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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."
Come on, NewYorkCountryLawyer, Slashdot isn't your personal outlet! Get your own blog.
Maybe something like http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/?
Is there a legal way the RIAA could be achieving their goals or is the mere concept of aggressively enforcing their rights under copyright law against regular folk something the legal system is currently stacked against?
I guess what I'm asking is, are they just lazy or just stupid?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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...
it's about time that people outside of schools are tapping this resource. I would have expected law students to have been tapped a long time ago, not only for this but in general by law firms since they have an expertise in the field in question largely due to having lived and grown with computers their entire lives.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
This is a cautionary note based upon experience i have seen in the movies:
When you find a new super weapon and decide to use it to help the people, it almost always backfires.
We are cheering the fact that MORE lawyers are being created.
What will happen when they finish with the RIAA?
"It won't stop at anything, and it will never stop hunting you until you are dead."
liqbase
I think if I was a law student, I'd be very very happy doing this sort of work.
Actual cases with a lot of what every defence lawyer is looking for: Suspense, Lying, Cheating, Inexpert Witnesses, Corporate Greed, Perjury, Farfetched application of laws...
This would be great. You could probably make a TV series out of it even!
(Okay okay.. Some of this is tongue in cheeck, but the basic premise is obvious: This is great material for law students to study and participate in. They get a real life example of how screwed up and convoluted cases can get)
And maybe, just maybe this'll breed a generation of lawyers not hellbent on making Escheresque pictures out of the law.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
I dont Understand this RIAA Crap. The other day i was watching the Movie JUNO. A character in the movie burns a CD containing some songs for Juno. Now is that not illegal according to RIAA? Why not raise a voice against that rather than draggin their ass behind innocent students??
Honestly speaking RIAA and MPAA are not loosing anything near what they claim.
yes.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
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.
It doesn't expire. The DMCA is unConstitutional on its face. The RIAA are trying to enforce an illegal law. Enforced by a corrupt judicial system.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
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.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
Digital information technology contributes to the world by making it easier to copy and modify information. Computers promise to make this easier for all of us.
Not everyone wants it to be easier. The system of copyright gives software programs "owners", most of whom aim to withhold software's potential benefit from the rest of the public. They would like to be the only ones who can copy and modify the software that we use.
The copyright system grew up with printing--a technology for mass production copying. Copyright fit in well with this technology because it restricted only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that.
Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):
* Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
* Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
* Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
* Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as "samizdat". There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness.
Owners make several kinds of arguments for giving them the power to control how we use information:
* Name calling.
Owners use smear words such as "piracy" and "theft", as well as expert terminology such as "intellectual property" and "damage", to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public--a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.
Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway.
* Exaggeration.
Owners say that they suffer "harm" or "economic loss" when users copy programs themselves. But the copying has no direct effect on the owner, and it harms no one. The owner can lose only if the person who made the copy would otherwise have paid for one from the owner.
A little thought shows that most such people would not have bought copies. Yet the owners compute their "losses" as if each and every one would have bought a copy. That is exaggeration--to put it kindly.
* The law.
Owners often describe the current state of the law, and the harsh penalties they can threaten us with
How we know is more important than what we know.
The simple fact that the latest batch of lawyers see the wrongful doings of previous batches heralds a kind of change. It's not just a cry of 'that's not fair', it is a cry of 'that's not fair use'. The tide will have turned when older established lawyers hire the newer tech savvy lawyers. They will need to: DNA tests, AI, robotics, and many other new technologies will spawn legal cases that deal with matters unheard of before.
It is, in some way, perhaps the beginnings of the fight against the corporate control of America. It is definitely a fight against IP and copyright run amok, as well as shady lawyer tactics. It's not clear cut when looking at only one case but if you look at the situation on the whole, the RIAA still needs to get some wins in court somewhere. Add to this what is happening to MS and others in the EU with regard to their business practices a picture begins to form about the general state of play in courtrooms around the globe. In Russia schools are moving to F/OSS because of legal action. The EU lobbed a 1.3Billion Dollar fine against MS. US law students are fighting against the **AA. Of course that is only a few of the cases. The big picture is that the fight against software IP, extended copyright laws, and bad corporate tactics is taking shape one case at a time.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Which "sacred human rights" you're talking about that the government is violating (which I presume to mean "is violating unconstitutionally")?
The constitution, albeit a fine document, is not the be-all and end-all of human rights; not least because it is somewhat limited in the people to whom it applies. While I will freely admit that the US gov. has a positively sparkling human rights record compared to some, 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.
Hmmmm, a clinic is a place where sick people go in order to get well. A "law clinic" is a place where sick lawyers go in order to get well... nah, it's the place where sick laws get in order to get well... nah, it's the place where new lawyers test their immunity system when exposed to sick lawyers... nah, it's the place where the new breeds of laws test their immunity system against the sick laws... nah, it's the place where sick law interbreeding happens... aghhh, I give up...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
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
1: Fuck the RIAA
2: Fuck the MPAA
and while I am at it,
3: Fuck Microsoft.
Trust me, they're all lousy in bed.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It does not matter what the source is or what format we have it in. We are purchasing a license to listen at our leisure to a song or watch a movie. We can have a thousand copies because we can only listen to one at a time. Somebody needs to argue this in court. That we are in fact purchasing a license to listen, not a piece of plastic or a digital file of zero's and ones.
This is the New legal justification for open downloads of music or copy righted material:
In fact the record labels need to, I think legally provide, free downloads of music. The record companies have not provided a way for me to enjoy my license to listen if the CD gets scratched, as it is now they force us to buy a new license they should probably reimburse anyone who has had to buy more than one license because of damage media.
I noticed about 10 years ago CDs became very easy to scratch not the bottom but the top. I wonder if this was by design to produce more sales? If so then the recording industry owes the consumers money
Because the carrier medium can be damaged we should all be able to get a download of a new instance of the song we paid for from the Internet if we purchased the license to listen to it. Since the record companies have not provided a way for us to get a replacement copy the Internet downloads can ethically be justified.
Truth is we don't need the record companies anymore. We can all buy from the artists direct and vote with a link what is most popular. I would be happy to pay the creative talent directly without the huge middle man cut. Another things is corporate pressure to maintain the status quo system cannot be put on artists by large corporations.
Hopefully someone will get this into the hands of the attorneys for the defendants.
Technically based on quantum physics there is only one copy of a piece of music in the universe. This exists in the intangible realm; all tangible manifestations of this one copy are simply a physical conveyance of this one real instance. It is an information universe, everything is ultimately just information.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
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".If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
even lawyers band together pro bono to help strangers fight you and your cause. I mean seriously. Seriously.