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RIAA Says "Wanna Fight? It'll Cost You!"
jeiler writes "Ars has the details on an RIAA strategy to double the cost of settling copyright infringement suits for students who try to quash the group's subpoenas in court. In a nutshell: settle early, pay $3,000; try to quash the subpoena and the settlement cost rises to $8,000."
This can't possibly be a frosty.
How is this different from any other type of corporate lawsuit? Raising settlement costs if the other party prolongs the case is hardly new.
How is this not racketeering and extortion? I mean, c'mon...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The **AA's, Law, and regular citizens opinion of wrong all differ greatly. In fact regular citizens cannot agree where exactly the line should be drawn. Right or wrong will also differ with the law depending on individual judges interpretations of the law as well.
and prolong the fight, and if loses, declare bankruptcy.
It's simply a tactic to make resistant seem more frightening. Most people don't understand the situation they're in, and the thought of another $5000 plus lawyer fees may be enough to make them shell out $3000.
Of course, if they go to court, and win, they have no reason to settle. If they go to court and lose, then they probably have to pay an excessively larger amount.
So who is this for anyways? People who go halfway through and quit? They're (obviously) just trying to discourage people from fighting it.
Fnord.
So who is this for anyways? People who go halfway through and quit?
Odd. Of the court cases that actually go to court, I've noticed it's usually the RIAA that try to quit half way through.
I understand that raising the cost of settling out of court is meant to deter people from fighting in the first place, but considering the ludicrous fines they expect people to pay, it's a little too low. Looks to me like they're just trying to highlight their low, low prices, to avoid people setting a precedent in court, against them.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
This is good news. Rather than "Fight and it'll cost you" in reality they are offering a discount to people who settle. See, the thing is, one man cannot fight the RIAA in court. But now they are faced with hundreds, even thousands of people challenging them. And they haven't been winning, usually due to lack of evidence that any infringement actually occured. So they aren't recouping the cost of their really expensive teams of corporate attorneys, long discovery sessions, return after return to the courtroom, etc. If we ALL fought at once, they would go out of business or be forced to change their model. They are starting to recognize it, and now they just want to capture as much as they can to pay their lawyers huge bills.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Excluding the illegal downloads arena (which I know is what they're suing over), I think half the problem is the *AA not keeping up with technology.
At home I have a sizeable DVD collection (around 230 at last count), but with the release of Blu-Ray I'm starting to realize that my collection will eventually be obsolete (such as when DVD first came out, and people with a reasonable VCR collection realized that their collection would eventually be worth squat).
I think this is one of the reasons people download (the other reasons being ridiculous prices, etc). People realize that technology changes - CD collections have been superseeded by portable MP3 players (ipod and the likes), VCR's replaced with DVD's which will eventually lose out to blu-ray (once the prices down).
And people realize this - why should you pay for a CD/DVD, which will eventually become obsolete, when you can get what you want in a digital format (for a cheaper price)?
This is a civil case. That means it isn't so easy to defend yourself. In a criminal case the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a fairly high standard because it means, just as it says there must be no reasonable doubt that you committed the crime for the jury to convict. That means that the prosecution actually has to prove their case, the defense needn't do anything at all if they don't. Also in a criminal trial, you get a lawyer, even if you can't afford one. Public defenders generally aren't as good as high paid lawyers, but they are lawyers none the less who can help you navigate the complexities of the legal system.
A civil case has a much lower standard, the preponderance of the evidence. More or less that means whoever has the more convincing argument. There can still be reasonable doubt, so long as one side seems to present better evidence, then they win. Also, you aren't given a lawyer, you have to pay for one yourself.
So even if you are innocent, paying the extortion money can be the easy out to take. It'd be real hard to mount a defense for $30,000, much less $3,000. Even if you do, they could still win.
That's the problem here. It isn't one of these "Oh you are innocent so you have nothing to worry about." No, you have a lot to worry about. Either you pay a ton of money to hire a lawyer to try to defend yourself, or you do it all by yourself and almost certainly lose just because you don't understand the legal system.
But they won't. It's an organisation with a legion of Chewbacca-Defense lawyers. The one thing they're good at is smoke-screens, and if they want to hide something, or make it exceptionally difficult to find out who actually wrote that policy, they can.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Bad analogy. A traffic ticket is a criminal offense. Getting sued by the RIAA is a civil matter. Furthermore, they are by no means obligated to even offer a settlement in the first place, so they can set and change the bar wherever and whenever they like.
It's shitty, but not illegal.
You know, you can just make free content for the internet and ignore the copyrighted kind (if you're so uncreative that you cannot make stuff without copying other works maybe you are unfit to be a content maker), that way you get your world and we get ours.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
RICO? Are you fucking kidding me? They aren't threatening anyone to keep them from defending themselves. Think about the kind of stuff that the RICO statutes were trying to criminalize and tell me if you can still say that with a straight face. If nothing else raising the settlement costs might encourage people to go the defense route instead of settling.
C'mon, people. Stop making arguments based on emotion instead of logic and facts. The RIAA and their army of lawyers are fucking scumbags, no doubt. And we have kind of a screwed up system here (yes, that was an understatement) which isn't making matters any easier. But spewing nonsense like this will get us nowhere.
If you settle right away, it costs them less. If you fight it, they spend more in legal fees. It's not only legal to do this, it's appropriate.
People like you make the RIAA look like the smart, honest ones.
That is not a good thing.
What loyal customers? There aren't any CD shops anywhere anymore. The only remaining ones are online and they will eventually die out too.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Two points:
1) Not all speed limits are put there because it's dangerous to exceed them, so breaking a speed limit is not in and of itself an immoral act.
2) How is recklessly endangering one's self immoral?
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
This pushes the emphasis back onto social contract: because it is hard to detect a driver's skill, a single standard is set for all, which better drivers are expected to buy into since they believe in society.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Go look up the meaning of the tragedy of the commons. Specifically, although it would benefit the whole public to challenge the RIAA collectively, what you're going to end up with is a bunch of people who are intimidated into a settlement for that most selfish of purposes, self-preservation. You're not going to see everyone fight together, it's not in human nature.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
The fact this kind of thing isn't blatantly illegal is just another example of how f**ked up this country's legal system is as it gives big business free rides and doesn't give two s**ts about the average person...
2) You don't live in a deserted island. Injuring yourself will have a cost for society. There will be minor inconveniences to a few people who are counting on you (boss, coworkers, clients...); there will be a lot of people who'll get late to work because you're body is blocking the road; depending on where you live, society will have to pay for cleaning up the mess, repair on public damage, hospital...
I understand what you're saying here, and there is a point to it.
That being said however, giving government power to control behavior and write laws based on this principal can be a very dangerous thing to do. I believe that any costs to be assessed against an individual on these grounds should only be a result of a civil action between citizens.
Once you've opened the door to government control of, and given it the ability to pass legislation concerning, ones' own personal behaviors and activities as it affects ones' own health and safety and/or costs to society, such laws, regulations, and legislation are subject to subsequent interpretation and re-interpretations later that tend to unnecessarily restrict peoples' normal activities and behaviors far beyond the intentions of the original framers of said laws/regulations/legislation.
Every human activity engenders some form of risk and cost to society. Parachuting, gun ownership, exploration (terrestrial and space), swimming, and riding a motorcycle to name but a few examples, all engender personal risk that will add costs to society if one is hurt or killed.
Giving government the ability to restrict behavior financially and/or imprison people for taking risks gives the government the power to restrict or forbid practically any activity it chooses, and veto power over any proposed action or endeavor. All government needs, once the door to control these activities and behaviors is legally opened, is to find a friendly court to interpret the legislation how they wish.
As the saying goes, any power given to the government will at some point be abused by those in power for their own ends. Our only defense as citizens is to grant the government as few powers as possible, and to keep the government weak enough to not be a danger.
One need look no further for proof of this concept than the US government (and most other 1st-world governments) in its'/their current state(s), and changing the figureheads or the legislative puppets for a 'D' or 'R' (or whatever the mainstream political parties' initial or insignia happens to be) by their names will not change this once a certain threshold of government size and power has been passed.
This characteristic of human governments, I believe, is where Thomas Jeffersons' concept of the Tree of Liberty needing to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants comes from.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
There's one simple way to stop the RIAA, MPAA, BSA silliness...make the member companies jointly liable for the excesses of the enforcement organization. Apply the same regulations for bill collectors. As long as they're playing by the rules and obeying the law, no problem. But if you're responsible for the actions of a collection agency you hire, you might be a little more selective about who you pick. Likewise if Sony, BMG and the others found themselves exposed to liability, they might lean on RIAA to play by the rules. In fact, I'd be willing to bet RIAA membership would drop significantly overnight.
I had a dispute with Dish Network a couple years ago, they tried to blame an advertising partner for the problem.
It would change the entire outsourcing landscape. If the local hospital is responsible for the actions of outsource contractors, they might think twice before hiring medical transcription services from Abduls Discount Transcription in downtown Pakistan. As long as companies can insulate themselves from liability when trying to cut corners the silliness is going to continue.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
They've convinced their Clients this legal service and the lawyers are rackin' up the billable hours.
Realize that an organization (any organization) becomes less self-aware (right hand knows what left hand is doing) as it becomes larger. Once it gets to a certain size, behaviour becomes fragmented--you'll often see one department working at cross purposes to another in the same company.
Ask anybody who's ever worked for the government (even a city government), or a Fortune 100 company.
The answer to the question "Why do they do something that is clearly self destructive?" is that there is no "they", and the folks that are doing the suing know *exactly* what they're doing.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Maybe it's time for some viral civil disobedience. Dual-layer DVD's hold a fair amount of music. Maybe we need to start burning our music collections and leaving them in public places for people to scarf. Hell even a SL-DVD would be enough to get a fair amount out there.
How is that *not* extortion? Someone? Anyone? This is ridiculous. These boys have to go down!
So I'm curious. If you don't believe in intellectual property, then I guess you don't believe in the GPL either?
If music and software producers have no right to prevent large scale copying of their work, then it would seem it's also okay to say that when an individual produces some software and gives it away for free that it's okay for a corporation to incorporate it into a for sale product and neither compensate you for writing the software in the first place nor make the source code available.
Do I have that correct?
The canonical example is the federally mandated 55mph speed limit put in force in the early 70's. It was initially instituted as a fuel saving measure, but dogmatic "safety nazis" pointed to a correlated reduction in accidents and it became "common wisdom" that a lower limit is safer. When the federal 55 limit was eased in 88 and repealed in the 90's, there were all kinds of dire predictions of increased mayhem on the highways. In reality, accidents went down! The problem is that elected officials and bureaucrats don't actually understand the 85th percentile rule. The safest limit is one where 85% of drivers naturally obey the limit. The 55 limit saw compliance rates under 20%! Studies (see pg 88) show that nearly all posted limits are 8 to 12 mph below the 85th percentile.
So what about the reduction in accidents in 1974? Well, it's a classic case of "correlation is not necessarily causation". The late 1960's saw a dramatic improvement in the safety of automobiles. Everything from increased use of radial instead of bias ply tires to mandatory seat belts came into play in the late 60's. The biggest improvement, however, was the 1968 mandate of front wheel disc brakes. If you've never driven a car with 4 wheel drum brakes, it's easy to miss the importance of this. So starting in '68 you have all new cars being equipped with disc brakes. The "replacement point" on cars of that vintage was around 5 years, meaning that the majority of driving miles were logged in cars 5 or fewer years old. Older cars were still driven, but were largely relegated to secondary status (e.g. wife's car, kid's car, etc). So around 1973 the tide turns from drum brakes to disc brakes... and accidents went down. It was pure chance that the 55 limit coincided with that. Really, the 55 limit was more dangerous, but the increase in vehicle safety hid that. Sadly, we still have morons like you who blindly belive the mythology. Perhaps that can be changed by people like me handing out education and insults, but I'm not optimistic. Injuring yourself will have a cost for society. This is an utterly invalid reason for laws curtailing behavior in a free society. Free individuals do not "owe" society anything. Society is a voluntary association. Fucking safety nazi shitheads like you would do well to understand that.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Utter and complete bullshit, and what's really sad is that I'm not surprised. Being sued, right or wrong, shouldn't be about how much money you have to defend yourself, damnit, especially when you're faced with a terrorist organization like the RIAA. Fucking bastards!
I agree wholeheartedly with every single one of your points. However, the poster you're responding to stated his opinions without any personal attacks. You really had no reason to call him a "moron" and a "shithead".
Your arguments really were strong enough that you didn't need to stoop down to that level in order to be heard. In the future, I'd urge you to keep that in mind.
"Because it is exceedingly rare that an individual bears the entire burden of his actions solely on his own shoulders. In reality, actions have consequences _that affect other people as well as the actor_. So, recklessly endangering oneself may well be immoral."
Your argument would only hold water if any action with negative consequences for others is immoral, including things such as buying a product from one vendor instead of another (which deprives the other vendor of income from me), or choosing to walk a couple of miles to a destination instead of paying a taxi driver to take me there, which has a negative effect on the taxi driver's income.
Modern society is such a complex web of interdependencies that it's absolutely impossible to live in it without negatively affecting somebody in ways that are completely predictable if we take the time to think about them. So by your definition of morality, it's impossible for us to avoid being immoral, which means that recklessly endangering one's self is merely one of the several immoral acts that we're all guilty of on a daily basis.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.