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."

Comments

Re:English Please.

[morgan_greywolf]

That means, basically, that the party that's suing or countersuing (LimeWire) has to show reasons why they should get relief (usually money) and that those reason need to be more than just name calling and saying "you owe me money, you owe me money!"

Re:English Please.

[tbg58]

Means that the plaintiff can't use boilerplate (form letter) verbiage as a complaint. In other words, the complaint is too generic or abstract and fails to state specifics, and is therefore not actionable. At least that's how it sounds to this layperson - IANAL.

Re:English Please.

[Arnoud Engelfriet]

When you accuse someone of violating a law, you have to show where and how he did that. You usually do this by copy&pasting the text of the statute and explaining how each element applies to what your opponent did. For example, for the cause of action "copyright infringement" you need to prove three elements: (1) your copyright ownership to the work, (2) defendant's access to the work, and (3) similarity with your original. What the court here says is that you have to do more than say "I own the copyright in the work. Defendant had access to it, and what he has published is very similar to my work." That's a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action. Arnoud

Re:Serves them right

[Ginger Unicorn]

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[The Only Druid]

Here's a basic legal summary of why Twombly is the active issue here:

Before Twombly, a case called Conley was the dominant SCOTUS case explaining exactly what standards a Plaintiff's court pleadings must satisfy in order to, in our parlance, "state a claim". In truth, Conley was extremely ambiguous, and for years the courts had decried it as a waste of time and money.

Twombly has now established that pleadings must, as a bare minimum, describe enough alleged facts so that - when the court assumes all of them to be true for the sake of a Motion to Dismiss - the pleadings allege a "plausible" claim. This means it has to be slightly more than "possible": for example, it's possible that I am in fact Bill Gates, but it's simply not plausible

Now, the most practical effect of Twombly in district courts around the country so far (it's an August 2007 decision) has been that it is no longer sufficient to simply say "The defendant did X to me", and then simply list the alleged components of X as defined by law. Instead, plaintiffs now have to allege sufficient facts that move it across that fine line.

Here, the Judge has simply stated that the Plaintiff has filed to properly allege his complaint; this is no different than if the Plaintiff had alleged rape but failed to allege forceful sexual assault.

Re:Wait, what?

[The Only Druid]

You're extremely mistaken: some "lawyer speak", i.e. jargon, is utterly required for the same reason that it's required in engineering, in medicine, etc.

Jargon allows for a specificity that colloquial language simply cannot possess: for example, by having specific meanings of words like "pleadings" or "plausibility", the Courts possess a uniformity across the nation that would be lost if each individual court were permitted to say "well, to me, 'plausible' means X".

Your intuition - that law is complicated - is correct, but you're firmly wrong in light of hundreds of years of debate in philosophy of language. It is firmly settled - with literally no dispute by any philosopher any more - that the specificity of a term is inversely related to the ease of understanding, because the more specific a term is the more collateral information is necessary in order to understand that term's definition. Put simpler, the more narrowly you define a term (e.g. "plausibility" here), the more information any reader must possess in order to understand what is meant by that term.

The side effect of this is that in fields that require a great deal of specificity - e.g. the professions (medicine, law) or the trade fields (engineering, masonry, etc.) - then there is a great deal of collateral information that readers need to understand in order to comprehend what is going on.

Re:Wait, what?

[boris111]

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.

from the order

[nomadic]

The notion of "antitrust injury" grew from the recognition that a competitor may be injured not only by prohibited anticompetitive activity, but also by competition itself, and that the antitrust laws were not intended to afford the latter injuries a remedy. See Balaklaw v. Lovell, 14 F.3d 793, 797 (2d Cir. 1994). Antitrust injury, then, simply means "injury of the type the antitrust laws were intended to prevent and that flows from that which makes defendants' acts unlawful." Brunswick Corp. v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, Inc., 429 U.S. 477, 489 (1977); accord Paycom, 467 F.3d at 290. To demonstrate antitrust injury, "a plaintiff must show (1) an injury-in-fact; (2) that has been caused by the violation; and (3) that is the type of injury contemplated by the statute." Blue Tree Hotels Inv., Ltd. v. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., 369 F.3d 212, 220 (2d Cir. 2004). The antitrust injury requirement thus ensures that a "plaintiff can recover only if the loss stems from a competition-reducing aspect or effect of the defendant's behavior." Atlantic Richfield Co. v. USA Petroleum Co., 495 U.S. 328, 344 (1990).
...
As described above, Lime Wire alleges a conspiracy among counter-defendants to fix prices for licenses at both the wholesale and retail levels. At the wholesale level, Lime Wire alleges that counter-defendants used their joint ventures, MusicNet and pressplay, "to effect a price-fixing arrangement among horizontal competitors" (FAC 36) -- i.e., among the record companies themselves.14 Although such a horizontal price-fixing arrangement is per se unlawful under 1 of the Sherman Act, see Leegin Creative Leather Prods. v. PSKS, Inc., ___ U.S. ___,Lime Wire has not established that it suffered injury-in-fact as a Case 1:06-cv-05936-GEL Document 51 Filed 12/03/2007 Page 14 of 45 omitted). "Restraints that are per se unlawful include horizontal agreements among competitors to fix prices or to divide markets." Id. (citations omitted). Although Lime Wire asserts in 16 its memorandum of law in opposition to the motion to dismiss that counter-defendants have "all refused to grant [Lime Wire] licenses to their catalogs of recorded music even at . . . artificially high prices" (Counter-P. Mem. 6), this allegation does not appear in the FAC itself, and thus cannot be considered by the Court in evaluating counterdefendants' motion to dismiss. See Brass v. Am. Film Techs., Inc., 987 F.2d 142, 150 (2d Cir. 1993) (noting that on motion to dismiss, consideration of factual allegations is limited to those allegations contained in complaint). 15 result of counter-defendants' purported arrangement. See Atlantic Richfield, 495 U.S. at 342 (noting that the "per se rule is a method of determining whether 1 of the Sherman Act has been violated, but it does not indicate whether a private plaintiff has suffered antitrust injury").

Although Lime Wire "actively solicited licensed content" from "independent labels and artists" and "independent retailers/distributors" (FAC 44), the FAC contains no allegation that Lime Wire ever attempted to obtain or purchase a license from any of the counter-defendants or their respective joint ventures.16 Lime Wire's retail competitors may have "faced excessive wholesale prices" for licenses as a result of the alleged price-fixing scheme (id. 36), but Lime Wire itself has not alleged any facts demonstrating that it suffered such harm. Although Lime Wire's attempt to obtain hashes from counter-defendants suggests that it intended eventually to obtain licenses from them, nothing in Lime Wire's pleading indicates that it has, in fact, sought (or imminently will seek) such licenses from counter-defendants. Accordingly, Lime Wire cannot claim that it has suffered injury-in-fact as a result of counter-defendants' wholesale pricefixing scheme.

LOL, Limewire!

[autophile]

LOL, Limewire

Re:English Please.

[sm62704]

Maybe I just need my coffee

No, it's just like my saying to my friend Mike that if he adds RAM and defragments his hard drive his computer may run faster and he says "huh? What's a "hard drive? And what do I have to ram it with"?

And like my cluelessly expecting Mike to know what RAM is, what a hard drive is (I used to talk about someone's hard drive and they'd pull out a floppy and say "this?") and about file fragmentation and seeing their eyes glaze over when I explained it, a lawyer will expect us to understand legaleze. It's perfectly understandable English to him.

But just like a lot of nerds would be out of a job if everyone understood computers, there would be a lot less legal work if we all understood legalese, or if the laws themselves were understandable to non-lawyers.

-mcgrew

A first year law student's explanation

[MunchMunch]

I'll give it a shot,

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.

______________________________

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...

Re:pjwalen sez...

[sm62704]

Except that LimeWire is and can be used for indie music thats creators WISH to be heard. Indies don't have radio; until recently they had Internet Radio and P2P, but now don't even have Internet Radio, now that the RIAA and its labels have bought legislation from "your" representatives that effectively killed any US based Internat Radio stations.

I, for one, wish that people would STOP putting the RIAA's crap in their "share" lists. But of course, so long as the average clueless computer user doesn't even know that they're actually sharing music, thinking it's just a place to download from, it's not going to happen.

I mean, how in the hell is anybody going to find that great somg named "scatterbrain" that I can't remember who recorded? Do you have any idea how damned many songs have that name? Of course, if you write a song named "scatterbnrain" and your band records your song and you place it on LimeWire, the RIAA is likely to sue you for uploading one of their "scatterbrain"s. You're going to get sued for uploading your own damned song!

Which is really their aim. They can't really give a shit if you download something you can sample from the radio more easily. If you want to find new indie music you're going to get sued.

My "share list" has hundreds of songs. Their creators specifically thanked me when I told them I was putting them on the internet. Of course, none of these guys would touch the thieves at the major labels with a ten foot pole.

-mcgrew

Re:Attention Ravens' fans, from an unbiases observ

[charlesbakerharris]

Well, I'm glad someone has brought some maturity to this discussion.