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Teen Accuses Record Companies of Collusion
evilned1 writes "A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy, accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats."
They're not competing? NO WAI!!!
Can't wait till studios figure out this isn't the 19th century...
There is a way to make money in music/movies. Selling mass copies of media is not it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
No matter what side of the RIAA-wars you come down on, there's something endearing about a kid who stands up to bullies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.
Uh... yeah, no kidding. I thought the RIAA's past legal failures should have already taught them that. Oh, wait... were they talking about the kid's charges?
I'm a lookin for this kids web site (if he has one) and I think i'll paypal him a couple of bucks. Not standing up and saying "NO" to the RIAA is as good as saying OK. I'm glad someone is returning fire.
Silulu. Hot Polynesian Geek Chick. HPGC
Let's hope the judge sides with him on this one.
I for one would love to see an actual list of the "thousands of employees that have been laid off" in the music industry due to piracy, according to the RIAA. Sheesh yeah those pop stars are out begging in the street, and they're the ones that keep the SMALLER percentage of the royalties...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
IANAL, But let's say for argument's sake that the kid is right and the record companies are 'colluding'. That seems immaterial to the charge that he violated copyright violation. Statue of Limitations I can see, but you can't use wrongdoings of others as a defense for your own, unless they are directly relevant to this case (extortion claims? But isn't that how all lawsuits work? Sue or settle?) If the case had no merit, then it shouldn't go forward at all, but I don't see how this 'collusion' defense addresses the charges at hand.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
The kid had nothing to do with the legal arguments -- the reporting is just following the convention that your lawyer speaks with your voice and your authority. Its probably the same set of lawyers who worked when his mother was sued and, inexplicably, were not called in when his sister got issued a default judgement for $20k. (Yikes! People, when the process server gives you papers, READ and ACT ON THEM. Default judgements are 64,000 flavors of nothing good!)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
That's what they said about Big Tobacco. Any attempt is a good attempt: It encourages and enboldens others, even when they fail.
Demented But Determined.
Since he's under 18, can he even enter into a contract? Can he effectively use the court system by himself? If he can't, it's all in the hands of whatever attorney will help him (I'm assumig he's not an idle rich kid, and that he basicly has paper-route money).
This is intriguing though. For adults like myself, who have little time to spare and much to lose, quick settlements and/or rapid capitulation to affordable terms are usually the only way out. In other words, if the *AA extorted 10 percent of my wealth, it might be enough to make them go away, and it would be more expedient for me to let them do that then spend half my wealth fighting them.
OTOH, if I'm a 16-year old and I can legally ride my bicycle to the court house and file claims all summer as an "interesting lesson", then what could I lose? That has a certain appeal to it; but I doubt it will fly. They'll probably drag it out until he's 18, and can be subject to things that will bother an adult.
Still though, the idea of a smart kid sitting there in the library putting up his time and zero money, pitted against corporate lawywers who charge their clients 100s of dollars an hour, is intriguing. Even if he loses, he wins, unless they force him to pay court costs--then he's screwed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://www.p2pnet.net/goliath/
If the recording industry is hurting soo badly, where the hell are they getting the money for all theese lawsuits & lawyers ?
Dumping their SCOX?
I've just been playing a fiddle tune. Although it is more than 200 years old I had no problem finding either sheet music or recordings of it, because anyone is free to publish and/or record without a license.
Cream rises to the top without a demon to drive it there.
Oh, the name of the tune? "The Rights of Man." I commemorates a little book of the same name. You might want to read it.
KFG
"The papers allege that the companies, "ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy" by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency "to make extortionate threats ... to force defendants to pay."
0 -cd-settlement_x.htm
The labels were actually found guilty of this once before:
States settle CD price-fixing case
By David Lieberman, USA TODAY
NEW YORK -- The five largest music companies and three of the USA's largest music retailers agreed Monday to pay $67.4 million and distribute $75.7 million in CDs to public and non-profit groups to settle a lawsuit led by New York and Florida over alleged price-fixing in the late 1990s...
Former FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky said at the time that consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1997 and that CD prices would soon drop by as much as $5 a CD as a result.
In settling the lawsuit, Universal BMG and Warner said they simply wanted to avoid court costs and defended the practice.
"We believe our policies were pro-competitive and geared toward keeping more retailers, large and small, in business," Universal said in a statement."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-3
Maybe some of those jobs being lost should never have been there to start with
All but two stores in the popular Tower Records chain just went out of business. They still have online sales, but I'm sure there's a lot of retail employees that lost their jobs.
Obviously, their mistake is in not raising prices to cover their losses. Maybe if they raised their prices high enough all the illegal downloaders would realize what a mistake they've made and start buying their music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_hands
"Unclean hands, sometimes clean hands doctrine, is an equitable defense in which the defendant argues that the plaintiff is not entitled to obtain an equitable remedy on account of the fact that the plaintiff is acting unethically or has acted in bad faith with respect to the subject of the complaint--that is with 'unclean hands'. The defendant has the burden of proof to show the plaintiff is not acting in good faith. The doctrine is often stated as "those seeking equity must do equity"."
Obviously the kid didn't think this up himself.
I think Tower Records suffered from the big boxes like Walmart and Best Buy flexing their corporate muscle more than online piracy. When selling physical media + accessories is your only game you aren't left with the resources to fight a company like Best Buy in a pricewar when they decide to sell CDs $3 or $4 cheaper than you can and make up the difference by selling you a shiny plasma TV. I would maybe buy piracy as an excuse if suddenly Best Buy or Target or whomever suddenly decided CDs were no longer worth selling, but that hasn't seemed to happen.
Fresh from Pacer
14 - Defendant's Answer [PDF]14 Exhibit A [PDF]
14 Exhibit B [PDF]
He was 11 when it happened, and the statute of limitations is up. Furthermore, his sister already had rights to everything he downloaded, since she owned the CD's.
I think the RIAA is going to lose this case, and it's going to set the stage for how the RIAA's patterned lawsuits start failing, time after time.
The last argument, in particular, should be able to defeat any RIAA lawsuit in court, since people buy and sell CD's all the time, and the RIAA can't prove what the person owned the rights to at the time they downloaded copyrighted music.
"His defenses to the industry's lawsuit include that he never sent copyrighted music to others, that the recording companies promoted file sharing before turning against it, that average computer users were never warned that it was illegal, that the statute of limitations has passed, and that all the music claimed to have been downloaded was actually owned by his sister on store-bought CDs."
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Here's an article about his lawyer. It is the same guy that represented his mom (and that worked out ok...sort of). It is a one man operation, with a little help from the mom herself.
It sounds to me like their short on funds, and I'm not sure what this lawyer is looking to get out of this--a judgment for attorney's fees? I guess he had to countersue for this kid if he is to have any chance of getting money out of this. It's too high profile to quit, but their is no funding to work with (except for this little fund mentioned in the linked article).
Red-flagged by SiteAdvisor. Here is the report from McAfee for p2pnet.net:
When we tested this site we found links to warezclient.com, which we found to be a distributor of downloads some people consider adware, spyware or other unwanted programs
After entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 3.7 e-mails per week.
I offer this purely as a suggestion, mind you, not legal advice:
But if the heart of your defense is that know you "nothing, nothing!" about the darker side of the P2P nets, a jury might think that this is a mighty strange place to find you.
This is exactly the kind of thing a 15-year-old kid would boast to his friends about... "Hey, if these fuckers came after me, why, I'd counter-sue their ass for defamation and slander, and .. and libel!". Except he's actually doing it. Yeah! That's funny! (you can +5 me funny and stuff for pointing that out!)
*blinks*
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringeme
- Creating a copy and giving it to someone else. This constitutes copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. It is not infringing under specific circumstances such as fair use and fair dealing. In some countries, such as Israel, creating a copy is completely legal, as long as it was done from non-profit intentions.
- Creating a copy to serve as a backup. This is seen as a fundamental right of the software-buyer in some countries, e.g., Germany, Spain, Brazil and Philippines. It can be infringement, depending on the laws and the case law interpretations of those laws, currently undergoing changes in many countries. In the US, legal action was taken against companies which made backup copies while repairing computers (see MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. (1993)) and as a result, US law was changed to make it clear that this is not copyright infringement.
And collusion sounds like what the oil companies do to maintain the high price of oil, working together for mutual benefit. Who needs monopolies when you have collusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion