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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."
How is this different from any other type of corporate lawsuit? Raising settlement costs if the other party prolongs the case is hardly new.
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.
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.
My girlfriend IAL; she says this particular practice of the RIAA is perfectly legal. A party to a civil litigation can alter the settlement terms basically however they want, whenever they want (subject to public policy, of course: RIAA can't alter the terms to include the forfeit of your firstborn child or whatever). A settlement is just a contract, after all.
This makes sense, so the argument goes, because a party's costs for litigating a particular case become higher and higher as the case progresses. So, the settlement costs must increase concordantly.
Your GF might be right if they were stating that they would ask for a higher settlement if the case was prolonged but in the case mentioned here its no different then my walking into every store on the block and threatening a lawsuit for $8000 if they didn't pay me $3000 now. Remember that when the RIAA sends out their little settlement letters they have already dropped a lawsuit against Doe, have not filed the new lawsuit, and it isn't the RIAA legal team who are asking for the money.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.