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SCOTUS Asked To Decide On Legal Fees In RIAA Cases
Fogerty's ghost notes that the Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether exonerated RIAA defendants should automatically be awarded attorneys' fees. Texas resident Cliff Thompson was sued by the RIAA, which subsequently dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit after it determined that his adult daughter was the culprit. Thompson was denied attorneys' fees by the district and appeals courts and is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter. "In the petition for certiorari filed with the Supreme Court, Thompson's attorney Ted Lee lays out the RIAA's legal strategy and notes what he describes as the 'inherent unfairness' of the lawsuits... The fight between the RIAA and alleged copyright infringers is inherently unbalanced due to the vast financial resources available to the record labels. The risk-reward ratio for defendants is seriously out of kilter, and mandating that a successful defense — even if it comes from the RIAA's decision to voluntarily dismiss a case — results in the record labels picking up the tab would even things out."
Any /. lawyers care to explain why the defendants would be unable to collect for legal fees on these lawsuits? I'm not terribly versed in how this legal stuff works, but I was of the understanding that in any case, if I am wrongfully taken to court, I am allowed to counter-sue for legal fees. I thought that was part of the balance that kept people from suing just for fun with no repercussion.
What is the difference with these lawsuits the RIAA is bringing?
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
but they should be allowed one solid punch to each of the RIAA lawyers. Above the belt if its a some what reasonable case, or bellow if its one of the "computer illiterate grandma" types.
In addition, their punch should be able to be done by a third party proxy to make sure it hurts. And thus a new service industry could be born.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
They sent out the invitations to the party, they get to foot the bill.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
This might set precident if SCOTUS rules in favor of it for the US going to a loser pays court system which I think would be a great idea.
Why isn't this the standard, anyway?
I can see why people argue that having the losing side shoulder all legal fees is a bad idea (even if I'm not sure I necessarily agree), but if somebody sues YOU and then just drops the case later on before there's actually any decision, why shouldn't they be required to reimburse you for the trouble they caused you for absolutely no reason at all? I'm not talking about millions in damages, but paying your lawyer fees and so on would be the least you'd expect.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
These "ZOMG SCOTUS to fight RIAA in cage match!!!" articles I have seen floating around the tubes seem a bit misleading. Thousands of litigants petition the Supreme Court to grant cert every year, and the court ends up accepting only a few dozen cases.
Although a split among the circuit courts makes it more likely that the SCOTUS will grant cert, it by no means makes it a certainty.
However, this issue has nothing particular in common with the RIAA itself. Slashdot readers should know that within US legal system (common law, precedents, etc..) simply there's much different way of arguing things before the court. Almost everythig must be brought before the court. Within so called "continental law" (civil law, etc..) in most of the morld reimbursing attorney fees to the winning side of the case is a rule rather then an exception that has to be argued specially.
Just "picking up the tab" is woefully inadequate. Defending oneself against RIAA action requires a tremendous amount of time, requires one to front a whole bunch of money to an attorney, and places a huge amount of stress on the person being sued. None of these apply the the RIAA -- their attorneys are being paid to do the lawsuits as their regular day-to-day jobs, the expense of the lawsuits is inconsequential and part of expected, budgeted business expenses for the RIAA, and the lawsuits impose no particular stress on the RIAA or its attorneys.
What needs to happen in these situations -- that is, when $BIG_COMPANY sues an individual and drops the suit or loses -- is that substantial punative damages need to be assessed to compensate the individual for lost time, their savings being used unexpectedly (what if they were planning to use that money for a new car or needed home repairs? What if they had to stop contributing to their retirement savings to pay their lawyer?), and for the stress of the lawsuit on the individual. Only with substantial punative damages will the RIAA have enough disincentive to file poorly-researched "shotgun"-style lawsuits.
I would think not paying a single red cent for something you didn't do would be quite the incentive. I must be frank, if you are right and you know it, you have a duty to fight. Rolling over because it's easy is both personally and socially irresponsible, and the fear of personal bankruptcy isn't one that would deter me. YMMV.
It's easy to see why an entity like RIAA should be forced to pay legal fees if it loses or drops its case, but making that award automatic would be even worse in the long run.
If a person sues a chemical company for polluting a lake, and the company gets off, it will wreck the person who tried to sue. A few million is corporate discovery costs and lawyers it too much to risk.
I think the relative difference in resources between the litigating entities should be considered. In the "david vs goliath" scenario, david should never be made to pay and goliath should be made to pay upon loss. That is hard to codify into law.
If you do that, then nobody would DARE to sue IBM, MS, or whoever. MS pays their lawyers better than any other corporation in the industry. Imagine MS being able to run amoke, says that you can sue them, and of course, makes certain that your funds and lawyer's fund will give out LONG before they agree to anything. Now, you are stuck with their bill. If you are person, you just declare bankruptcy. If you are a business, MS owns you. No lawyer will take this on contigency.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While that sounds good, in this case the RIAA didn't even know if they were suing the right person. The case was dropped when it was shown that it was not this guy doing downloading, so that essentially he is having to pay court costs to prove he wasn't guilty. A good counter suit to the tune of 3 times his costs or more should help set the right precedent. If the **AA continues to sue people without being sure they are even suing the right people, their evidence is flawed horrendously. Sure, there is some purchase here for using the probable cause phrase, but in the end they were wrong and significantly distressed and inconvenienced this guy.
Without discovery (in this case a fishing trip) the RIAA cannot even be sure if there is anyone to sue. They don't have direct evidence of copyright infringement. They don't have anything more than circumstantial evidence in most cases.
IANAL but...
If Mr X has a gun that is the same kind as used to kill Mr Y, and Mr X was in the area of the murder at the time of the murder and had previously fought with Mr Y. The bullet was too damaged to do ballistics on it. That is circumstantial evidence. Pretty good but circumstantial
If Mr X has a gun that is the same kind as used to kill Mr Y, and Mr X was in the area of the murder at the time of the murder and had previously fought with Mr Y. The bullet ballistically matched Mr X's gun. Witnesses saw them together within minutes of the estimated time of death. That is strong evidence. This is what the RIAA does not have.
Taking Mr X to trial on circumstantial evidence has a matter of risk to it. They might not be able to convince a jury that Mr X killed Mr Y. He might have a good alibi. OR They may convict him only to find out 30 years later that Mrs Y killed him with the same kind of gun.
Basically, the RIAA uses bad evidence, circumstantial evidence, and other techniques to get convictions and runs away when they think they will lose. It's a shotgun approach. Sue everyone we can, let the complainers go free.
Right now the RIAA is telling artists that they represent that there is little to nothing left of all the money they got from Napster, so the RIAA can't really give them much of the rewards for that effort. It all went to lawyers.
Add all that up and the case against the RIAA looks bad for them. They are suing the wrong people, causing harm, ruining credibility, and their efforts are not even benefiting those they represent in court. I would not call that frivolous, I'd call it malicious.
How to bring that all together in court is a problem I'm not sure how to handle though. Clearly some retribution is called for against a bully that uses the legal system to bludgeon ordinary citizens with few resources into paying them 'protection' money.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This is patent law I'm talking about, prior art doesn't matter!
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Attorneys fees in copyright cases can be, **but do not have to be**, awarded to the "prevailing party." See 17 USC 505. This is different from most cases under US law, in which a prevailing defendant typically isn't entitled to seek a fee award. (BTW, if a copyright plaintiff did not have timely registration of its copyrights, it cannot get attorneys fees even if it prevails. See 17 USC 412) Contrary to some of the comments (which I strongly suspect are not from attorneys, much less copyright specialists), you do *not* have to file a counterclaim in order to get fees as a prevailing defendant in a copyright case: you merely file a fee application seeking fees and costs at the end of the case, and the court rules on it as they would any motion.
The law is very well-settled that the decision to award attorneys fees in a copyright case is a matter committed to the sound discretion of the district court -- which is lawspeak for "whatever the trial court decides is going to hold up on appeal except in very rare situations." I read the chances of Los Supremos granting cert on this one as between extremely slim and none, and the chances of them granting cert and holding that a prevailing defendant -- even one who prevails against the RIAA -- **automatically** getting fees to be absolutely zero. It's just not gonna happen, folks.
As a matter of policy, *should* prevailing defendants be automatically entitled to fees in copyright cases? Perhaps. However, given the clear language of section 505, if you think that should be the law, you need to be petitioning Congress, not the Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court receives 7,000 or so petitions for review each year. It grants 150. About a quarter of these will ultimately be disposed of in single line or less.
The screening process begins with the Court's law clerks, who sift through the petitions and settle upon a select few that they deem worthy of consideration by the justices. Next, inside a closed conference room, the Chief Justice leads the meeting in which the Justices discuss the petitions and vote aloud on which cases they find more significant and deserving of deliberation. Voting begins with the Chief Justice and is followed by the Associate Justices according to seniority. The most junior Justice...takes the handwritten notes that will be passed to a clerk for public announcement... To be considered, a case must receive at least four votes. Whether or not a case is accepted "strikes me as a rather subjective decision, made up in part of intuition and in part of legal judgement," Rehnquist wrote in his book, "The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is." In deciding whether to review a case, the Court will generally consider whether the legal question was decided differently by two lower courts and needs resolution by a higher court, whether a lower court decision conflicts with an existing Supreme Court ruling, and whether the issue could have broader social significance beyond the interests of the two parties involved. However, not all cases of significant social issues needing resolution are accepted by the Supreme Court.
A History of the Supreme Court
In general, the idea of granting legal fees to the winner is something that is a tricky balancing act for fairness.
Most of the time, the person filing the suit should not get their legal fees, because most of the time, if the outcome isn't enough to justify the fees, why did you file in the first place? Generally, if you need to sue someone, the harm should be worth the cost to the society at large (court costs) and worth the legal fees or why did you sue?
The idea of granting fees to a winning defender is more interesting, but suffers from the problem of unequal footing. If I want to sue Microsoft or Google or Ford, they can immediately pile up bazillions of dollars of legal fees in their defense. If I lose, I lose _everything_ for the mistake of suing them. I might even be in the right, but have lost because their lawyers were better, and I would be punished for the temerity of suing.
Therefore, in the case of successfully defending against a lawsuit, the standard in the US has long been that for the defender to get their fees, they need to prove that the lawsuit was more than just wrong, but was somehow evil, that it was frivolous, or harrassing, or otherwise created with the full knowledge that it was without basis in the first place.
In the case presented here, the district court, and the appeals court both said, "The owner of the IP address is a reasonable target to sue. If you find out that he wasn't the one who infringed, well and good, we dismiss the suit, but that didn't make it frivolous."
That's not a COMPLETELY ridiculous position. Of course, we know, and the defendant claims that the RIAA makes no effort to confirm identity before it sues, and that therefore, the suit was frivolous in that sense, but on face, the idea isn't insane, only their implementation of it.
The problem is, if we change the rules so that the successful defendant AUTOMATICALLY gets their legal fees, the precedent will not be restricted to RIAA cases, and the chilling effect on consumers may well be "bad"
Most of that badness can be eliminated by a system of caps on recovered fees similar to the cap on legal fees for lawyers working on social security disability cases, but that requires legislation, and should not be put into place by an activist judiciary.