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RIAA Complaint Dismissed as "Boilerplate"
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The decision many lawyers had been expecting — that the RIAA's 'boilerplate' complaint fails to state a claim for relief under the Copyright Act — has indeed come down, but from an unlikely source. While the legal community has been looking towards a Manhattan case (Elektra v. Barker) for guidance, the decision instead came from Senior District Court Judge Rudi M. Brewster of the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The decision handed down denied a default judgment (i.e. the defendant had not even appeared in the action). Judge Brewster not only denied the default judgment motion but dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim. Echoing the words of Judge Karas at the oral argument in Barker , Judge Brewster held (pdf) that 'Plaintiff here must present at least some facts to show the plausibility of their allegations of copyright infringement against the Defendant. However, other than the bare conclusory statement that on "information and belief" Defendant has downloaded, distributed and/or made available for distribution to the public copyrighted works, Plaintiffs have presented no facts that would indicate that this allegation is anything more than speculation.'"
you can't change reality with a lawsuit
reality: your business model is history
think up a new business model, and stop trying to prop up the dead one with the court system
a new business model means less money? too bad. the golden age is over. fucking deal with it and stop sending your barking dogs to terrorize little people in your rage and frustration and denial
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What is the deal with this RIAA/MPAA situation? Are these organizations run by total morons? I'm not trolling, but it seems like they aren't putting one iota of serious effort into this. Are they so cynical, moneyed, and jaded, that they think nothing of suing mothers and teenagers apparently just for the hell of it? How can they do such a lousy effort this yet be one of the largest sectors of industry?
The longer I live, the more I am in a state of sheer awe that society doesn't come apart like Britney Spears fan on youtube.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"Plaintiffs have presented no facts." This is exactly right, and can likely be far more broadly applied than just this case. I think the best argument most folks have is that it is very hard to tie an IP address to a specific user. And they think that just because they provide a screenshot with a list of songs on it that that is damning evidence. Hooray for this judge who has seen through the rhetoric.
Screenshot? could be photoshopped.
Text Log? could be edited.
If instead of that, you have a text log, verified by the ISP and with a signed statement asserting that this text log effectively shows that the given binary conversation took place at the given time, and that the receiving end has a given MAC address, and if that MAC address can be certainly confirmed as belonging to the accused, now THAT's a completely different story.
By frightening people, they are successfully slowing down the business model change which is a consequence of the IT revolution (or Industrial Revolution III).
My guess is that they know it is dying - they just want a little bit more money before discarding the RIAA as "the evil force that forced us to force the old model - but we have a new one now, and we became good and nice).
The laws governing copyright infringement need to be updated. The laws on the books today (or at least their ideologies) were written in a pre-internet era. Back then, pirating large amounts of media in the fashion that we easily can today WAS a serious crime because it actually took a criminal to do it. using the laws of then to govern today is like using an early 20th century speed limit to fine somebody driving a ferrari, or other ultra-high-performance race car.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Many people object ... some argue that
Sounds like - what do they call it a wikipedia - oh yes, weasel words.
Oh, I had to check. You copied that verbatim from your fountain of wisdom.
They call themselves the RIAA, but really, they represent companies like Sony, UMG, Time-Warner, etc... The RIAA moniker is used to keep their activities from reflecting poorly on the sponsoring companies.
You know what's interesting? When I was younger, I had heard things about pop music being evil, then rock music being evil, and certainly, gangsta rap was evil. I just kind of dismissed them, thinking, how could listening to music be evil?
Turns out, I was asking the wrong question. The problem wasn't in listening to the music, so much as it was that my paying for music was funding evil things, directly and indirectly. Sure, rappers talking about killing cops isn't a good thing, but it wasn't as nearly as bad as what music purchasers were doing by feeding the record companies:
I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. In fact, I'm probably one of those lost sales the RIAA blames on piracy. The thought that someone might not buy their music because they object to their lack of morality and common decency doesn't even occur to them. They think everyone else is just like them - greedy, money grubbers who can't stand the notion of actually paying for music. (After all, the RIAA member companies do their best to avoid paying the musicians).
You don't need to explain why you don't patronize the RIAA member companies like Sony, etc... Instead, ask the question, "What good has the RIAA done for music, musicians, and society in general?"
The silence will be deafening.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The penalties are not fair and way excessive. The Mpaa has records of all P2p filesharing transactions throught 3rd parties who monitor. Penalties should be spread around to everyone and no a few. $10-20 fine would be good.
You're making me laugh. The fines were originally created to penalize organized crime groups creating bootleg video/audio casettes bring them enormous profits from the copying of a single product.
Fining them $10-$20 for distributing 30 thousand copies of Die Hard 4 would be hysterical.
The law needs to be refined. Exempts must be made, the copyright offense should be considered in the context given.
But even in the case about some kido downloading illegal MP3, $10-$20 is a joke. This is not product cost he's paying, it's a penalty. If you don't buy a ticket when you drive the train, if you're caught they don't just charge you few dollars more than the ticket price. They penalize you for working around the system and not paying in the first place.
I would consider $200-$300 per copyrighted material to be closer to how I see it. And with a ceiling if the offense is subject to one of the exempts (so having too much content at once doesn't make you a slave to RIAA until you die).
Face it: downloading music/movies is in fact not moral or just. It's just a side effect of the industry being too stupid and slow to react to the Internet and adapt its business models to it.
Still, it's not moral or just. We just shouldn't let the industry sue people with loose evidence and enslave them for *maybe* copying some movies on their computers.
The evidence must be goddamn solid.
Falken: I never could get Joshua to learn the most important lesson.
Lightman: What's that?
Falken: Futility. That there's a time when you should just give up.
Circumcision is child abuse.
"downloading music/movies is in fact not moral or just. It's just a side effect of the industry being too stupid and slow to react to the Internet and adapt its business models to it."
Neither is the way the musician is screwed by record companies.
I'm not saying two wrongs make a right. But it's hard to appeal to people's morality when you have none yourself.
It's like Brittany Spears saying girls shouldn't screw around and have babies until they're adults. You would laugh. Kids would laugh. She would be right. But she has no moral standing to make the recommendation.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This situation, more than any so far, blatantly exposes the true motives of the RIAA. They never intended for any of these cases to actually go to trial. The whole effort is a shakedown, a scare tactic to quickly extort some cash through intimidation and fear and hopefully provide a deterrent to others not to infringe. If they wanted to, they could build more solid cases with more convincing evidence, but that would take far more time, effort, and expense than they are willing to put into it. Believe it or not, their legal eagles are probably involved in far weightier and more important matters than suing a handful of file sharers. To build a case that will hold up in court for each and every one of these people would be extremely cost-ineffective.
To me, this is very much like credit card companies or other creditors who threaten to sue for collection of very small debts. They don't want to actually go to court to get that couple of thousand bucks you owe -- they know that the expenses of doing so would far outweigh the debt. (And getting a judgement is one thing -- actually collecting the money is another.) They merely hope that having a deputy show up at your front door with some scary looking legal papers in hand will be intimidating enough to motivate you to somehow scrape up some dough to settle the case.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
...or because there's only so many provider of a certain good or service)... Not trying to be a troll, just wanted to let you know that, since you mentioned monopoly, this particular concept is called an oligopoly.My penguin ate my sig