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RIAA Victim Wins Attorney's Fees
VE3OGG writes "Debbie Foster, one of the many caught-up in the RIAA's drift-net attacks who was sued back in 2004 has recently seen yet another victory. After having the suit dropped against her "with prejudice" several months back, Foster filed a counter-claim, and has just been awarded "reasonable" attorney's fees. Could this, in conjunction with cases such as Santangelo, show a turning of the tide against the RIAA?"
However...
The bit that caught my eye, though, was the quote
Me like. If that can be said to be a precedent, it means anyone with an unsecured WiFi network has a strong argument for not being held liable for anything done on that network - it's open, after all. Anyone could drive by, park, download [insert bad stuff here], and drive off. Unless the prosecution has video surveillance of your house/apartment, it'll be very hard to *prove* who did what.
It seems the best protection may be none at all. How very Zen.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Was there really that much of a tide to be turned?
Could this, in conjunction with cases such as Santangelo, show a turning of the tide against the RIAA?
/. stop ending summaries with "Could this be the end of <something most /. readers think is bad>?"?
Could
Even if its secure, its not that hard to break into it anyway.. or just directly compromise your pc with a trojan.. So really in ANY situation you can claim it wasnt you, quite reasonably.
Now, that said, if they get a search warrant and strip your house bare and find that 'backup' cd hidden away with one of the files in question, your quite logical defense melts away like an ice cube in hell.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Great news, I just wish she had gone for pain and suffering, harassment, and libel (or something like it). Get those greedy bastards to set her up for life and we'll see how many more suits they file. Fuck you RIAA!
Me like. If that can be said to be a precedent, it means ...
Some explaining is in order.
I know y'all aren't lawyers, so I shouldn't expect you to get the lawyer-speak right, but I have noticed lots and lots of misuse of this term.
"Precedent" in the context of a court's decision doesn't mean much at the trial court level.
That's because a court is only bound by the decisions of the courts ABOVE it. Since a trial court is basically the lowest court, you don't have trial courts setting "precedents" that anyone has to follow.
Appeals courts set precedent that the trial courts (aka district courts) must follow within their circuits. The Supreme Court also sets precedent that the Courts of Appeal and district courts must follow. But district courts do not set precedent that anyone else must follow.
I suppose any time someone decides something it can be called a "precedent". But usually, when we say that about courts, we are talking about something that has to be followed.
A court does not have to follow its own precedents, though they tend to do so, absent a good reason to change course. This tendency is called stare decisis, and it is not a requirement. The Supreme Court reverses itself fairly regularly, and that's why some people worry that Roe v. Wade (or another decision) might get overturned.
While a district court sets precedent in the sense that decisions in that same court will probably follow it, they do not set precedent that anyone outside of that court's jurisdiction needs to follow. Someone else may or may not find that judge's reasoning persuasive.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
FTA:
"Instead of immediately dropping the case against Debbie Foster and suing those they believed were responsible for the alleged infringement, the plaintiffs amended the complaint to add her daughter Amanda Foster, while keeping Debbie as a codefendant. The RIAA told Debbie Foster that she was liable for any infringement regardless of whether she had shared or downloaded files herself because she was the registered owner of the account. Foster responded by filing a counterclaim for a "declaratory judgement of noninfringement.""
So with that logic; I can shoot someone with a gun that belongs to someone who works for RIAA; and they would be responsibe for the murder. Wow... Love their logic.
They love big and overly-inflated numbers when they cite losses. They might as well hand over a big and overly-inflated number to this lady in damages.
So the good news here is that almost all the broad band users out there are safe. The evidence the RIAA has against you is that the have the files coming from an IP, and while that ip is associated with you, it is associated with a device not capable of doing what they are accusing you of. All they have evidence of is that you acted as an ISP for a violator and as such The DMCA actually protects you.
I am not a lawyer but I imagine that the logs that show that your account had a given IP at a given time also associate a mac addr to that ip, and it should be quite easy to demonstrate that the device with that ip at the time in question just can't do what they accuse that it did.
Do you honestly think the RIAA gives a damn? They would rather win, yes, but this isn't about the relatively trivial (to them) judgements and legal costs. This was a P.R. campaign. They wanted parents to stop their kids from downloading gig upon gig from Kazaa. They wanted colleges to monitor what their students were up to on the networks. They wanted the average user to always have a nagging fear every time they went to Limewire.
I think it's pretty despicable*, but it was (unfortunately) very effective, much more so (and probably cheaper than) a typical ad campaign. Yes, there are other ways they could have done it, I am not saying it was right; but to think any legal setback (other than something extremely catastrophic, such as ordering them to pay ALL legal fees for all past cases plus emotional distress or something like that) will make them consider the campaign a failure is just foolish. If they lose a case there is nothing to stop them from filing more; it's the front-page news alerts that another thousand have been served that they are after, not the judgements themselves.
And anyway, even if they were to stop tomorrow, they could do so comfortably knowing that they already won-- "piracy" has been stygmatized, and casual users are afraid.
* I would go so far as to say no corporation should be able to sue an individual under any circumstances, but that is a different discussion.
And if you're planning on killing somebody, just leave a loaded gun on your front porch. Then anybody could have done it! An airtight defense if I ever saw one.
If it was even suspected that you were hosting an open WiFi point to engage in, or encourage others to engage in an illegal activity I think they could find many ways to make your life miserable. I'm fairly certain that giving others the tools to commit a crime and then standing idly by while they commit it is, in itself, illegal. Maybe harder to prove, seeing as how they would have to prove intent, but still enough to get you in trouble. Especially if they could show that you were knowledgable enough to know what an unsecured network could be used for.
Stop thinking about the children. Think of the actual facts. If you apply more feelings than logic, you know you're on the way to do someone wrong.
The firewall at work will do that if I haven't authenticated to the network yet and I try to visit some protected site (usually Gmail).
I examined the cert the first time and have clicked no ever after.
Maybe it's too early to say, but have you seen any change in their legal tactics since this ruling came down? Do you think they're likely to start doing things much differently now?
That one day, the RIAA will be sued or counter-sued for not only attorney's fees, but for compensation for harassment, and have to pay punitive damages appropriate in comparison to the RIAA bottom line. Furthermore, that the punitive damages in question not be awarded to the plaintiff, but rather be diverted to a charity of their choosing - naturally, a fund existing for the purpose of assisting struggling independent artists. One can dream.
This is unrelated but does the latest version of the Cd/Dvd burning program k3b for linux not supporting .WAV files possibly have something to do with RIAA or cronies influencing the authors of that program? I just compiled the most recent stable k3b on slackware 11 and it informs me .wav is not supported.
/extra, added some sym-links and the program ran fine. Maybe it /was/ me and .WAV support is not included in k3b by default. That action there could also be because of RIAA warmongering.
I wiped the system I can't check now but maybe there was no cddawav and that's why, still the possibility remains. I copied all the k3b libs from
I never say riaa i say sony or who ever but not riaa give them no place to hide
How very Christian:
.. "Make no effort to resist evil." .. "If they ask you to walk with them a mile, walk with them two miles." .. "If they sue you at the law and ask for your shirt, give them your cloak, as well, and don't ask for it back."
"If your enemy strikes your cheek, turn the other, that he may strike it, as well."
It could well be argued that not securing your networks is the Christian thing to do. (applying the "turn the other cheek" to "hackers" and "network piggybackers") It could also be argued that "turn the other cheek" would have the RIAA not suing, but it would also have their victims giving twice the amount asked for, if they were sued.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Isn't it simply academic for a good social engineer to get a list of names of all the RIAA 'people,'-- all the RIAA policy makers, decision makers, and lawyers, etc.? And wouldn't that pretty much be, for a good hacker, a few hundred hot pockets away from getting all their identity info? And then maybe from that point, just a few candy bars away from transferring all their money into a Belize /. account?
The only reason the RIAA is scary is because of the money they have, and the money they will take from you (destroying your life in the process). Take that away, and they're not so scary.
Short of taking their money, we should at least know who they are, a face to the fascism, you know? Once they are publicly identified, will they really be so bold taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from regular low-middle income folks?
OK... back to reality. In America, money always wins; money before rights; money before justice; godmoney, just tell me what you want me to
The Admin and the Engineer
Is Oklahoma a state with Anti-SLAPP laws? If so, she can also file a motion for punitive damages. That would be sweet.
cat
That means no search warrants.
Wasn't there some code that replaced images in a stream? I recall that being used at some hacker conference, could be entertaining :-). What do you use to firewall?
I'm asking because I'm toying with the idea of setting up something similar, but leave it open for Skype and maybe some sites like the BBC and Dilbert. In my opinion a WiFi port should never give access to an internal network without a VPN layer.
Insert
The only thing that will stop them is if some appelate Court rules that their drift-net technique is insufficient grounds to advance a case and upholds summary dismissal. So they don't appeal!
This best part of this decision is where the judge says to the RIAA contentions that claims under the Copyright Act are the same as claims under Rule41(a)(2): "It is not." Now those are three powerful words.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually, on the 'distracting hackers' front you may want to do some digging for Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit (DTK), even just for amusements' sake. AFAIK most people clued up now use LaBrea tar pits because it uses less resources and makes more of a mess at the transgressor end, but Fred came up with the idea of deliberately creating 'vulnerable' services, only they weren't /really/ vulnerable - the hacker wannabee was basically talking to a bunch of scripts pretending to be a flawed service.
The idea was to waste as much hacker time as possible, thus increasing the potential for detection and the assailant moving to another target. Neat idea IMHO.
Insert
RIAA only exist because people are over all stupid. My last comment to call out sony and others who use riaa to hide behind was moderade troll? That shows how stupid people are.