Lawsuit Against RIAA Tries To Stop Them All

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Tanya Anderson has filed an amended complaint against the RIAA. One of the more interesting provisions in it is in the 18th claim, which seeks to stop the RIAA from 'continuing to engage in criminal investigation of private American citizens', no doubt referring to the unlicensed MediaSentry investigations. If granted, that could shut down the RIAA lawsuits entirely. Naturally, the RIAA doesn't like this at all. First, they got the judge to agree that the original complaint was too light on the details, so it was amended. Now the RIAA complains that it's too long, because it's 108 pages filled with the RIAA's dirty laundry. You may remember this as the countersuit to the lawsuit where RIAA lawyers tried to grill a 10-year-old girl, only later to drop their case for lack of evidence and have the mother sue them for malicious prosecution."

Comments

Re:Tubes

[Bubbahyde]

What they should do is reinvest the 'funds' and get some acceptable talent going so music would be worth buying again. The crap they try to pawn off as music nowadays...

be sure to read the update at the bottom.

[n3tcat]

Apparently she has to file a 3rd revision now.

Re:Doubt that's even possible.

[geminidomino]

There is.

It's called Vexatious Litigation

Re:Doubt that's even possible.

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, let's check with a law dictionary on that one:

n. filing a lawsuit with the knowledge that it has no legal basis, with its purpose to bother, annoy, embarrass and cause legal expenses to the defendant. Vexatious litigation includes continuing a lawsuit after discovery of the facts shows it has absolutely no merit. Upon judgment for the defendant, he/she has the right to file a suit for "malicious prosecution" against the original vexatious plaintiff. Moreover, most states allow a judge to penalize with sanctions a plaintiff and his/her attorney for filing or continuing a "frivolous" legal action (money award to the defendant for the trouble and/or attorney fees). In other words, it has to be shown the the RIAA's lawsuit 1) has no legal basis and 2) that the RIAA and its laywers knew it had no legal basis and sued only to "bother, annoy, embarass and cause legal expenses to the defendant."

Thing is, some of the cases the RIAA has filed do have legal basis (these are the ones you don't hear about in the media and are settled out of court quickly), and while some of the most egregious examples might approach might approach vexatious litigation, I doubt you'll find a judge to agree that all of them do.

Re:RIAA

[sm62704]

God damn it somebody please mod that as TROLL. The link goes to the NIMP thing. For that matter why can't anything pointing to a known trojan be filtered out??

THIS comment is offtopic. The above comment is dangerous to your computer. I have to hand it to the asshat who posted it, he managed to make the status bar report that the link was to yahoo, and somehow overcame the slashcode that reports a link's domain at the end of the link.

Re:Doubt that's even possible.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Just to help you think about it --- corporations are nothing more than groups of individual citizens. A group of citizens has as much Constitutionally-granted rights and freedoms as an individual citizen. I stand corrected, but only mostly :) A bit of digging turned up Ohralik V. Ohio, which did essentially find that while corporations are protected, they are not afforded the same level of protection as citizens.

Re:I really hope she wins this

[Dhalka226]

Not the OP, however: I understand the incredulity, but here's one study I was given in a telecommunications economics class. (The link from my school's website appears to be gone, but based on filename this is the same PDF I saw):

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

A quick excerpt from the abstract:

Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.

The basic conclusion, if I remember correctly, was: The top 1% of artists in terms of popularity lose sales due to pirated songs, and the rest actually see their sales increase with piracy. Obviously you can fact-check this yourself to see if my recollection is correct.