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Granny Sues RIAA Over Unlicensed Investigator
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "An elderly, non-file-sharing grandmother from East Texas, who had been sued by the RIAA after being displaced by Hurricane Rita, has sought leave to file counterclaims against the RIAA record companies for using unlicensed investigators. In her counterclaims (PDF) Ms. Crain claims that the record companies 'entered into an agreement with a private investigations company to provide investigative services which led to the production of evidence to be used in court against counterclaim plaintiff, including the identification of an IP address on the basis of which counterclaim defendants filed their suit... [They] were at the time of this agreement aware that the aforementioned private investigations company was unlicensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas specifically, and in other states as well... [T]hey agreed between themselves and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign... [T]he private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation... Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.'"
Old People Strike Again: MP3 Granny
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. --Arthur C. Clarke
my grandmother can't even double click...
Good for this lady..
Jimmy
Wrong Pasadena, I know, but... still.
erm... I'm not so sure about that part about their families.
Well, her lawyer knew enough to discover this information and file this anyway...
... this has been a sad joke for such a long time ....
The RIAA seriously needs to reconsider its position on this entire subject
if the RIAA was smart they wouldn't hire those kind of investigators to do their dirty work, they could postpone their inevitable doom for a little longer had they collected actual evidence and left the grannies alone. Now that their stupidity is well understood, people are fighting back and kicking the RIAA's ass on a daily basis. They do us a big favor by doing stupid things that hasten their decline.
What the "F" is it going to take to prove that these people are evil??? Is there no cort in the land that can protect us from these money sucking bastards? All the people in the RIAA should be striped of there money and hung in public.
...when they are working for the good guys. Nice to see that the RIAA is finally being challenged, not on the slashdot message boards amongst the powerless, but in the courts amongst the layers.
>>...they, their families should all be hunted down and killed. Exterminate them all.
Alec Baldwin reads slashdot? Who knew?
It seems like every other day we either find out that the RIAA used some illegal practice or lost a case against a so called music pirate though they keep dishing out lawsuits. The RIAA train has derailed but it doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon.
Well, if it is a case of a broken record, are they going to sue themselves for using the backup copy they made? :)
Jimmy
> Well, if it is a case of a broken record, are they going to sue themselves for using the backup copy they made? :)
Nah - it's handled by the automatic deduction off the royalties for breakage.
I'm happy for the RIAA to get anything and everything that's coming to them, but I don't think it will change their litigation-happy behaviour at all. The problem is that the RIAA is just a faceless body representing the big labels, and until people start bitching about Sony, Universal Music, EMI etc, then what does the RIAA care if people hate them? They're not selling the products, they exist solely as a trade group, and if they take all the flak that rightfully belongs to the labels, they'll still do it.
It's the puppeteers, not the puppet, that needs to be demonized.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
I'd rather have no lawyers than try figure out which are the black hat and white hat laywers.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The RIAA train has derailed but it doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon.
That just means it's going to be one spectacular train wreck.
The RIAA seriously needs to reconsider its position on this entire subject ... this has been a sad joke for such a long time ....
Do we even need it?
Q: How do you know if a southern woman is a virgin?
A: Can she outrun her brothers?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Wow, that makes me ... what's the opposite of dying a little inside?
heh, don't send airhead PIs to mess with a little old lady who got through a level-5 hurricane. they're out of their league.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
RIAA et al have learned a valuable lesson here.
In Texas, old ladies SUE YOU!
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Its the little old lady who got a subpoena
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
She got a mean nasty letter after fleeing hurricane Rita
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
It said "Hey, we caught you downloading our garbage,
so we've hired a bunch of lawyers to sue you to Dodge!"
And everybody's saying theres nobody meaner
Than the mean nasty lawyers from the RIAAaaahhhh
They sue real fast and with no good reason
They're like "Grandmas should be in open season!"
Its the little old lady who got a subpoena...
You can see her on the stand telling the truth now
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
With her four lawyers and her bi-focal glasses now
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
"Them lousy RIAA jerks hired an investigator
who would be better occupied as my personal masturbator!"
You can see her on the stand her kickin' RIAA ass now
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
With her four salivating lawyers and her beehive hair now
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
She's gonna have an RIAA executive as her waiter
cause they cant help being evil vindicators
And everybodys saying theres nobody meaner
Than the little old lady who got a subpoena
She counter sues real fast and packs a punch
They say She's out to eat some asshole's lunch...
Its the little old lady who got a subpoena
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Look, I'm all for the RIAA burning in hell. But I really hate the idea of having to use a "licensed" investigator. The following *is not* to be taken for a RIAA analogy:
Let's say your laptop is stolen. Let's say you had a program that reported IP addresses. Someone buys your laptop from the thief for a stupid low price and hooks it up. It reports their IP. You turn the evidence over to a cop who goes to get your laptop.
1. You were not licensed to be an investigator.
2. The program author was also not licensed.
3. The cop obtained evidence from you.
The person who bought stolen property cannot be charged with a crime. All because you didn't have a "license".
Instead, the law requiring a license should be replaced with a "suspects' bill of rights". Anyone can investigate, but if his/her rights are violated, then the evidence becomes poisoned fruit.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
when they're supplying your side.
But of course they're supplying the other side as well, and making a profit from all conflict.
The US is in the crappy state it's in because of lawyers. The fact that that granny's lawyer happens to be fighting an evil cartel of blood-sucking music industry parasites sounds nice, but it's just business as usual for a profession predicated on causing misery so that they can defend against it.
... and the lawyer stampede has begun.
= andersen_riaa_070622complaint">found a number of grounds on which to countersue. One of those was using an unlicensed private investigator to get the IP number of alleged private-party infringers.
Well, her lawyer knew enough to discover this information and file this anyway...
You'll recall from an earlier article that Tanya Anderson's lawyer (in Oregon) http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDFfull.asp?filename
Texas has a similar requirement for private investigators to be licensed. So THIS granny's attorney is filing a copycat countersuit. This is the second buffalo in the stampede.
I expect we'll shortly see television ads from the law offices of James Sokolove asking whether you have received a settlement request from the RIAA, which is about to be nibbled to death by ducks. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
YOU yourself can do this sort of thing, legally, even in Texas.
What isn't legit is hiring someone without a proper license to do this professionally
on your behalf. The same thing goes for providing security services of any kind (incl.
cybersecurity...)- YOU can do it for yourself, but if you hire someone, you need to hire
someone with a license or operating the umbrella of one to make it legit if something
goes wrong.
Where your analogy falls apart is that you make the assumption that a consultant doing
the work is analogous to your doing the same work. It's not as far as the civil and
criminal laws are concerned. Since the RIAA or the Labels themselves did not have direct
hire employees doing this work, it's not the same thing as what you present- they hired
a an outside professional (or group thereof) that didn't have a Federal
license for the work being done or a Texas state PI's license. This makes it all subject
to litigation like what's now happening to them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Let's say your laptop is stolen. Let's say you had a program that reported IP addresses. Someone buys your laptop from the thief for a stupid low price and hooks it up. It reports their IP. You turn the evidence over to a cop who goes to get your laptop.
In addition to the objections others have pointed out, the situations are not analogous. Stealing your laptop is a criminal offense. Despite their propaganda, unlicensed copying of a RIAA member organization's content is a civil matter AND not theft.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an att.... BWHAHAHA we did away with those. Now let me drag you before a judge who'll probably have you thrown in jail before you understand half of it."
only old people do music file sharing...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Your hypothetical situation says you used the unlicensed investigator to get evidence, then you went to a cop, and the cop cot your laptop back from someone who BOUGHT it.
This is completely irrelevant.
If you want a good example, you use an unlicensed investigator to get evidence, then sue the someone who bought the laptop for 1000x the price of the laptop, not giving a crap about getting it back.
You go granny! We need more lawyers to recognize the potential massive financial benefit of stepping in and represeting the RIAA's targets and swamp them with counter-suits.
...and when were done with that wheel torcher them with speling lesons!!
Yarr!
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Should the parent be +5 funny, or -1 stupid (and offtopic) stereotype . . . .
I was actually thinking the same thing! Sometimes it's just too painful for words to express.
We own that song. You are an Evil Content Pirate(TM). Please pay us <PINKY-TO-MOUTH>ONE MILLION DOLLARS!</PINKY-TO-MOUTH>
Signed,
The RIAA
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Oops, WinMX is down.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Amen!!!!! Imagine one week if Sony sold absolutely nothing across the whole US. Ouch! They'd freak out, and Howard Stringer's head would be served to shareholders on a platter. Hey, you don't even need to boycott them all. Pick them off one by one. Causes division in the ranks: While one suffers the others shrug.
In the past consumer boycotts have rarely if ever worked, because most consumers either don't know or don't care, or think what's the use. So form a message and target it. Spread it on Myspace and Youtube: The sort of people where those that buy SONY guy congregate. Reach out. Let them know why to hate the RIAA, no, call them by their real names Sony, Universal Music, EMI etc. Better yet, list the artists since most kids won't know which artist _belongs_ to which record company. Sure some won't go along with it, but so long as SONY see dropping sales, the message will get across.
To the SONY web watcher reading this: eat me
To paraphrase a phrase I once heard, I'd say about you:
He mined the power of Slashdot.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Do ppl really want free music enough to sue record companies? hmmmmm. I wonder....
the problem is corporate interests buying never-ending copyright and increasingly stricter punishments for doing anything that might possibly be used to violate said purchased perpetual copyright. The question becomes, what the bejesus can those of us who care (the nerdy minority) do?
This is not the problem. The problem is the American voter continuously re-elect the fools who do these things. The answer can be found in the technical roots that helped halt the amnesty bill.
I have not bought a new label CD for at least 5 years now.
+4 funny stupid offtopic stereotype.
against the members of RIAA? Are the members of RIAA shielded from any responsibility for actions the organization takes, presumably in their interests? Do the members have a sufficient quantum of control over RIAA (either explicit in the membership agreement, or de facto) that they could be sued for its activities? Sort of analogous to "piercing the corporate veil" and going after a corporation's owners, which can be done in limited circumstances? As long as the RIAA members can live comfortably above the fray, absolutely nothing will change. If they can be reached, even just to be served and brought to court, with some non-zero probability of losing a large judgment against them, it would help put the brakes on this out of control train.
Now that their stupidity is well understood, people are fighting back and kicking the RIAA's ass on a daily basis. They do us a big favor by doing stupid things that hasten their decline.
If this were a ball game, I still don't like the score. The number of cases in court verses the number who have rolled over and paid the settlement letter is huge.
The game isn't over yet. Between the boycott on CD's, the bad PR, and the defense getting into shape and warmed up getting stronger, the last quarter of the game will be worth front row seats. It's going to be exciting to watch the goliath fall as David shows others how to win. Not everyone turned and ran when Goliath challanged the little people.
The truth shall set you free!
Grannies From Texas. I know, I'm married to one.
> [T]he private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation... Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.
Just so. Also, as noted in the p2p article their actions "amount to extortion". If someone says "If you do/do not do X, then I will/will not do Y", that's extortion. When it's done across state lines, it's a federal offense, and none of the plaintiffs are Texas corporations.
I'm looking forward to the day someone manages to get charges filed rather than just filing suit, and someone from the MafIAA gets arrested. My money's on a state's attorney general doing it, and Texas is a very likely place for that to happen. In any case, KICK ASS, GRANNY!
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The Mafiaa tag becomes all the more appropriate with each countersuit. I hope Texas Attorney General can be persuaded to file these charges on the RIAA, their members and their hired "investigators". This can only help bring about real RICO charges ( by the government ) and strengthen the chance of success of RICO charges in countersuits. IANAL and not sure how directly Ray can respond to this within Bar restrictions. Opinions?
Quote from an actual Texas lawyer, as best as I can remember his statement: "Lots of police officers think they know the law; they don't know the law, defense attorneys don't know the law, the prosecuting attorneys don't know the law, the judge don't even know the law, that is why we argue about it in court so much."
i thnk u shuld b moded up mor u r smart!1!
The underlying problem is that some people are anti-social jerks who have discovered that they can get their way by bullying others.
You're certainly right. However, without lawyers those jerks would just be jerks, and they'd be doing jerky and probably illegal things, and very rapidly brought into line.
In contrast, with lawyers in the world, those jerks are being given a respectable face while still doing their jerky crap, and they're just barely kept within the law through the lawyer's legal advice. This is no benefit to society at all. Without lawyers, we'd be rid of those jerks pretty quickly, because being jerks, they wouldn't know where to draw the line and they'd cross it to their doom.
The whole problem stems from lawyers being mercenaries, perfectly happy to take anyone's money, including a jerk's. And the word "mercenary" is the right term, because they are making a point of not applying their own moral or ethical judgements and hence accepting money for extremely dubious propositions. And, like an arms dealer, they play both sides of course, and mud never sticks to a lawyer who represents an evil side. The fact that they made an ethical judgement to accept the commission and defend jerks doesn't seem to worry them in the slightest, and they don't feel tainted despite the hardship which their representation of jerks delivers to the other side.
So yes, lawyers are largely to blame for all of this. Jerks will always be jerks, that's unavoidable, but a lawyer ought to be a respected professional who stays well clear of giving jerks a respectable platform from which to launch their crap.
is that they make the powerful more powerful.
A pithy little one-liner I came up with once that seems to fit the real problem with lawyers.
You forgot to account for the 2 x 9 months of the pregnancies. Which could still make her under 30...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
In XP, it's under the file/directory window's Tools->Folder-Options... dialog, on the General tab. Select "Single click to open an item (point to select)".
IIRC, this was called "Web View" when first introduced; it was supposed to make the computer interface more consistent with that of a web browser. I'm not sure that many people use it... except me.
For some reason, I tried it out when I was learning 95, and kept it that way. This didn't strike me as being strange until right now, when I consciously thought about it. Although I like web-view in some ways, it's also a nuisance when you're trying to select multiple files, particularly from thumbnails- incorrectly hovering can lead to files being deselected (and so on). Not sure why I didn't change back- habit, I guess.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Alas, you make the very common mistake of believing it is illegal to be evil, whereas RIAA is hellbent on being the evilest lawful evil company ever!
www.aleo.no
That the elderly may be somewhat naive to technology and modern music, but they tend to realise what rights they have moreso than younger generations, especially those who have been through a lot.
Dont mess with old people. They aren't afraid to fight back.
God I hope this shuts them up.. At least for a while.
I was under the understanding that there was one. Heh... I'm not perfect and I don't know it all- nobody really does, save whatever you call God.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
She has not won anything. This lady is from East Texas. Most patent leeches do everyting they can to file in East Texas because it is almost certain that the judge will rule in their favor. I have no doubt that the case is already biased against her, and if she loses the RIAA will use it as precident for other cases
The first time I had to go to court in Texas, was when I was in a minor car accident. I got a bill from the other person for $4093.27 in damage to the vehicle. When I showed them the police report that said their was no vehicle damage, I got a bill for $4093.27 for medical bills for a named individual, when I showed them that the named person was not listed on the accident report I got a bill for $4093.27 to cover the medical bill of the driver.
When I went to court I showed the judge the 3 bills, the accident report, and said that I thought the charges were bogus. The judge told the plantiffs attorney that he didn't know the law in this situation, and asked her what he should do. The attorney for the plantiff said that I wasn't allowed to question the bill, that I couldn't review the actual medical bill because it was private information. So he had no choice but to rule in their favor.
My first mistake was thinking that I didn't need a defense lawyer for something that was so obvious. My second mistake was assuming that a Texas judge knew what a clue was, yet alone find it. The judge pulled my drivers license for 2 years for not paying the bill before it got to court. I had no prior record before this. Because the "only" reason that someone loses their license in Texas is a DWI, they filed the suspension on the same paperwork as a DWI. I had to get a notorized letter from the court explaining that I did not have a DWI on my record in order to look for a job for the next 10 years. They would all run background checks and pass me over. I had one headhunter tell me that he couldn't take me because of the DWI conviction or I would have never known why I wasn't getting hired.
The person before me had 4 prior DWIs and was there for his 5th, he got deferred adjudication with 2 months probation, and got to keep his license.
Texas justice is not going to save us from the RIAA. If this was any other place, we might have had a chance.
You know, if there were standardized laws, punishments and a fedarally approved 'police task force' charged with upholding those civil laws, the RIAA and MPAA would be in a lot less trouble.
But standardizing single-use 'civil theft' to something in the range of a traffic ticket would destroy their cash-cow and the fact that people are stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the industry.
Right now the 'fines' are so ludicrous that it isn't funny. It needs to be a fine that people *can* pay that gets money to the IP holders. All it is now is a way to totally destroy someone fiscally with punitive reparations.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
This woman and her lawyer are heros. Go get em. Open it up for class action, put their name in lights in the media, and this will go away sooner or later.
On an aside, the RIAA conglomerate is complaining about dwindling profits. Could it be their legal costs that are growing out of control? If not, they must have some money to continue this bs. They aren't businesses so much as they are a cartel.
We know that corporate executives can be brought under criminal charges given the Enron fiasco. Senior executives at Enron were not indemnified by the corporate umbrella for making decisions that broke the law. Why are we seeing repeated civil and Federal Wiretap offenses based on their decisions and actions not being under criminal prosecution?
I'm not a business law expert. Perhaps someone could shed some light on this for me.
Thanks
People seem to think that no longer buying RIAA member products will solve these issues, but...
Not buying their product(s) just gives them more fuel to feed the fire they started. They keep using declining record sales (that they claim is due to piracy) to justify these suits, and even worse, to justify lobbying Congress to change laws to allow them even more power and do things (investigative and otherwise) that currently are illegal - including the right to install SpyWare on people's machines to track and ensure they are only playing licensed music (which since they dont follow us to the stores, is not possible - it only allows them the ability to spy on the public and amass a lot of private information). It's called the CanSpy Act, and is one of numerous efforts underway all under the guise of stopping the (in their mind) major cause of their declining CD sales (which they claim - and maybe even believe - is music piracy).
Rob
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Or anyone of you, anti-spam fighters — do you have a license to investigate, what ISP the spammer's IP-address belonged to?
No? Well, your investigations will not hold in court then... And performing these investigations is unlawful in itself — if this granny's "good lawyers" have their way. You'll need a license to use whois...
Be careful, what you wish for...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A much better statement to evaluate is:
"MY right to walk the streets unmolested by the police outweighs MY right not to get blown up."
You don't choose between walking the streets unmolested and other people getting blown up. You choose between walking the streets unmolested and YOU getting blown up. And when that is the choice, it's pretty clear that neither NO molestation by the police (and strong risk of getting blown up) nor NO risk of getting blown up (but absolute safety from the police) is the correct way to go. Some risk of being molested by the police and some risk of being blown up is the correct answer, but each individual's preference for police molesting vs. risk of turning into tiny bits is going to be different. Some people will prefer a greater risk of explosion, and some people will prefer more hassle from law enforcement.
paintball
In principle, I agree with you. Unfortunately, in the particular case of the RIAA, appearing to be legal is merely camouflage. They break laws when convenient, if it looks like they won't get caught. If they're caught, they engage in a spirited fight to throw the blame onto someone else.
I'm not sure that the MPAA is quite as bad here. They haven't been caught anywhere near as often, so they may, possibly, adhere closer to the letter of the law. Possibly.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
theyre more or less getting what they want man... and we arent.. sadly we are the broken record
With enough patience, this too is a good thing.
God bless Vista. God bless DRM. And God bless the RIAA.
Eventually (and we're getting close) these fine folks are going to push the public past the tipping point. They'll lose their majority hold on what do and do not do with our files, OS'es, music, etc. They will lose their power by using it too flagrantly, too desparately.
I welcome it.
Picture the hypothetical case of my wife, the Free-with-a-capital-F non-believer. She just didn't get it. Imagine I were not in the picture and she had to deal with more of this DRM crap. It could go a lot of ways, I know, but I see a clear path like this:
1) She moves from XP to Vista (already happened)
2) New WMP means new DRM and all the songs she's purchased need new licenses. This is a major pain and involves calling an 800 number, holding, explaining the situation, waiting, and testing each and every song in the extensive collection in the next 24 hours. (already happened)
3) Vista sucks. Performance is worse, things crash, blue screens from the web cam, etc. She wants to go back to XP, where she "didn't have to worry about this crap". (present day)
4) No downgrade rights to XP, because she's not a business. She's on Home Premium. So here goes $150 for a copy of XP from a (hopefully legit) source.
4) Back on XP, all that DRM'ed content refuses to play. That same company on the other end of the 800 number won't reissue the licenses. There's no support for a downgrade from Vista to XP, but they're "really sorry".
5) She's the inquisitive sort, so she looks into getting around all this DRM garbage. The music HAS to be there, right?
6) This research leads her to the Free-with-a-capital-F idea, and because it's impacted her life AND her wallet, she now gets it. Choice is a lot more important to her now.
7) Ubuntu ensues. Lesson learned, she rides off into the sunset...
Now, I'm not saying that's the only way it would go. There's the chance of a Vista super-patch, interference from someone like Geek Squad, and a host of other things. All I'm saying is that it COULD happen this way.
And this example is today. Your tomorrow suggests a situation that would impact A LOT more people's lives that poorly-implemented DRM. A mandated spyware package would almost certainly be more visible, more resource intensive, and more just plain irritating than the current spyware we see today. And, to go back to the wifey, spyware is what drove her from IE to Firefox. I has suggested it several times, but until it actually got to the point where there as a NEED to switch (a point to the effort, since to her OSS simply isn't 'cool') she didn't go.
Bring it on, morons!