've nailed it. I recall some analysis several years back that through fingerprinting or what have you, they found 16K copies of an Eminem song on a P2P network that all came from the same rip. Power in numbers.

    --
    Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
  5. Re:Umm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Double counting damages is not exactly legit. The RIAA cannot sue me for illegally distributing a song, claiming I am responsible for "downstream" sharing, and then sue "downstream" sharers as well. Either I am responsible or the downstream user is responsible -- claiming both, at least if the RIAA benefits from it the first time, is called judicial estoppel and is grounds for their argument to be thrown out. The defendant's theory in this case is probably similar.