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RIAA Accepts $300 Offer of Judgement In Carolina
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a North Carolina case, Capitol v. Frye, the RIAA has accepted a $300 offer of judgment made by the defendant. This is the first known use, in the RIAA v. Consumer cases, of the formal offer of judgment procedure which provides that if the plaintiff doesn't accept the offer, and doesn't later get a judgment for a larger amount, the plaintiff is responsible for all of the court costs from that point on in the case. The accepted judgment in the Frye case (PDF) also contains an injunction — much more limited than the RIAA's typical 'settlement' injunction (PDF) — under which defendant agreed not to infringe plaintiffs' copyrights."
Seems like a reasonable resolution for the defendant. $300 to make a lawsuit like this go away could be worth it if you don't really have the financial means to mount a decent defense and there's no way the RIAA had spent less than $300 to that point, so they lost money on the deal. This a very low settlement amount for the RIAA, so it's possible others may be able to utilize this.
It'll be interesting to see if the RIAA accepts it if anyone else tries it.
Providing that's possible, of course...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Your post is redundant if anything.
Now that I've meta-moderated your meta-moderation, I need a nap.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
I'll be sure to ask my lawyer to translate it for me.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
True, but on the other hand it's entirely possible she was guilty, knew she was guilty, and thus saw this as the cheapest way out. Which is not to say that the RIAA could have proved it to the satisfaction of the judge, but rather that the defendant knew she was wrong and owned up to her mistake.
Get thee to Wikipedia!
/d?/ was seen as an incorrect spelling. In the context of the law, however, judgment is preferred."
"The spelling judgment is found in the Authorized Version of the Bible. However, the spelling judgement (with e added) largely replaced judgment in the United Kingdom in a non-legal context, possibly because writing dg without a following e for the
Actually, RIAA won. In simple terms her offer was "Okay I'm willing to plead guilty and pay you $300 inclusive of everything" and RIAA accepted. So the award is made against her. It's different from convincing the RIAA to "drop the matter".
We should note that their are other situations where the "j" pronunciation with "dg" is found, such as the English town of Bridgnorth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgnorth) So there are still places in England where "dg" is the correct spelling. This probably stems from earlier times when spelling in English was less consistent and not as standardized.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I believe it was a hypothesis, not a conclusion, and I'd expect everyone to have figured out that the courts aren't always able to determine truth... Or do you think someone is only guilty or innocent after the findings of a court, regardless of what actually happened in real life? Put another way - if courts are able to reach accurate verdicts 100% of the time, no matter the nature of the case, why is there so much unsolved crime? The Justice System is pretty good, all things considered; but it's not at all like television. You don't always get fingerprints; you can send stuff off to the lab and get a clearcut answer all the time...
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
Nowhere in the entire post did I say either that I didn't think they could prove their claims or that I thought the defendant was guilty. You should re-read the post.
I said that since I don't know the details of the case I have no idea if it was possible for the RIAA to prove their claims, and that the defendant may have been guilty and wanted to end the suit. Neither is unreasonable given the posted article and the case's resolution.
...Because we all known that the Holy Bible is a great source of factual information!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I love the way people keep throwing around this word "guilty". Like this is a criminal case. The longer people apply criminal law terminology like "guilty" and "innocent" and "theft" the easier it will be for the copyright owners to get new criminal laws passed.
Stop playing their game.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Right, but the important thing is that AFAIK it can't be relied on as precedence like it could be if there was an actual judicial decision in the RIAA's favor.
IANAL
Not really. First off, you don't plead guilty in civil cases such as this. Second, courts have held (see, e.g., Scosche v. Visor Gear) that Rule 68 judgments do not have a preclusive effect on litigating issues they dispose of. Therefore, the RIAA probably cannot take the Rule 68-based judgment and use it against this defendant in a future case to avoid actually litigating the issues in the future case. Numerous sources indicate that Rule 68 has the sole purpose of encouraging settlement.
Finally, the real issue that was raised and to which I responded: There is no precedential effect, no matter how you take the Rule 68-based judgment. Legal precedents are only as to issues of law. It seems that no interpretation of law was made here, and any issues that were disposed of by the judgment are factual in nature. There is no such thing as a legally binding factual precedent.
These are civil cases. The terminology should be "liable" and "not liable".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Even if the RIAA took it all the way to trial and won a judgment of $8 billion dollars, it would likely still have next to no precedential effect. It's not like you can go to another court with a different defendant and say "See! We over there against that chick, so, Your Honor, you have to give us money from this guy too!" Thankfully, whatever faults it does have, the American legal system doesn't work quite like that.
Correct, except for the "plead guilty" part. That's only in criminal cases.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
WTF are you talking about? It makes perfect sense.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I dare you to try to recover more than that.
If you don't recover more than that, you're going to be liable for all of the court costs from this day forward.
If you've got the guts, bring it on.
If you don't, pick up the $300 and get out of my life.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Dun, you and I just wrote almost the exact same post, at the exact same time. I hope we don't get modded "redundant".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I notice that the settlement offer explicitly excludes any claims for sanctions that the defendant has already requested. Can you give more information on possible sanctions against the RIAA and/or their lawyers?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I don't doubt that was her thought process... specially, she was probably thinking about it as a matter of guilt, because that's the RIAA wants her to think about it. "I did something wrong" not "I caused significant damages to a music company". The first is easy to plant in people's minds, the second isn't.
Which is why I was saying that you shouldn't help them do that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But there are consequences if the RIAA accepts the offer. There is a judgment against you, which shows up in a credit report, and in view of the judgment you can't claim to be the prevailing party and assert entitlement to attorneys fees.
But for many the Rule 68 offer of judgment will be a useful tool.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Since most written languages in the Western world were standardized by their translation of the Bible, the Bible is a great source for this information.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Note, in cases in which the suit is simply wrong in alleging you've fileshared, an "offer of judgment" is going to SHIFT THE BURDEN TO THE RIAA to make DAMN sure they haven't been careless in their statement of claim. An offer of judgment is apparently going to be POWERFUL in fighting these b*****ds. And if you're a one-file-at-a-time kind of guy, $750.00 is cheap to buy out of this fscked-up RIAA misery.
Congress should rein in the **AAs, but I doubt they are going to. This is a great evil. Corporate America has co-opted our culture and is fighting hard to keep control in perpetuity.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The joke is in the Subject. Nothing more to see. Move along, folks.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
1. Plaintiff accepts. Defendant pays plaintiff $1 and everybody goes home. 2. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is awarded more than $1. This is the same outcome as if the judgment offer was never made at all. Filing pointless motions does two things. First, it pisses off the judge to have to wade through your bullshit. Pissing off the judge is never a good idea because they can and will make your life miserable. Second, it costs money to file anything. Even if the filing itself is free, it costs lawyer time... and by lawyer time costs money out of your pocket. 3. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is not awarded any judgment. Plaintiff has to pay defendant's legal costs. If no damages are awarded, then this rule does not apply. There is a separate mechanism for potentially recouping losses from a civil suit that fails. You can potentially recover lawyer costs (and potentially more in some cases) if someone files a civil suit and you successfully defend yourself, but this is not the mechanism that does it. This mechanism only kicks in if you are found to have committed damage and the amount of damage was less then what you offered.
The point of this mechanism is not punish someone for demanding more money than they are entitled to. The point of this mechanism is to prevent needless litigation. Imagine if your neighbor threw a baseball through your window because he was sick of hearing loud music coming from your house. You take him to court and claim $10,000 worth of damage. Normally, you could be a dick and just carry on suing him because you want to make him pay his legal expenses as extra punishment and see how large of a settlement you can score. You know you are asking for a bullshit amount of money, but lets pretend your a rich jerk and just want to make your neighbor suffer. Your neighbor knows he is going to lose because he did indeed break your window and you can prove that it did damage to you. What he can do is offer to pay up $200 in damages via this mechanism. You can still bring it to court if you want, but if the judge decides that you only did $150 in damages, your neighbor just pays that $150 and then drops a few thousand dollars worth of legal expenses with your lap. So, being wise you grumble and accept the deal because it is a fair amount. By accepting the deal you don't waste the court's time and do your small part to help keep state legal costs down.
The point is just to force people to accept fair settlements before it ends up costing a judge time and the state money to sort out the mess.
the defendant's lawyer should be sanctioned, based on several things he had done that irked the judge.
Irking the judge has defensible standing in law?
If it does, how come that the RIAA's lawyers bringing meritless suits based on an almost total absence of evidence against a sizeable proportion of the young population has not yet irked any judge, and sent their lawyers packing?
Exactly, otherwise companies wanting easy lawsuits in the future could be very dishonest and pay someone to be sued (and lose).
I am NaN
Just a quibble, but since we're all seeming to quibble here..
You wrote: "**AA"s
Wouldn't it be more proper to use "??AA"s
Z
It seems like such a powerful tool that it would be almost automatic to offer a small amount. What happens in cases where it isn't done? Are costs typically shared evenly?
If there's only a single song at issue, then your analysis would be valid. But for most of the defendants in the RIAA suits, the allegation is that they "made available" (had in a shared folder) hundreds or thousands of songs.
Since that's $750 per song, in these cases the bottom line is a hell of a lot more than $300.
The fact that the RIAA accepted this offer is suspicious. It make me believe that they had no real case against the defendant, and knew it (gee, big surprise there). It's a shame that the defendant was unwilling/unable to actually fight it out...
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
I am a landlord, and I always notify applicants if I reject based on their credit report. It's just a form letter that I drop in the mail. No biggie. I recall a university in NC having a position paper stating that credit based hiring may represent a system of discrimination against minorities that is illegal (this is highly likely, but a test case might be hard to find and argue). I do not know about hiring, but it has been tested over and over that relying on credit bureau information is not discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act. People with bad credit are not a protected class.
Good luck!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
In a copyright case, the answer is probably yes, since the Copyright Act includes attorneys fees to the prevailing party as part of the costs.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
One of the dot coms I worked for imploded. During the implosion there was a lot of confusion over who owned what, at the center of all this controversy was a little sun box that contained the source code for the company product.
At the time I was the IT guy for this company. I took my orders from the CEO because the CTO was just psycho. In one of the meetings between me, the CEO and CTO the CTO accused me of being on "Mind Altering drugs" at work because I had a can of get this.. Jolt Cola on my desk (This CTO was a devout mormon)
The CEO fired the CTO, then decided to pack up our office and head north from Sunnyvale to Alameda. Being the IT guy, it was my job to make sure the computers made it up there safely. A few months later the company completely imploded, everyone went off to work for different companies, and that was that or so I thought.
About a year later I got a court summons. The CTO was suing me for $15 million dollars. I was being accused of "Stealing his source code" because apparently the company didn't own that little sun box I moved. After a few initial rounds in pre-trial we were all set to go to trial.
My lawyer and I were sitting out in front of the courtroom when we got a surprise. The judges assistant came up to us and started telling us the CTO was willing to settle for $1500. He explained it like this..
"You know toq, we're really sick of this asshole. Me, the judge, the other lawyers all think he's a cocksucker, but you already know that. Just take the settlement"
Me, "But I didn't do anything wrong"
Assitant, "Well let me put it to you another way. If you don't take this settlement, it's going to mean a trial, which is going to mean jurors, and a whole bunch of menusha I don't want to get into, but it's going to cost ALOT of money. The judge is going to look at the fact that you didn't take this $1500 settlement, and wonder why you costed all these people time and money"
Me: "So the judge just wants this out of his hair, is that what you're saying?"
Assistant: "Yes"
So I took the settlement, nothing went down on my record.
I'm guessing this $300 RIAA case is the same deal. The judge probably got sick of the team of lawyers that represent the RIAA tying up his courtroom with petty bullshit, and i'm guessing the person taking the settlement got the same speech I did.