Slashdot Mirror
New Attorneys Fee Decision Against RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has gotten slammed again, this time in Oregon, as the Magistrate Judge in Atlantic v. Andersen has ruled that Tanya Andersen's motion for attorneys fees should be granted. The Magistrate, in his 15-page decision, noted that, despite extensive pretrial discovery proceedings, 'when plaintiffs dismissed their claims in June 2007, they apparently had no more material evidence to support their claims than they did when they first contacted defendant in February 2005.....' and concluded that 'Copyright holders generally, and these plaintiffs specifically, should be deterred from prosecuting infringement claims as plaintiffs did in this case.' This is the same case in which (a) the RIAA insisted on interrogating Ms. Andersen's 10-year-old girl at a face-to-face deposition, (b) the defendant filed RICO counterclaims against the record companies, and (c) the defendant recently converted her RICO case into a class action"
It seems like 9/10 of rulings in America are based on the ideal of precedent; it's worked a certain way in the past, so we see no reason to go against the grain.
There are a lot of precedents being set against the RIAA lately, and it leads me to believe that maybe... just maybe... there's light at the end of this tunnel.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
when plaintiffs dismissed their claims in June 2007, they apparently had no more material evidence to support their claims than they did when they first contacted defendant in February 2005
You'd think it would take them a lot less than two years to fabricate the proper evidence. Maybe their "research" team is running a backlog of cases and this one fell through the cracks.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Most everyone already knew that settling for a few thousand is worth it, versus the incalcuable time and money and headaches of fighting the RIAA extortion racket. So while I'm glad a single judge was able to figure it out eventually, will this case really have any significant impact upon future threats from the RIAA? Without some explicit legislation (a law) that protects citizens fair-use rights, paired with reasonable copyright protections, I just can't imagine any court procedings fixing our societal dilemma.
This is not legal advice.
.. they are built upon historical cases. Every case they lose, they update the contract to make sure they do not end up in that position again. All this does is give more ammo to the RIAA / MPAA, they GAIN EXPERIENCE (so do we but they have people focusing on this 24/7).
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Although I shouldn't respond to you - I will. This is nothing about Americans not paying their way. This is about cases being brought to court with inadequate evidence, or simply no significant evidence at all, in a hope that the case will either be settled by the defendants simply to avoid the expense of the case - but not as an admission of their guilt - or as a way of frightening others. If they had adequate evidence then the case should be in court, but they haven't. And recently we have learnt that MediaDefender, the company that collects evidence on behalf of many of these cases, are not beyond fabricating evidence or using very dubious tactics indeed in order to frame individuals.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
If they learned something, they wouldn't push DRM so viciously.
Got that right. It's the number 2 reason I haven't bought any music online. Value is number 1. Too much money for too little quality, content and usability. DRM/Copy protected CD tracks are incompatible with my car stereo, living room DVD player, portable DVD/MP3 player and Winamp, PowerPoint, Lights-O-Rama, DigitalPhotoFrame,.... I buy DVD's instead. CSS is broken enough DVD's can be put on both the kids Zen and iPod without buying the media twice, once in each format.
The truth shall set you free!
Also, if you stare at "attorney" too long, the word just looks funny.
That's because it is funny. It's a 15th century misspelling of a french word, what do you expect it to look like?
Copyright is a fairly recent notion, as it popped up only four hundred years ago or so, and in a small part of the world. Long before that--and today in places were copyright is not respected--culture and content continue to abound.
Think about all the great poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome. They didn't get a dime when copies were made of their work by amanuenses and sold in the marketplace, but they didn't complain. Indeed, the only time someone had issue with copying, the Roman poet Martial in his Epigrams , it was because another fellow was putting his name on those copies. And even then, Martial didn't demand legal penalties; he just lampooned the guy.
In Hong Kong, the film and music industries continue to flourish even though very few pay for content, as creators there have discovered other viable economic models. In the European Union especially, many forms of art couldn't generate a profit even if all copies were sold, but government subsidies ensure culture remains vibrant.
I think the GP's point was "what is to stop the RIAA continuing to sent out nastygrams demanding money or we'll sue?"
Unless the recipient seeks independent legal advice from someone who's actually aware of these cases before settling, the short answer is "Not a lot".
Because they can. Seriously.
See, the value of it is very very low. The asking price is considerably more than that. Therefore, most people wouldn't seriously consider buying it at the asking price, and will simply go without, or wait until it comes onto TV and then record it, or buy it second hand, or whatever.
Digital content provides another option, and one which is quite convenient for many people at that. It's so convenient that many people pay for fast internet connections specifically so they can download things; and many of these people also wear part of the cost of allowing other people to access the content too! Which just goes to show, the content does have some value, it's just much less than the content producers want to charge for it. Also, since the content producers aren't making it available in a convenient and affordable manner, the money is going to those who do: ISP's.
Previously, Big Media have been able to charge whatever they wanted, because it was impractical for anybody else to distribute it. Now, it's cheap and easy to distribute high-quality copies of the content to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Eventually, the content producers will have to accept that they can only charge what the market is willing to pay, but for now they're just throwing a tantrum and calling everyone who doesn't value their content as highly as they do "thieves".
If it can be shown that any significant number of the RIAA's settlements were only settled to avoid lawyer's fees greater then the settlement combined with the RIAA backing down when actually opposed, would it be possible for the court's to order all such activity by the RIAA be stopped, all money collected by them through such activity be refunded with additions to cover costs and interests? The RICO counterclaims are appropriate cause the RIAA's lawyers and their so called experts are doing little more then running protection rackets for the record companies. Considering all that the recording studios pull on artists, the artists really should join in on the RICO claims.
Standard IANAL disclaimer.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
It's not just that its too expensive. They are so used to the old system that in many cases I can't even buy what I want.
I'm the sort of person who buys what he likes.. I prefer to give money to people who provide me with entertainment. My usual MO is to download what I want and if I like it I will look for it on CD or DVD and purchase it. I have a strange collection of movies and many of them were downloaded before I bought them. I make good money and I'm more than willing to share some of it with people who make my life more enjoyable.
When it comes to TV shows I find I can't even buy what I want. It's just not available. My choices are to either download it or sit during the time they put it on the TV and watch it and there is my problem. My evenings are MINE to decide what to do with. I'm not going to give up hanging out with friends just so I can sit and watch TV. I'm not going to give up making extra money to sit and watch TV. I'm not going to give up weekly church events to sit and watch TV.
So I download and hope whoever ripped what I want didn't do too bad a job of it. But you know what? My time is expensive. I would happily pay someone to make sure that whatever I got was good quality. But they simply don't provide that service.
How did things get so completely backwards? What happened to customer convenience? The whole point of capitalism is to provide a SERVICE. When the customer wants a service the customer pays for it and gets what (s)he pays for. Give me what I want(entertainment) and I'll give you what you want(money). Instead we have an organization that expects me to make changes for them and do business at their convenience. And then they have the nerve to feel entitled to this arrangement.
They need to get over themselves and start providing a service again. Until they do that: I'm stuck downloading.
(Even better would be to force the RIAA to pay the defendant what they were attempting to collect in the first place - do that only once or twice and all of these cases go away.)
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Well then here you go my friend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgP-23AQROo
It's not theft, because you're not depriving the producer of anything. In your gadget example, those gadgets a) cost money to produce and b) selling them is the only way for the company to recoup its costs.
My downloading a copy of a film or whatever doesn't prevent the producer from being able to sell it to other people. The other big difference is that the outcome, for the producer, is the same whether I choose the legal option (don't buy the content, and therefore never see it) or the illegal option (to download it): they get nothing from me, but I also don't cost them anything.
It's for this reason that it appears "neutral": I'm not directly harming them by downloading something I would've otherwise chosen to ignore.
This of course, depends on the idea that you only download things you truly wouldn't buy if you couldn't download them. This isn't always the case, and I guess this is where an individual's sense of ethics comes into it, and why distributing copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission is against the law. On the other hand, quite a few people do buy things they've already acquired by downloading them (myself included), and in many cases had they not being able to try it out "for free" they wouldn't have bought it. There's also the potential for increased word-of-mouth advertising: downloaders telling their friends, who go out and buy the DVD because they actually find it more convenient than downloading, or more people watching it on TV resulting in more advertising revenue. And, since downloading and sharing is an "underground" activity (due to it being illegal), it's nigh impossible to track with any kind of accuracy the nett effect of downloading. So, those in favour of it say it actually helps them sell more stuff, and those opposed say it decreases sales. Both sides are just making stuff up, because nobody actually knows.
Back to your gadget analogy, it would be more accurate to imagine that someone finds a way to duplicate the gadget for a tiny fraction of the RRP. So, he buys one from the store at full price (maybe splitting the costs between a few friends), then he uses his gadget duplicator technology to make limitless additional copies and sells them for a pittance to cover his costs. The manufacturer of the gadget, rather than embrace this new copying technology, continues to make their gadgets the old fashioned way and sell them at the same price. Conscientious consumers naturally choose the cheaper option.
Even worse, the manufacturer may in fact embrace the copying technology in order to lower their costs, but sells their now much cheaper to produce gadgets at the same price as before. Or, they sell them a bit cheaper but with built-in self-destruction devices so you end up needing to buy it several times over if you want to keep using it (that's my analogy for certain DRM schemes).
Now, the manufacturer does still need to defray the R&D costs so they can't sell it as cheaply as the guy who merely copied it, but they need to do it in a way that doesn't make the customer feel like they're being ripped off. That's the tricky bit, and the answer may very well turn out to be that spending millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars making TV shows or movies just isn't a viable use of resources. For example, Prison Break is a reasonably entertaining programme, but is 42 minutes of reasonably entertaining TV really the best use of two million dollars our society can come up with?
Prior to the invention of the printing press copyright was not necessary since there was no economic incentive to copy a work - maintenance of the slaves or paying the manual transcriber's salary was a far greater cost than buying copies from the author's agents.
It was only in England (not too coincidently) the home of the industrial revolution 400 years ago this incentive brought about by mass production of copies first came to exist, and it is not too surprising that this is where and when copyright law first emerged.
Playing on the idea of the noble savage not needing copyright law is disingenuous and completely neglects the main issue - mass production or copies at prices low enough to make a creator's work a significant part of the cost of the copy.
I respect your point that culture and content was abundant in times when there were no copyright laws, but its relative abundance paled in comparison to today. Consider that:
Also, consider that this was a time when:
We live in different times and have a completely different culture, so to compare today's creative content to that of ancient Greece or Rome is misleading. Copyright law was created for a reason. Without it, we wouldn't have nearly the amount of creative works we have today, because those who created most of what we do have today would have taken 9-5 day jobs instead.
"Copyright is a fairly recent notion, as it popped up only four hundred years ago or so, and in a small part of the world. Long before that--and today in places were copyright is not respected--culture and content continue to abound."
That is a very simplistic way of looking at things. It assumes, among other things, that all cultures have the same nature, and that therefore copyright isn't necessary. And that is very historically ignorant. The nature of cultures in the past was not the same as it is now.
"Think about all the great poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome. They didn't get a dime when copies were made of their work by amanuenses and sold in the marketplace, but they didn't complain."
Actually, that's not true. We honestly don't know if they were paid royalties or not. We do not seem to have any defenses from the Athenian law courts regarding copying, but that just means that none survived to us - there may or may not have been any. The current documents that have survived suggest that the Athenians were not suing people over copying, but we honestly don't have enough recovered to know for certain.
Aside from which, neither ancient Greece or Rome had a concept of individual rights. People would be sued based on a failure to carry out their responsibilities, but the rights of the individual was a concept that was centuries in the future. There was a concept of obligation, and that went right through to Christian times (for example, in terms of religion, the Romans didn't like the Christians because they didn't fulfill their obligation of joining the rest of their community at sacrifices, meaning that they were not "doing the sacred things" (aka "sacra facere") - and meaning that bizarrely to our conception of religion, the Christians were persecuted for being atheists).
"Indeed, the only time someone had issue with copying, the Roman poet Martial in his Epigrams , it was because another fellow was putting his name on those copies. And even then, Martial didn't demand legal penalties; he just lampooned the guy."
In fact, there was a law I recently learned about passed by the Emperor Augustus that declared that the content being copied belonged to the copyist. That being said, in Ancient Greece and Rome ridicule was a corrective, and it could be very dangerous to somebody. There is at least one case on record of somebody committing suicide because of slanderous poems being written about them (I know because I've spent the last two years working on a book about ancient Greek and Roman humour with a professor of Classics).
I can't speak for the law outside of Europe, but my own inquiries into the history of copyright have suggested that in order for a concept of copyright to develop, there needs to be certain factors in play:
1. A concept of the rights of the individual.
2. The technology to mass produce copies of the work (without this, copying is not an issue).
3. A society capable of mass consumption of the work (for literature, a literate society, etc. - and again, copying is pointless if there is no market to consume it).
4. A free market economy (extremely important, as it means that there is a financial stake for whoever is copying, and whoever creates).
Without all of these, there can be no development of the concept of copyright. As soon as all four appear, however, copyright follows. The Stationer's Log (the earliest form of copyright in England) was at the dawn of this, but copyright as we know it didn't come until 1705 - and at that point, the patronage system was beginning to disappear, society was literate and the printing press had been around for a while, there was effectively a free market economy, and the rights of the individual had become prevalent enough that two revolutions would occur within the century over them. A lot of people may not like to hear this, but copyright did develop naturally as the circumstances developed so that it became necessary.
"In Hong Kong, the film and music industries c
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
I drove to the store last month looking for a specific, recent movie. Could not find it. Get it? I'm actively trying to pay for a DVD, trying to encourage the producer to make more like it -- and it's not in the flippin' store.
But there is a torrent for it.
Don't forget, this is a current movie; the fact I'm a weirdo who also would like the complete run of Misfits of Science does not enter into it. The simple fact is that the torrent providers are doing a better job of distributing niche material than the people who are supposed to be getting paid.
That's not even touching on the arguments about unskippable FBI notices, annoying ads for other movies, and whether I can watch it on a Linux box. Those all presume that at least I can find and pay for the damn' DVD -- but I can't.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I think the GP's point was "what is to stop the RIAA continuing to sent out nastygrams demanding money or we'll sue?"
The risks of having to pay all costs (which include negative publicity), being sanctioned for bringing frivolous lawsuits, and having additional judgements narrowing the **AA's target area.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
That's the attitude the RIAA and MPAA have towards their customers-and they wonder why their customers are voting with their feet in droves! Yes, downloading has a small effect on their sales, but it's their complete lack of customer service that's their biggest problem! Look, if I go to a grocery store and time after time either can't find what I want or the it's packaged so I have to buy five pounds of hamburger or rice when I only want one pound of it, and/or am treated rudely by their staff, I'm simply going to say; "Hasta la Vista, baby!" and go to another store. Yet, that's EXACTLY the way the music and movie industries treat me. Big problem for them is there are OTHER things I can spend my money on that I get enjoyment from. Look at iTunes-they provide music in a user friendly way and provide a no hassle way for me to buy EXACTLY what I want-WHEN I want it! No wonder why they've sold over a billion songs in such a short time. If everyone was pirating content, they'd have NO business! The thing I can't understand is Congress' hard on to pass laws friendly to the music and movie industries. You don't see them passing laws requiring me to shop at Safeway, for example. Are they THAT corrupted?
I'd mod the parent Insightful +1 for that point alone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Thank you SO much! That's a point I've been unable to formulate, a logical link I'd never seen stand by itself. Yes, the point of downloading things is not only price, but convenience. It is so EASY! I'd happily pay for most content, really. What if my ISP gave money to some artists I name on a list, what with my 100/month bill. In my case, I'd see it that way : My ISP charges 50 for a month, with a 50GByte limit. Beyond that, it's priced 1/GB. I'd be happy to know that some percentage of that goes to the copyright holders of the things I download."
Well, here's the problem with that: you mention "goes to the copyright holder" and "goes to the artist." The record company holds the rights to the recording, and the composer and lyricist own the rights to the music and the words. I think you really meant the latter, in which the record company is cut out of the picture.
Many people have suggested the same thing: that we set up a system in which only the artist is compensated when we pirate music. The trouble is that record companies are typically for-profit ventures and have finite resources. We like to claim that the current business model is dead, but the alternative model of "record companies provide the cash and expertise to record, produce, and promote the music, with money going only to the artists" does not work well, either. Of course, I'd like to be proven wrong... if anybody reading this wants to set up a service like this (where, again, you get the artist's music produced, and they keep all the money from the sales or donations), then please do. If you can make it work, you'll be a hero among Slashdotters everywhere. A flat broke hero, but a hero nonetheless.
As an aside, I think your notion of a socialized music system (where artists are paid a percentage from ISP fees using the assumption that people are using their connections to pirate music and films) might work in Europe, where I suspect people tend to be a little more comfortable with socialized commerce. But here in the US and Canada, I do not think it would work. US residents already pay a tariff on music CD-Rs for much the same reason, and Canadian residents must pay an even higher tariff on ALL CD media. These laws are highly reviled around here. I personally hate them because I don't pirate music or films, and I certainly don't want to subsidize the entertainment industry on behalf of those who do.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Gotta love the irony ... the RIAA members spent a couple of decades pumping out filthy rap trash as mainstream "entertainment" which encouraged people to break the law in more ways than I ever thought possible. Now, when they need it the most, they can't get anyone to obey the law! Instant karma got 'em!
Playing on the idea of the noble savage not needing copyright law is disingenuous
Pretending that current copyright law is the only alternative, and bring in irrelevant nonsense like "noble savage", is a lot more disingenuous.
and completely neglects the main issue -
The main issue being to encourage the most efficient and cost effective creation, dissemination and use of ideas. Nothing more. Copyright, as it is currently implemented, appears to be increasingly useless in the efficient creation, dissemination and use of large classes of ideas.
mass production or copies at prices low enough to make a creator's work a significant part of the cost of the copy.
A limited argument that becomes increasingly unsustainable in a population of billions where the originator can copy just as efficiently as anybody else and also has the advantage of being the first and being authentic, which a lot of people care about.
There are many reasons why people create art and content. In a population of billions it is a statistical certainty that it will happen regardless of the state of copyright law. People like to create, it is often it's own reward. The copyright distribution cartels like to pretend that copyright is the only reason to create. As usual they're lying.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
But if you really want the job I think you should send your application to their attorneys, who seem to be the ones running the show.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful