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RIAA's 'Misspeaking' May Have Affected Verdict
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "David Kravetz of Wired.com covered last year's Capitol v. Thomas trial gavel-to-gavel. It's worth noting, then, his article saying that the RIAA's recent statement — that Sony's top litigation lawyer 'misspoke' during the trial. She said that making a copy from one's own cd is 'stealing', which (in his words) may have caused a major miscarriage of justice. Wired further points out that later on in the trial, during the RIAA's examination of Ms. Thomas, 'On the hard drive she [turned] over were thousands of songs Thomas said she ripped from her CDs. The RIAA's Gabriel suggested to jurors that copying one's purchased music was a violation of the Copyright Act. Gabriel, for example, asked Thomas whether she had ever burned CDs, either for herself, or to give away to friends.' Gabriel, the RIAA's lead attorney, apparently misspoke too — prejudicing jurors along the way."
Is any of it grounds for appeal?
Is this grounds enough to declare a re-trial?
I would hope so.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you want to talk about the original intent of copyright, it was to prevent publishers from reprinting each other's books and selling them for profit. At the time, there was no expectation that we would have such a thing as a "digital copy", or that private individuals would have the ability to copy and distribute millions of copies of anything for practically zero cost.
So copyrights were never intended to apply to our current situation at all, because our current situation wasn't anticipated. Applying copyright to the caching of software code in RAM in order to run that software, for example, has nothing to do whatsoever with the "original intent". And yet that's how it's being used now, which is why software vendors are able to require "licenses" in order to use their software even if you don't copy the software.
Some might argue that, regardless of the original intent of copyright law, we need the protection for content owners now. Personally, I think copyright law should never have been allowed to be used against individuals who have produced unauthorized copies without any commercial gain.
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this is how a good many high-profile criminal cases are argued by DAs everywhere. Misrepresenting the leagal status of your case is almost universally allowed now days. Most things we worry about here... like being charged kiddie-porn or terrorism or hacking are delt with the same way.. half truths by prosecutors trying to "invent" crimes and trying to bend laws to fit instead of knowing how to charge you with breaking the appropriate law (which would be a slam dunk). Prosecutors routinely try to bring in non-relevant evidence, in a trial over 1 or 2 illegal pics they might put the worst stuff they find that might be in your cache and use that to bait the jury and confuse the issue of "morality" with which pictures break the law and WHY. Police do the same in their "reports", I've seen police reports with ""'s that a person said this or that when it wasn't what was said at all, but what the police THOUGHT was the answer they wanted to hear... and not the facts.
Fact is that the present jury system is DESIGNED to REMOVE the jury from the facts. Designed to obscure facts of a case from the Jury, while crippling their ability to ask for facts or have the appropriate laws relevant to the case pointed out to the. Juries are treated as a bunch of dumb slobs to beg to push the Blue button or Red button so they can go home. The civil system is even worse as all the cases "waste the courts time" so incentive to pull big stunts and baited arguments is in full effect because the jury just has to "agree", it doesn't have to make LEGAL sense!!!