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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."
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.
Ultimately, he did break the law by copying music he didn't have a right to
... ?
And your source for this claim is
Oh, the RIAA. Right.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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"?
God bless this alleged little copyright infringer... Get it right people.
you implicated that he's guilty when you said "Ultimately, he did break the law by copying music he didn't have a right to". nothing in there says that you think he's "likely guilty". there's actually a great chance that he is not guilty, and if he is, they have little to no proof of it. the burden of proof is on the accuser and if the RIAA can't prove that he's guilty, he wins and they pay his legal fees.
if he can actually get the courts to agree that the RIAA is wasting their time, it's a win for everyone, which is why he deserves more than a starving FLOSS developer. i equate a FLOSS developer who doesn't have a real job with an artist who refuses to join our capitalist society. our country has been capitalist for over 200 years... that's not going to change, you don't deserve my money if you can't figure that out for yourself. it's called getting a real job and making sure that anything you code on your own time belongs to you. not too difficult.
if i had the money to donate, i'd donate it to this kid. he's taking on a worthy cause (through his lawyers). chances are a "starving" FLOSS developer has the means to get a real job and afford to live, while a 16 year old kid taking on the RIAA probably doesn't.
please me, have no regrets.
i thought this {legality | prosecution | persecution} hadnt been thoroughly tested in the courts, because when the 800 kg gorilla that is the *iaa team of lawyers descends on unsuspecting accused, they take the _much_ cheaper option and pay the protection money demanded as 'settlement'. the few cases where the accused has said 'thems fighting words, lets step outside', the *iaa backs off.
just 'cause the *iaa keeps bleating 'youre stealing, its illegal, etc' doesnt make it so.
i'd throw a few gold coins his way too, as this looks like a pretty good vector to prise open the *iaa shenanigans
Maybe I'll donate to a dictionary since they educate people on the definition of "imply".
The Farewell Tour II
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
Well, IANAL either, but my guess is his defence pertains directly to the case at hand: that being whether or not the RIAA really represents a monopoly and whether or not what they are doing is in fact extorsion. This would determine whether or not they even should have the legal right to sue anyone at all, or to act on behalf of any group of organizations that should be legally required to operate in competition with each other. If his claims are found legally true (I think it's pretty obvious that they are true, but from a legal standpoint does that hold water?) then their lawsuits are technically illegal themselves.
If these five separate companies were actually acting individually, and not as a monopolistic cartel, then they should each have conducted their own investigations of wrongdoing, and each have filed their own separate lawsuits for the individual violations of their IP. But them all acting together as one big organization kind of gives the game away and removes any doubt that these are saparate companies only as a mere formality. They are acting as a single entity with no free-market competition in mind while holding these proceedings. But that's just my layman's view of the situation, and I just hope the common sense I hope I applied to this analysis parallels the actual law in some way.
I just don't know if you can come up with a more textbook definition of monopoly (and all the reasons why they are bad) than what the RIAA seems to represent.
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.
Fresh from Pacer
14 - Defendant's Answer [PDF]14 Exhibit A [PDF]
14 Exhibit B [PDF]
...what has he done wrong?
We're talking about "legal" and "illegal". Right and wrong have nothing to do with it.
What?
'there are a few guilty people in Gitmo'
Innocent unless proven guilty, remember? One of those democratic principles we're supposed to be fighting for?
deus does not exist but if he does
Correct.
My Dad, who is a lawyer, always used to say: "Law is not justice, legal is not right and illegal is not wrong."
Law is just a set of rules for the smooth functioning of society and has nothing to do with morality or ethics - they may overlap in places, but that does not mean a thing.
In WWII did the soldiers decide they weren't going to fire at the enemy combatants because "they hadn't been proven guilty in front of a jury of their peers?" No, they shot at them, and if they captured them, they were sent to POW camps, where they were held as guilty until after the war (or they were traded). You don't try people in war like that, it just doesn't make sense, as all of your time would be spent on the obvious.
I guess you missed the part where Bush declared that the Gitmoees aren't POWs, German soldiers in WW2 aren't enemy combatants, and we aren't actually at war with anyone in particular. Aside from that, you're doing fine.
The people at gitmo are so unlikely to be innocent it's not even a question.
Based on what, exactly? You round up a bunch of people in Afghanistan and they're suddenly bloodthirsty animals? If they weren't then, they are now, and with good reason.
These are the prisoners who demand TVs during the world cup, than destroyed them during commercials.
Sound like fans to me.
These are people who will do anything to kill the western way.
Even if it means raising sheep in a village you've never heard of - suck on that!
I imagine the odds of one of them being innocent is much LESS than the odds that any given person in american prisons is innocent.
That's about 40%, right?
But all these big hot shot lawyers are clamoring to defend them. It's pure publicity on their part, they don't care about guilt or innocence, in fact, they want guilty parties to go free. if these lawyers cared about justice, they'd donate their time to help cases where people were legitimately screwed by the justice system.
So you see nothing wrong with throwing someone in a hole for 3 years, declaring them outside the Geneva convention, and outside civil due process? I hope they come for you tonight.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Phil.
Seriously...
They've found a rather large number of folks at Gitmo to be innocent.
Do a search for british gitmo prisoners.
We (america) engaged in *TORTURE* of them which means any admission of guilt on their parts is suspect.
If I were to waterboard you, shave you, parade you around naked, etc. as we have done to these guys, you would confess to just about anything in under 48 hours.
We really need to hold ourselves to higher standards if we hope to be the shining beacon on the hill.
Or we just need to say we are savages too and stop pretending we are better than everyone else.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.