University of San Francisco Law Clinic Joins Fight Against RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's litigation campaign has met resistance from the academic community before, but now it's been taken to a whole new level: the defense of RIAA victims who are not part of the college community. First the University of Oregon lashed out on behalf of its students, then it was the University of Maine's Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic on behalf of its undergrads. Now, the University of San Francisco School of Law has taken the fight a giant step further. Its Intellectual Property Law Clinic's attorneys-in-training, working under the supervision of law professors, are going to bat against the RIAA by helping outside lawyers to defend their clients, pro bono. They reached out 3000 miles to get involved in Elektra v. Torres and Maverick v. Chowdhury, two cases going on in Brooklyn, NY, against non-college defendants. Two of the law students in the USF's legal program assisted in the research and preparation of briefs in these cases, opposing the RIAA's motion to dismiss the defendants' counterclaims. Thousands of honor students throughout United States law schools, most of them digital natives who actually understand the legal fallacies and technological missteps the RIAA is taking, and who can't wait to expose them, make a pretty good resource for the poor and middle class people trying to defend these cases."

Comments

Re:Get your own blog!

[kaos07]

Wow you missed the sarcasm and the joke.

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ IS run by Ray Beckerman. I'm a big fan of his, and his contributions to Slashdot. That post my subtle way of directing people to another source of information.

Re:Are they just lazy?

[sm62704]

They represent the Big Four music producers, and are only answerable to them ....

That is the problem - They have no Copyright (of their own) to defend, they have no customers to care about....

The big four that they represent own the copyrights. The Corporate Owned Congress made musical recordings "works for hire" granting copyright to the record company, not the people who actualkly perform the music.

As Lynard Skynard said,

Want you to sign the contract
Want you to sign today
Gonna make lots of money
Workin' for MCA

The MCA record company owns copyright to that song, not the band.

I'm surprised there is no "cease and desist" from EMI, who hold copyright (IINM) to Pink Floyd's Lunatic and Eclipse, the lyrics of which are in my latest journal, along with a little minirant about the RIAA:

I went out in the beer garden with Mary, she to smoke and me to look at the moon. It had gone from full to crescent. When we went back in I decided to waste some money and contribute to the evil RIAA, just this once, because there was an RIAA album that fit the situation perfectly.

I hate those damned internet jukeboxes. I'm no fan of jukeboxes anyway, and always let some other fool put money in them. But the new internet jukeboxes cost twice as much as a normal old fashioned CD jukebox, and if it has to download a song it takes a whole dollar, and it doesn't sound as good as a CD jukebox. But at least I should be able to hear a song from an album that was in the top 100 for twenty years.

I put my dollar in and searched for Dark Side of the Moon. The only song from the album was "Money". Fitting.

Fucking dickweeds. One more reason to hate the RIAA! And congress; that album should have been in the public domain long ago. So I played the old Patti Page song "Crazy" which should have been in the public domain when "Dark Side of the Moon" was recorded, and "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap". As the second song started, Linda broke and put the yellow ball in. "I should have played Big Balls" I said.

Re:good for the proto-lawyers!

[Dun Malg]

I note that the country is still not party to, for example, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights among others.

Apologies for being somewhat OT here, but the difference between human rights law in general and the US constitution is an important one and I think it important not to blur the difference.

See, the trouble there is that the ICESCR isn't about rights, it's about socialism. A right that imposes a obligation on others isn't classically a right. ICESCR is full of "rights" like the right to paid vacations, welfare, social insurance, and "health".