RIAA Mischaracterizes Letter Received From AOL

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Elektra v. Schwartz, an RIAA case against a Queens woman with Multiple Sclerosis who indicates that she had never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came knocking on her door, the judge held that Ms. Schwartz's summary judgment request for dismissal was premature because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' When her lawyers got a copy of the actual AOL letter they saw that it had no such statement in it, and asked the judge to reconsider."

Comments

Re:uhoh

[Baricom]

My initial interpretation to that was that all the other IPs were not Ms. Schwartz. Wouldn't this put even more doubt as to the credibility of the RIAA's supposed evidence?

Re:Sure, the **AA are evil...

[bishiraver]

"[MS] really has no bearing on the case".

(IANAMD,BIRW [I am not a medical doctor, but I read wikipedia])

Actually, it sort of does. When you have MS, you can have "relapses" or "attacks" that increase the severity of your disability. These can be triggered by disease (colds, influenza, etc), or stressful events.

Needless to say, having to go through the ordeal of a trial may cause her disease to get worse. So it sort of does have an inhumane quality if she really did pirate music. Even so: couple thousand dollars, or potentially make the person you're suing degenerate further into a permanent and debilitating disease... sort of calls their morals into question, eh?

Re:Nothing to see here, please move along

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I don't agree that suing someone every other Tuesday is our national tradition.

I do think that the rule of law is our crown jewel, and is the bedrock of our democracy, and that in our common law system the law evolves in part through judicial decisionmaking. Respect for law, to my mind, suggests that we should respect the courts, and not litter them with frivolous litigation as the RIAA has done.

I am hopeful that the judges will take action against these bullies.

Keep an eye on Capitol v. Foster, where the judge has the opportunity to hit them with a big attorneys fee award, and Elektra v. Barker, where the judge is considering whether the RIAA even has a sufficient claim to warrant filing a lawsuit.