Boston Judge Denies RIAA Motion for Judgment

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a Boston case, Capitol v. Alaujan, the defendant is representing herself, without a lawyer. Nevertheless, the Judge denied the RIAA's motion for summary judgment, which the RIAA had based upon the defendant's alleged failure to respond to the RIAA's Request for Admissions. The Court's decision (pdf) held that the RIAA had served its requests for admission prematurely, prior to the conduct of any discovery conference. The Court also noted that the RIAA had upped the ante quite a bit, trying to get a judgment based on 41 song files, even though it had originally been asking for judgment based on 9 song files. This would have increased the size of the judgment from about $7,000 to about $31,000. The Judge scheduled a discovery conference for October 23rd, at 2:30 P.M. and ordered everybody to attend. Such conferences are open to the public."

Comments

Re:Judges should ENFORCE the law, not MAKE it.

[E 99]

And another swing and miss. Juries, not judges, decide if defendants are guilty, and that is again criminal law, not civil law.

Re:Judges should ENFORCE the law, not MAKE it.

[ari_j]

There were other swings and misses in both that comment and elsewhere in this thread. I haven't read any other comment threads attached to this story but I rest assured they are mostly as bad.

What law are judges presiding over the RIAA cases supposedly making? What precedents are they ignoring or going against? Can anyone articulate these things or are we just jumping on a "judicial activism is bad and every judge is a judicial activist" bandwagon lately?

As to summary judgment and interpreting the laws - these are orthogonal concepts. Summary judgment is simply the judge deciding that the case must come down a certain way according to the law, because there is no material fact in good-faith dispute. A material fact is one that actually matters to the case. For instance, if I have to prove that you sold me a car in order to win, it is immaterial whether the car was made in Japan.

The idea that judges "interpret" the laws is mostly a creature of high school civics classes. Judges apply the laws to disputes between parties. The judge may do some interpreting in the process, but that is neither the judge's whole job or is it solely the judge's job.

The criminal vs. civil issue will be dealt with in 30 other comments to this story. I'm not overly concerned about covering it here, as a result.

The judge vs. jury divide is worth discussing. Juries decide issues of fact. That's their only real job. When a judge denies a motion for summary judgment, he is essentially saying that there is enough of a factual dispute to send the case to a jury. It won't go to a jury immediately, of course, but it hasn't lost that possibility in the future. That's what happened here.

Re:When did NewYorkCountryLawer buy Slashdot?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Obviously then it is "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to them. Not going to go into details here or look up links to use, just suffice it to say that the RIAA's efforts in both courts and trying to get laws past to fight "music piracy" has a much greater far reaching effect on the internet and technology people then just whether or not the RIAA gets to grab money from "pirates" or not. Furthermore Ray and other lawyers have gained advice and assistance from these articles as well as Ray's legal blog, so in many ways each victory over the RIAA is a victory for many Slashdotters as they have chosen sides on this as well as participated in helping to achieve a portion of those victories as Ray has acknowledged here in the past. ATM, Ray and Slashdot together are about as close to a Groklaw for the RIAA fight as there is. Thanks.

Point II of the Warner v. Cassin reply brief (at pages 9-10) briefly discusses the impact the RIAA's theories could have on the internet if they were to be accepted by the courts.