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LimeWire Antitrust Claims Against RIAA Dismissed
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The antitrust counterclaims imposed by Lime Wire against the RIAA record companies have been dismissed. In a 45-page decision (pdf), the Court relied principally upon the holding of the United States Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly that 'A party's obligation to provide the grounds of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do.' Ironically, the Twombly decision was the authority upon which the RIAA's copyright infringement complaint was dismissed in Interscope v. Rodriguez."
i rather foolishly followed these links just out of morbid curiosity (i knew it was spam but i thought ff2.0.0.11, adblock plus, noscript, cookiesafe, avg, spybot, spywareblaster, OpenDNS, comodo2 would protect me) and it managed to lock up firefox to the point that i could close it by clicking the close window icon, but the process was stuck running. i killed it in taskmanager and am running avg and spybot checks now but just thought i'd warn anyone who thinks they're invincible to malformed websites that this one might still get through. it might just be conicidence but just thought i'd warn you.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
As a techy who has complained about lawyer jargon before... after reading your post I'm a little more sympathetic to it now. My coworkers get frustrated with me when I use technical jargon, but I'm just being specific to avoid ambiguity.
Of course I would like my Project Managers to beef up their technical glossary. So many occasions they look at me like I'm speaking Japanese.
Basically, before Bell Atlantic, the bar for filing a lawsuit(1) was very low. If you could outline the factors for a 'cause of action' (e.g., for, say, a tort battery claim, you'd say that the Defendant 1) intentionally 2) made contact which 3) caused harm--for the antitrust claim, I'm sure they're much more complicated), that would be sufficient to at least allow the suit to continue. If you fail to assert that those factors were met, or if there was no factual basis for what you stated, your claim could be dismissed--but the bar was set extremely low in favor of allowing suits to continue. All you had to do was basically state how you think you'd been wronged, and not have to prove much of anything. Discovery would start, the defendant would have to produce emails and documents relating to your claim, and if evidence (or lack thereof) showed that your claim was groundless, it could still be thrown out via summary judgment without having to go to trial.
The Bell Atlantic decision is a little vague, but it seems to raise the bar. It says that there has to be some evidence to support the claim factors if the lawsuit is even going to go to discovery. The issue with this is that, when a corporation has all of the evidence, they're not going to turn it over willingly. If, in a hypothetical, you have a high suspicion of an antitrust violation occurring, however reasonable, unless you had some hard evidence beforehand you can't file suit. Before Bell, you could file the suit and discovery would commence, and if the evidence existed the company would have to turn it over. Now, you have to somehow get the evidence beforehand.
Some may argue it's fairer, since claims can't be brought 'on a whim,' or to harass by starting expensive litigation without any evidence. But in cases where there seems to be strong indications of antitrust, but no direct evidence BEFORE discovery, it could be protecting the companies from answering for their conduct.
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1. I haven't read the Bell Atlantic decision for awhile, so I can't remember if it was just related to antitrust cases. Either way, that's what's relevant here.
But I actually have finals starting tomorrow, so maybe I should get back to studying...