Slashdot Mirror
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."
Honestly the RIAA should just stop all this and invest in the Tubes and maybe charge in this way. Artist would then distribute through some RIAA developer method which would not take a cut. Then the RIAA could then just charge for the bandwidth.
My blog
However, as someone who's never illegally downloaded or uploaded music or movies or software over the Internet, this case really has no bearing on me personally.
Tell me again why this doesn't affect you. The *AA have shown again and again that the facts of the case really don't matter -- espescially when it comes to the method they use for identifying litigants, IP addresses. If your ISP has floating IP addresses, then this could easily become your problem.
[move
For that matter...where are any April Fools articles?? I hope they're still gonna do them....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Apparently she has to file a 3rd revision now.
Hope this is not an Aprils Fool, its about time somebody tried to roast those fuckers.
And I right that this is one of those situations that she was one of the few people who had a chance of doing this as she already had them in court and could add it in as an amendment?
If Joe Public tried this they would probably be able to block it before they got to court, no?
I just love the irony that they originally tried to block the complaint because it was not detailed enough, and that backfired when it came back as 100+ pages of **AA damming dirty laundry in their faces. Heh Heh.
Being innocent of file sharing doesn't mean you won't get sued. I seem to recall a story about a Macintosh using Granny who was accused of using Kazaa (not available on Macs) to download rap music. It was only the publicity of the story that got the RIAA to back down. (And even then they reserved the right to go after her at any time.) It was obvious to everyone (except the RIAA) that she was misidentified. And if you are misidentified, your options are basically:
1. Spend a lot of time and money to fight to prove your innocence. If you are not successful, the fines will drive you into permanent bankruptcy. (If the legal fees don't do that first.)
2. Accept the RIAA's settlement offer to make it all go away. NOTE: Part of the settlement offer is admitting that you are a pirate even if you aren't one. But at least you won't face a long court battle and possible bankruptcy.
Most people chose Option #2 since it is the quicker and easier way to make it all go away. With recent RIAA court losses, though, it seems that more people are willing to try for Option #1. That's a good thing too. The last thing the RIAA wants is to actually fight these cases in court. They just want quick settlements so they can move on to the next victim... er, evil, bloodsucking pirate.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Three lawsuits for the Jersey yutes using WiFi,
Seven for the little kids in their third-grade lab,
Nine for college men who share on the sly,
One for the RIAA on its dark throne
In the land of Washington where the lawyers lie.
One suit to end them all, one suit to crush them,
One suit to expose them all and in the courtroom brush them
From the land of Washington where the lawyers lie.
>> It would be very easy to demonstrate to a judge in a court room that in the case
>> of most ISPs, IP addresses are dynamic and do not stay fixed on a particular PC;
>> I'm sure even the most basic of ISP logs would clearly show this.
And yet, the *AA have attempted to show that this doesn't matter at countless colleges and universities by forcing the burden of proof upon these institutions. "We know you have a thief among you, find them for us" is not how a case should be built.
>> that means that legal CD purchasers like me pay more for our purchasers and end
>> up subsidising the thieves.
Afraid not. You pay more for your music because the record labels and the RIAA wish it to be so.
The fact is that sales have risen during these years where "piracy" has run rampant. I would link to statistics, but I am at work and don't have time to find them. I'm sure someone else will do it at some point.
>> If everyone chose to steal their music, what would happen then?
Well, hopefully, the RIAAs of the world would realize that their business model isn't something most people are interested in funding. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like paying $15 for a CD that has one or two interesting tracks and 10 garbage tracks, and that's what they are forcing me to do in most cases. Services like iTunes allow me to bypass this antiquated way of doing business, so I use iTunes where I can.
Where I can't use iTunes, I refuse to spend the money until I know that the product (in its entirety) is worth paying for, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
The first thing a judge does is strip your case down to its essemtials.
The broader the reach and more fanciful your demands, the more quickly they disappear from view.
- - and never faster then when you try to persuade a court to make policy decisions in criminal law when they are hearing a civil case.
I see no constitutional barriers to the launch of a private criminal investigation. There was, after all, no such thing as a paid, professional, police force in the U.S. before 1845. Police History
The Pinkerton Detective - "The eye that never sleeps" - dates from 1850.
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.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You're already dead. Please find a grave to lie in already.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
>>>If everyone chose to steal their music, what would happen then?
Several studies have shown that if "everyone" stole music, then CD sales would escalate higher than ever. I know that sounds strange, but here's how it works:
- A person downloads songs for free.
- He/she likes the songs.
- He/she buys several CDs of that same artist, because they enjoy his or her work.
- The result is a several sales that would not have occured otherwise.
BEFORE: The person bought $0.00 worth of CDs.
NOW: The person bought $30-40 worth of CDs.
NET IMPACT: More money for the company and the artist. Stealing music helps sell more product by introducing people to new artists they had never heard before.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
This reminds me of a story I recently read:
- A man had setup a website with the name of a local mall. It was strictly an information site (like a Trekkie fan site, but this was for a mall). The local mall didn't want the website to exist, so they sued him using cyber-squatter laws. Initially the website owner lost his case, but eventually he repealed to the State Supreme Court and won. - It cost him ~$3000 in legal fees that he never recovered.
Big corporations like to go after & abuse the little guy, just because they can do it, and if the Corporation loses the case it's no big deal (just 0.000001% of their profit), but it causes major damage to the average citizen.
Big corporations need to be stopped. Corporations should be required to pay ALL legal fees for the cases they bring against individuals (unless the corporation takes the case to verdict & wins).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I run a web site that provides free hosting to bands that I think have a clue and my site has been banned by many universities because of the RIAA which has resulted in the bands not getting gigs in the US and other countries. From my point of view, the RIAA's actions are purely to prevent additional competition.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
"But you have stolen Mr. King's labor..."
Mr King's amount and intensity of labor is the same to write the book whether I download his book or buy it in Wal-mart.
Now if I download it, I may have infringed on someones copyright, but I have not stolen anything.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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:
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.