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Variety Says Class Action May Stop RIAA Suits
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Variety reports that Andersen v. Atlantic, the class action which has been brought against the RIAA in Oregon may 'ultimately force the organization to drop or dramatically change the way it uses its principal weapon in the fight against online piracy"'. The RIAA responded to Variety saying that 'We are confident that (Andersen's) claims have no merit....We look forward to presenting our arguments in the next few weeks to the court about why this case should be dismissed. In all our cases, we seek to follow the facts and be fair and reasonable in resolving pending claims.' p2pnet opines that Hollywood's interest in the suit bodes ill for the RIAA."
The RIAA has a very unusual and skew view of the words "fair", "reasonable" and "facts". Could someone buy them dictionaries with those words highlighted please.
I thought you where going to say "forget the Artist" which the RIAA already did
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
The issue is not that guilty people get sued. The issue is that the way the RIAA gets evidence is immoral and probably illegal (invading people#s computers, entrapment etc.) then of course the fact that many people get sued for copyright breach that never happened. And finally, the fact that they aren't sueing someone who stole one mp3 for $1, they're suing for hundreds of times the value of the mp3. There are more reasons than that, but the fact is we side against the RIAA not because of what it does, but rather how and to some extend why, they do it.
Apparently, you didn't RTFA. If you had, you'd have noticed that this class action lawsuit really doesn't have anything to do with illegal downloading; in fact, as far as anyone can tell, the lady starting the lawsuit apparently had the case against her dropped. Her lawsuit basically alleges that the way in which the RIAA goes after its 'victims' is not legal, in the form of not gathering anything but totally circumstantial evidence before choosing to sue.
Whether or not you approve of file-sharing, I'd imagine it's in your best interest to uphold the concept of innocent until PROVEN guilty. =P
Think about it -- because many of these suits have a high number of defendants based on digitally obtained lists that may or may not be accurate based on the tool used to auto-generate the list. I can just about guarantee that another program took their lists and auto-generated many of the filings. [because I don't see the RIAA hiring masses of para-legal qualified folks to type up their legal filings....]. So at the minimum there is a
- software list "maker" generating a list connected to
- a software file-creator for that fills up the postal or other mail services for
- the purposes of ostensibly extorting legal settlements,
- and yet another set of programs filling up the legal system with cases based on program talking to program talking to program.
Anybody else have a problem with corporate law being conducted like that? To my way of thinking every filing should have to be done without the intervention of a software list generator, wouldn't you think? That way a corporation must risk the cost of the data entry and hand operations to generate their filings, just like the rest of us would. Seems fair enough, doesn't it?...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
No you do not! You demand outrageously overinflated damages and target people with all the accuracy of a drunk stumbling out of a bar. Most importantly, you are extorting money from people who have never used p2p file sharing and violated NONE of your copyrights. You then proceed to rely on scare tactics realizing most of these lawsuits will be settled out of court because the prospect of going toe to toe with a major corporation in the court room is downright terrifying and can financially ruin an individual of far lesser means than you.
You have every right to protect your member organizations' copyrights via the court system. You *do not* have the right to pick people at random, bring financial ruin down on them, and harras them and their families.
I don't have a huge amount of faith in the court systems these days, but you really need to lose. And badly. I'm not talking about $5.00 coupon-for-a-CD settlements. I'd really like to see a judgement so harsh that some of your member organizations are driven to bankruptcy. After all, it's what you've been using the courts to do to people these past few years. Turnabout's fair play.
- If people decide to just stop buying the good, than the market completely collapses. No demand and no buyers means that all of the providers go out of business.
- However, if people decide that they need the good, then a second market will appear, providing lower prices and filling demand. The first market's providers get choked out from the undercuts, and die unless they stop fixing prices.
So, what we have in this case is a second market. It is a black market, a market that is not legally sanctioned. The cost of goods on this market is effectively zero, making it a free good. The RIAA can't possibly undercut or fairly compete with a free good like pirated music, so instead they resort to these lawsuits to try and scare people away from the black market. Does it work? Not really.So, what should the RIAA do? They should stop fixing prices and let the market sort itself out. There are two types of participants in the black market: People who want the good, but don't want to pay for it; and people who would pay for the good if it were a bit less expensive. The former will never leave the black market, but the RIAA could court the latter if they would only stop fixing their goddamn prices.
That's the economics of it, anyway.
~ C.