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RIAA-fighting Maine Law Professor Speaks Out
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In an interview with Jon Newton of p2pnet, Prof. Deirdre Smith of the University of Maine says that 'our students are enthusiastic about being directly connected to a case with a national scope and significance'. The UM Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic is the first law school legal clinic in the U.S. to have taken on the RIAA, to have the opportunity for hands-on experience fighting the RIAA's effort to rewrite copyright law. Smith went on to say that the case is probably one of the first intellectual property cases the clinic has ever taken on, and that if it proceeds further, she expects to also 'draw on the considerable expertise in IP among members of our faculty and the Maine Center for Law and Innovation, another program of the Law School'. "
Doesn't having a law college student handle your court case feel like having a med. college student do surgery on you?
I wonder how many of those students will end up working on the other side once they graduate. It would be kind of like a hacker working for a security company. They'll be more familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of all the arguments and could demand premium salaries in this area of law.
The Riaa makes it seem like you're a thief who went into the record store and stole a bunch of CDs'.
This is ip ifringement. Not the exact same as theft.
The songs can be deleted and nothing is left. Is that the classical definiton of theft?
Where is the evidence? This to me is the part that is left out of the debate.
Just because you download shouldn't convict you!
If you delete then there is no evidence! damnit!
At this point someone over there at the RIAA/MPAA have got to realize they are pissing off/on the legal minds ,business leaders and congress critters of tomorrow, this must be making them spot. It's one thing to get the little old lady who's grandson was over at christmas and installed limebearfreezemule and began downloading all his favorite songs, then left with the software starting everytime(and sharing!!!) granny went online; her only hope is to pay for a lawyer and that is not likely to happen, she'll be dead in a few years anyway... IT IS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT thing to sue those who are in the process of learning the law or (choose on of the others i previously mentioned), they will be in their prime to fight back soon enough and will do it with great force. My name is Innigo Montoya, you have sued my father, prepare to die.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
i had another five minutes. read the footnotes of this article. The links were to an mpaa site and they have been pulled - but there has to be a way to track down stuff like Valenti, "International Copyright Piracy: Links to Organized Crime and Terrorism," Testimony before The Subcommittee On Courts, The Internet, And Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives. It also says Valenti joked about wanting Dmitry Sklyarov executed. well - i'm gonna go do some other stuff - but you may want to think about a new approach on this issue because saying that you are awaiting requested examples from the 'other side' is basically saying 'i have built my position on ignorance of the publicly available facts.'
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
you don't care about the facts.
these businesses tried to pass copyright law inside anti-terrorism legislation. that's not a strawman. it's not lame. you are saying that the author imagined that this was an anti-terrorism bill?
as i insist? i don't insist anything. Jack Valenti testified before the government in an investigation entitled "International Copyright Piracy: Links to Organized Crime and Terrorism". Are you going to tell me that he wasn't there to talk about copyright and ties between piracy and terrorism? the name is a straw man imagined up by whoever chaired the subcommittee?
you asked for examples. i was bored - took ten minutes to find you a couple and you then turn around and say they aren't examples at all. i see in other parts of this thread you've equated violating copyright with murder. at the same time your original post i replied to says that the statement certain legal whores who allow or act to bring certain types of "private lawsuit" is alluding to the riaa as terrorists. so gaining the right to hack people's computers in an antiterrorism bill is a straw man - but the words private lawsuit in quotes is a satisfactory allusion to terrorism. you live in a weird reality. and the funny thing is, you just haven't done any homework. google riaa and terrorism. you will find hundreds of hits where people clearly and definitively state that they believe the actions of the riaa are terrorism. you can drop your weak example. why i'm helping you out with that, i don't know. you should really do the work yourself.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The right of the creator to control their creation is -- correctly -- understood as a human right. There is no (or there should be no) distinction between tangible, material property and the non-tangible intellectual kind.
You are absolutely correct. But the "right of the creator to control their creation" does not mean that "the creator is allowed to infringe on my right to create". I think that is what is overlooked by many who blindly support all forms of intellectual property.
I'm not talking about music in particular, but about the general idea of "I did ABC first, now you cannot do ABC (and a thousand things related to it)". This goes beyond your right as a creator and actually takes away my freedom to create.
I happen to think that intellectual property can be controlled by private parties via contract law without the need for government enforcement.
The RIAA is constantly citing its 'victories' in district court ex parte cases (cases where the other side doesn't even know there's a case), default cases (cases where the other side either didn't know there was a case or failed to defend it), and pro se cases (cases where the other side couldn't afford a lawyer). When we had motion practice in an appeals court, they cited their lower court ex parte 'victories' as though they were binding (although as you and I know, they were not).
Even when dealing with normal -- as opposed to moronic -- lawyers, district court precedents are extremely important where, as here, there are no appellate precedents.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I always thought it was a dig on that anti-piracy campaign that went something along the lines of "When you download movies off the internet, you're supporting terrorism."
The most complete article I can google up comes, oddly enough, from Kuro5hin.
Some Guy named Rick McCallum shot off his mouth about how Piracy and Terrorism are the same.
I don't know about the states (I'm living in Germany with the Military, so the only english-language TV we get here is AFN) - but the anti-drug campaign that runs along similar lines is still going strong here, with a bunch of kids talking gravely about how they helped kill police officers and fund criminals when they're doing drugs is still going strong.
There is a (small) amount of support for the arguement, physically pirated discs (as opposed to bittorrent downloads) - are usually pressed by organized crime in Asia. A bit of the money they make off that probably ends up in the hands of one terrorist organization or another.
Same with Drugs, the Poppy fields in Afghanistan provide the vast majority of funds for the insurgency there.
My understanding is, they wanted an exception, that would apply to their activities — to prevent the anti-hacking provisions of the law from applying to their own investigations. But it is not, unfortunately, uncommon to see even completely unrelated bits attached to legislation these days — it is called "pork-barelling".
Without reading the transcript, I can't draw conclusions. I'm surprised, you can.
The people in the article are lawyers, who are trying to help those accused by *AA of piracy. Even if you still think, the pirates themselves may be (unduly) labeled "terrorists", the lawyers defending them are perfectly safe from the accusation. The only time, a (real) terrorist's lawyer was herself convicted of crimes, was for very real help she provided her client in communicating with his followers "in the wild". The jury deliberated for 12 days and convicted her on all five counts.
Whatever your opinion of Lynne Stewart, no other lawyer has gotten into this sort of trouble. Even if Jack Valenti would like to portray pirates as terrorists (and I have not seen any evidence of this), insinuating, that the pirates' lawyers will be accused of "terrorism" is completely unfounded.
Indeed, they aren't.
No, I don't. But if such is your understanding of my other posts, I can see, why you are so mistaken on the original challenge.
You should've read the entire post, which tried to substantiate, why those "legal whores" may be seen as terrorists.
My weak example uses a (highly moderated) Slashdot post — not some left-of-the-wall lunatics' site...
Because you are an honest man, who argues in good faith and is ready to accept the other side's argument. Whereas *AA themselves were accused of "terrorism" (wrongly, of course), no examples of them calling a student file-sharer "terrorist" exist. The frosty-pister I responded to made a completely unjustified claim.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.