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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."
The little funny quote at the bottom of the page at the moment read "What's done to children, they will do to society."
Would be great if this is the children that have been sued bankrupt for musicdownloads that finally (in time) sues the MAFIAA out of business. But being pesimi... erh, I mean, realistic, I'm not going to hold my breath...
Unfortunately, due to the prominence and infamy of Slashdot, it is in fact very appealing as a public forum and soapbox. Plus, it'd take ages to drum up enough publicity for http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/
Just saying...
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
I like the posts of NewYorkCountryLawyer, and if the editors or readers of slashdot would get sick of them they would not get past the firehose. And if slashdot were against people keeping journals and submitting them as stories, why do you think "Slashdot journal entries can be automatically submitted as stories"?
If you care about Your Rights Online, I think both his stories and his comments are to the point and well written and at least HIAL. If you don't care about your rights online, you can choose not to see that section in your preferences.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, keep up the good work!
There is a big difference between between using a computer and an understanding of the law, nevermind grasping that there is an even bigger difference between the machinations of the legal system and justice.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
In the past, the RIAA has shown that the grapes are too sour when it comes to attacking colleges whose law students and faculty stand ready to defend them. Now these same colleges are taking the fight to the RIAA? This cannot end well for the latter, I think.
The problem is the RIAA do not represent the Artists, and do not care about the buyers of music
....
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....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Actually it's about the methods the RIAA is using. It's very important to do everything possible to prevent this sort of thing being seen as okay, or even normal, "so long as they're catching the bad guys". Just like it's not generally considered okay for the police to break the law in order to make an arrest, no matter how bad the guy they're arresting is, because it sets precedents of "acceptable behaviour" that are ultimately far more detrimental to society than the acts of even lots of individual bad guys.
Same deal here. If the RIAA can use these sorts of tactics with impunity, then so can everyone else with enough money. Even though some - indeed, probably almost all - of the people being sued did infringe on someone's copyrights, the harm they did pales in comparison to the harm these kind of abuses of the law would do to society if they became (even more) widespread.
It's not just the RIAA, but the fact that it's hard to show actual harm or even deprivation of income from copyright infringement seems to make this a more morally appealing battlefront than others.
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.
Even a literate layman who takes the time to read the US Constitution can see that the concept of intellectual "property" is unamerican. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
If I rent a hoouse I have an exclusive right for a limited time, but it isn't my property. If "IP" was "property" than rather than giving "exclusive right" for a "limited time" the founding fathers would have said "ownership".
So why does a law school have an "Intellectual Property Law Clinic" when the Constitution is so clear that it's NOT property?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
and if I had mod points they would mod you up. Everyone bashes the lawyer... thats like someone who knows nothing about networks bashing the network engineer.. "they just keep deisnging new technology so they can make money and the people who have to pay them will never know if they really need it or not. The lawyers that do their jobs well and with morals are just as good as the engineer who helps his client... this is also the same as the lawyer who is sloppy, does bad work, doesn't bother to learn the law, or looks for the quick buck, is the same as the engineer that rapes his client stating you really do need this $250,000 appliance or your network will be rooted.
love the taste, hate the texture
What interest me most is how this will evolve in the next generation of lawmakers. If these young people are going to step up against RIAA and win, who will be left to watch the RIAA propaganda videos like recently exposed on /.? Seems to me that RIAA with their complete propaganda machinery is no match for educational facilities :-)
Back in the seventies, we young people all smoked pot. Now that my genertation's rich people have taken over from the last generation's rich people, is it legal? Hell no, the assshats running things all deny ever having touched the stuff. Well, one famous asshat former doper claims he tried it once but never inhaled, as if he were talking to a nation of idiots. Well maybe he was.
But at any rate, I think when you in your twenties now are my age, your generation's rich people that become lawmakers are no more going to restore copyright to reasonable terms and legalize noncommercial copying than my generation's rich people that became lawmakers legalized the marijuana that nearly every single one of them broke the law smoking in the seventies.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's a good thing, since none of the items listed in that covenant are actual human rights. There's a simple litmus test for whether a proposed "right" is reasonable: can you exercise the "right" in the absence of other human beings to exploit? In this case the answer is clearly "no"; their so-called "rights" cannot be exercised except by making one or more other people worse off than they would be otherwise.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat