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RIAA Short on Funds? Fails to Pay Attorney Fees
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Can it be that the RIAA, or the "Big 4" record companies it represents, are short on funds? It turns out that despite the Judge's order, entered a month ago, telling them to pay Debbie Foster $68,685.23 in attorneys fees, in Capitol v. Foster, they have failed to make payment. Ms. Foster has now had to ask the Court to enter Judgment, so that she can commence 'post judgment collection proceedings'. According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment. Perhaps the RIAA should ask their lawyers for a loan?"
I'm sure they are short on funds. That's like 5 cents to me.
So where is all that cash going that they are "winning" in settlements??
Oh, that's right! Straight to the artists' pockets. Sorry for the stupid question. I was wondering how Fiddy Cent's new gold tooth was financed.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
IANAL, but I think this would be a good time for Foster to hit 'em with Contempt of Court... Is that possible?
It removes responsibility. In particular, assume that RIAA declares bankruptcy, or simply decides to say that it is none-existent. The labels will simply spin up RIAAII. What is needed is to require the parent companies to take full responsibility for ALL of their subsidiaries, ownerships.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, this shouldn't surprise us. They haven't lived up to their end of the copyright bargain, either.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Knowing they lost the next best thing they can do is delay the payments in court as long as they can.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Why should they pay when they can ignore it and make her go through the extra steps to actually get the cash? Is there any penalty for failing to pay?
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
they have the money, they just don't want to part with it
*piracy - producing crap loads of crappy music and selling it at over inflated prices
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
I wonder if they've structured themselves that they can simply close whatever small working unit owes the fees.
...refuse to buy from our music industry overlords.
According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment.
If you're trying to collect money owed due to a legal ruling, it'd be prudent for your attorney to pick up the phone, and/or put the request in writing and send it via certified mail.
I hate the RIAA and the assorted *IAA's that seem to want nothing more than to force me to re-buy something I've already bought over and over again, but is an email inquiry really worth anything? There's no real mechanism for guaranteeing delivery of the email, short of a reply from the recipient. If they'd sent a certified letter and heard nothing back, that'd be one thing. But an email seems to be wide open to "we never got it" or "the guy that checks that account was out the last two weeks."
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
If they end up having no money, she's going to be stuck with the bill. We may have to help her out.
"Your Honor, we ask for your understanding and leniency in this case. Rest assured my client and I are suing people as fast as we can. I mean, it's not like money grows on trees. We have to wring it out of grandmothers and college students and people who don't even have PCs and hey, those cheap bastards just aren't coughing it up like they used to. Plus, it's getting harder and harder to trick the public into buying the latest Bubblegum Boys album. So even with a crappy contract that guarantees poverty for the musician via advance fees, bills for studio time and 18th century "breakage" clauses, times are tough for us over at the chrome & glass RIAA skyscraper. We need just a little more time to get some cash together. We've got hungry executives to feed, and those Gulfstream jets don't exactly fly themselves, you know... etc. etc. etc."
Or something like that.
At $750 it won't take many downloads to get your money back!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'll check him out Thanks for the suggestion.
I have been involved in more cases than I would like, and I can't say that I am aware of any situation in which e-mail was regarded as reliable. If my lawyers wanted to make an on-the-record contact with representation for the opposing side, it was usually by courier, and occasionally by snail mail or fax, with back-up confirmation over the phone. I can't imagine the circumstances in which it would be reasonable to regard delivery of e-mail to a recipient's inbox as reliable.
Other than having assets seized by the Sheriff and auctioned off to settle the debt? No, none.
Which occasionally leads to an attorney for a major corporation running to the court house steps as said corporation is about to have its home office auctioned off to cover some paltry judgement. Sometimes the suits forget that the legal process does in fact have an end game, and that their team lost.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Losers
Get some perspective, consider how much record labels make, then look at the amount they owe: $68,685.23. I dunno but that seems like a bit like saying someone is broke when their child asks them for a quarter for the gum-ball machine and they shrug it off. Even if said person was broke you'd think they'd find a way to get a quarter to keep the screaming kid happy :-p
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Despite the courts awarding this person some money, there's nothing that says the RIAA **has** to pay.
Most likely scenario the individual gets nothing. At all. Sure, she can farm it out to a collections agency, but they'll get nothing. This is the classic problem with most court judgments. The Good Guy may get their day in court, but there's no mechanism to compel the Bad Guy to pay.
OT: I was going to use "Therein lies the rub" as the title, but it looks like that is an abuse of the original phrase.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Peggy in AP is on maternity leave!
Here they're spending about $5000 in attorneys fees to try and squeeze $543 out of a 20 year old. I guess
-they really do need the money, and
-they're really bad businessmen.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
That's what the 'post judgment collection proceedings' are all about. The RIAA would be wise to just pay up before things get really expensive for them.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Looking at the actual motion at irweb, It appears that
the judge may have erred slightly in procedure. Apparently
the order and judgement were not put in separate documents
or were not filed as separate documents. I'm not exactly clear
since I am not a lawyer. The motion is to correct the paperwork
by filing a judgment consistent with the court order of July 13, 2007.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
IANAL, but I think this would be a good time for Foster to hit 'em with Contempt of Court... Is that possible?
Kind of. However, you damn well shouldn't be using email:
According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment. Perhaps the RIAA should ask their lawyers for a loan?"
What, a letter via registered mail was too expensive? Gimme a break, guys. This crowd should know, email is easy to lose (on purpose or completely accidentally) or never get in the first place. Registered mail, someone has to SIGN for and accept. Then they have no wiggle-room...the other party is holding on to a piece of paper with your (or your representative's) signature.
Please help metamoderate.
US Marshals collect the money
U.S. Marshals are involved in State judicial affairs? Really?
A quick visit to http://www.usmarshals.gov/ shows *no* method or process by which a Federal agency can collect funds on behalf of a State judicial matter. Maybe you are thinking of asset forfeiture?
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Your proposition leads to a perpetual legal affair generating fees to a point for which there is no "upside" to the original winner of the case. This, of course is the intention on the RIAA's side who have the lawyers on salary for just this purpose.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Maybe the RIAA should release an album - If it was a hit and not downloaded too much they could collet enough royalties enough to pay for their court cases.
Sounds like they're too busy spending money producing good music. And by good I mean horrible.
she can go to their bussiness office with Marshalls and start loading copiers, desks, chairs, phones, basically anything and everything on to trucks and the marshalls will sell them at auction until the debt is made good.
Is there somewhere where we can send donations to help out the poor beleaguered RIAA, who can't afford their legal bills? -PHiZ
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
What they are trying to do, is delaying the legal precedent that comes out of case - once the money is paid it opens the door wide for other cases for come on in.
what? me worry?
They are in total denial of reality.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's the RIAA's stubborn refusal to pay a single cent in exoneration that puts them at the top of the list of most evil organizations ever!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
IANAL, but it appears that dia-RIAA has the option to appeal the judge's order. The defendant needs to get an official judgement in order for the clock to start ticking. Otherwise dia-RIAA can just wait forever.
Regards,
Art
You obviously don't use Hotmail.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Bookmarked!
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Send them directly to me. Make them out to CASH, which is much easier to write than my entire name otherwise. I promise to be as honest in passing along the proceeds to the RIAA as they are in all of their other business dealings.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This has nothing to do with being short on funds. Judging from how behind the times the RIAA is, they probably just haven't figured out how to read email yet.
This isn't really news so much as it is just the result of the apathetic civil justice system in America. Our judicial system here is really only expedient with executing (most) sentences when it is a criminal trial (convict goes to prison immediately usually). When it comes to civil cases, orders and judgments can take forever to be enforced. This isn't news, just a fact of our broken system.
The worst is when an attorney for whichever side will act as an officer of the court and then you're liable never to get your paperwork from them (or judgment). These private attorneys are money-hungry and as a result over-worked and almost never bother to make sure that things get done unless it benefits them directly.
In this case, I'll bet the only reason her lawyer is pushing the judgment is so they can collect the fees for their time. If she were collecting something she'd never see it except for maybe pennies on the dollar from the collection agency.
"and have never had a single instance that I can recall of any email communication going astray."
:)
That's the problem with email. You wouldn't have received the email, so there would be nothing to remember going astray, unless there was some subsequent followup, either inband or out of band.
On a lighter note, rest assured that your check is in the email.
And, as a subsequent poster said, ditto on the thanks for all the work you do. It is refreshing to see the hope you've generated for those who have been the innocent victims of this legal abuse of the system.
I wonder if the "Request delivery receipt" option offered by most mail clients is admissible in court.
They're just treating their lawyers like they do their artists. "We'll pay you when we feel like it."
He who laughs last...probably didn't get the joke.
> no response to their email inquiry about payment
My bet is it's caught in RIAA's spam filter. An email from a bunch of attorneys probably sounds like "payment of $68,685.23 (sixty eight thousand six hundred eighty five U.S. dollars)". It would be even better if they named some trustee in Barbados or something.
Hmmm.....actual lyrics...
Original -- "I shot the sheriff, but I didn't shoot no deputy"
1st try -- "They paid off the Sheriff. (But they did not pay off the Deputy.)"
2nd try -- "They paid the Sheriff, but they did not pay the deputy..."
My try -- "They paid the sheriff, but they didn't pay no deputy"
Best. Actually matches the rhythm and the spirit of the original.
Not if she pushes the matter. I don't even know that they can appeal since the award was for attorney's fees. Regardless there's no way to tell the court to remove the judgement. So, if they fail to pay, then she can (and is) filing to be able to start collections on them. After that it just keeps ratcheting up and yes, it actually CAN come to the point of having their assets seized. When you get down to it, you can't ignore a court judgement. In a civil case you can sometimes only if the person who got the person who won decides to just let it go, but if they push, you'll eventually be made to pay one way or another.
It still ultimately comes down to men with guns willing to use them. We're just not very civilized no matter how much we pretend.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
* Fat Tony voice *
Excuse me Mr. RIAA, I'm a building safety hobbyist. Just out of curiosity, how fireproof is your building?
Here, they are trying to make show that even if you fight and win, you still lose.
Nice theory. I like my theory better.
They have a long history of not paying artists. Nothing has changed.
The truth shall set you free!
To stop referring to RIAA and start using the names of it's members. RIAA is nothing, and when they fade into the shadows it's members who drive it's current tyranny will walk around as if they were pristine.a boutus_members w ho_we_are_board.
It's not RIAA, the real culprits include: 20TH CENTURY FOX
A&M Records
Arista
Capitol
SonyBMG
Universal Music Group
Virgin Records America
and a slew of others you can find at http://www.riaa.org/aboutus.php?content_selector=
Of particular note is their board of directors http://www.riaa.org/aboutus.php?content_selector=
Honestly, are their lawyers telling a judge that Sony, Universal, Virgin and the rest are low on cash?
Pathetic to the n-th degree.
Hope is the currency of fools
But if the parent was actually serious that makes it all the funnier. Before Napster, I'd bought 12 CDs over the course of 3 years. Within a year of using Napster, I'd bought 20. After 4 years of pirating music I'd bought 400 CDs.
I bought more music when I had the chance to decide if I liked the CD first... and I was happier with my purchases.
If it's over GBP 750 she could serve a winding up order. It stops business until they pay up (if I recall correctly) which would be fun.
Given what they have been doing, there should be NO margin for leniency. Nil. Nada. Abusing the law and then not complying is dead out and this should be brought up in ANY subsequent case going to court as it reduces their standing.
you probably want to send it to the company's attourney, registered agent, and the CEO. If they fail to respond, cc your Representative in the House, the SEC, and the IRS with a note that this calls into question their honesty and willingness to obey the law when it comes to finances.
IANAL though. If it were me, I would harrass back by informing the SEC and IRS of their willingness to pay and implying that they are not showing a willingness to obey financial regulats, so their tax and SEC filings should be suspect.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Next time RIAA, the plantiff, should have to post a bond for potential legal fees (typically $xx,xxx) to able to continue to abuse the court system, to protect potential victims.
Ms. Foster's attorneys should raise their rates to be similar to those paid by the music industry.
Food for thought: Seems like it would be pretty easy to seize an intangible like the rights to a song or catalog. All you need then is an auction site.
for record labels.. they never pay their bills.. or pay them as late as possible seemingly in order to piss you off. the worst offenders in my experience have been mushroom australia and warners australia, but its now an industry culture, so singling out these two is a bit unfair.
You can't sue someone else 'til the claims of another case you lost are settled.
I doubt that they can't pay. They just don't want to. They want to make people suffer. They want to make people invest all their life to fight the harrassment, because they dared to stand up against the extortion. The message: You better just pay and go on with your life, because the alternative is to invest more of your time than it's worth.
Create that law. As long as you didn't pay in case A, your case B is stalled. Because, hey, if you can't pay in A, what keeps you from suing everyone and their dog, even if you lose you don't lose. You can't lose more than you have.
Because for me at least it's clear what should be the logical consequence if you lose against the RIAA and are forced to pay more money than you make in your lifetime: Sue every single record company for idiotic reasons. I mean, what can you lose?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is precisely the kind of behaviour to be expected of a big modern corporation. It's not quite accurate to say that they ignore the law completely. It's more that they don't have any of the emotional respect for law that some (I hope, many) of us individual citizens have. Sure, we might cut corners in a few small matters... parking where we technically shouldn't, taking some stationery from the office cupboard, that kind of thing. But we would never dream of defying a court order.
Joel Bakan explains what's going on in his great book The Corporation. Thanks to a framework of laws set up in Britain, the USA and other places in the late 18th and 19th centuries, corporations get treated as people - except that they don't have all the responsibilities of people. You can't imprison a corporation, and if it runs out of other people's money, it can simply declare bankruptcy and leave everyone else holding the bag.
As Bakan explains, while corporations are hard to pin down legally, they are increasingly compelled by law to leave no stone unturned in the search for profits. Not just profits, maximum profits. Not just maximum profits, but maximum profits NOW. That makes them liable to behave, in some important ways, just like human psychopaths. A corporation has no "better nature"; no decency, no innate or learned morality, and very little actual reason to fear the law. To it, "ethics" means a set of showy acts designed to improve its public image.
So it's hard to be surprised when a corporation behaves the way the RIAA has done. It simply compares the upside with the downside, and acts accordingly. Don't expect it to think or act like a decent human being: there's no "there" there.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
If anyone has communication with Foster's lawyers, ask them to post somewhere an image of Capitol's check in payment of attorney's fees (when they finally get it and they will). Maybe it can be the new logo for RIAA v, World topics.
The law is not an ass. No really.
Capitol Records would do the same, along with corporate shell tactics, to put off settling this debt. $cientology has done this all the time.
If the accounting records of major labels were ever audited, it would make Enron look like choir boys.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
And allow me to clarify: I was in no way saying that violence is currently warranted. I was only inquiring if you felt it could *ever* be warranted. The answer, after getting past all the qualifiers, seems to be that, yes, it can be justified in extreme cases even if the result is most likely to be disastrous. So we agree. Cool.
Now, on a more personal level, I feel that the general principle (violence can be justified in extreme circumstances) can be applied to specific cases on a much smaller scale. If someone is about to murder me, I feel no qualms about using deadly force to keep myself alive. So I think it's a terrible overstatement to say that governments should keep a monopoly on violence. There are just too many justifiable exceptions. Obviously, governments, expressing the will of the people, get a monopoly on setting the rules for when violence is allowable. But there are just too many exceptions to justify the notion that only governments should have the power to dispense violence.
How about a compromise? If I am acting in a way a policeman would act (e.g., defending an innocent from attack), perhaps we can simply view that as me acting under the authority of and in the place of a government official? The result is the same - I get to defend myself. And folks like you get to look at it as an action taken under the imprimatur of govt authority.
Of course, that's not the standard we have in the U.S. Here, the standard is "reasonableness." What would a reasonable person do in the same circumstance? In my home state, if someone breaks into my house I will assume they mean me ill will and if they don't run away the instant they hear me load the chamber of my shotgun, no jury in the state would consider it anything but reasonable that I then proceeded to unload the firearm into his chest. (Well, maybe not in Austin...) In other states, the presumption of reasonableness only kicks in when a homeowner runs away. It is, in that view, completely unreasonable to take a life when the simple expedient of walking away is available. So, obviously, there's confusion.
The rules, though, are knowable and fairly reasonable pretty much everywhere. And there's almost no place where the state attitude completely precludes the use of deadly force. (Washington D.C., Chicago, NY maybe, off the top of my head would probably count as exceptions.)
So I'm wondering, do you think this idea that the government should maintain a monopoly on violence is a workable one? Obviously not in the case of justified revolution (we've already covered that), but what about more personal cases? Or, perhaps, do you live someplace other than the U.S. and, therefore, view this entire exchange as seriously nuts?
I mean, really - if they're serious about collection, e-mail's the LAST way I'd go about it. Try registered/certified mail instead.
Then they can't say "oh, we didn't get your message".
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Ignore registered mail.
Sorry, but I don't agree. Lives are ruined in many ways, and living in fear of losing your house and everything else because someone downloaded a few songs through your Internet connection is one of them. Stress kills, and few things are more stressful than a lawsuit from a large, well-funded, company with no morals.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Whoops, brain fart, I meant to say (and was thinking) "receipt required" mail, but wrote "registered" for some reason.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Maybe all that downloading really cut into there record sales and made them loss all that money...I propose a government bail out
The RIAA is like the mafia, however not in the since you would find in a movie like the Godfather, or something. they attempt extortion, and in my opinion the RIAA didn't get slammed hard enough