Slashdot Mirror
Judge Tells RIAA To Stop 'Bankrupting' Litigants
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Boston judge who has consolidated all of the RIAA's Massachusetts cases into a single case over which she has been presiding for the past 5 years delivered something of a rebuke to the RIAA's lawyers, we have learned. At a conference this past June, the transcript of which (PDF) has just been released, Judge Nancy Gertner said to them that they 'have an ethical obligation to fully understand that they are fighting people without lawyers ... to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it ...' She also acknowledged that 'there is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. The judge did not seem to acknowledge any responsibility on her part, however, for having created the 'imbalance,' and also stated that the law is 'overwhelmingly on the side of the record companies,' even though she seems to recognize that for the past 5 years she has been hearing only one side of the legal story."
technological advances are running so far ahead of society's ability to adjust to and digest the implications of new technology, that as the advances get too far ahead, you get these absurdities which amount to nothing more than entrenched interests fighting progress
the riaa is as if the monk scribe's union rose up and sued operators of printing presses. incredibly stupid, but also impossible since the introduction of new technology back then proceeded at a slower clip
as society advances, its rate of progress seems to be retarded in a number of ways. a sort of trailing edge of reactionism, militant mediocrity, and end of the world believers
if progress is to continue in this world, the trailing edge can no longer be relied upon to simply slide into obscurity unnoticed and powerless. a sort of organized backlash arms itself against progress and undermines it
we must actively fight the trailing edge of progress. whether on legal issues, or in the relam of social morals. social conservatives and reactionary business practices must be waged war on. simply because they are already waging war on progress
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why should someone accused of copyright infringement have it any easier (cheaper), than someone accused of running a red light, or breaking a contract, or committing a felony (tort, civil, and criminal examples mixed here deliberately)?
The judge is part of the Judiciary, that slowly made litigation a very expensive option — heal thyself, and consider awarding legal expenses to the winners, whoever they are, by default (rather than by special request, as happens now).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"The judge did not seem to acknowledge any responsibility on her part, however, for having created the 'imbalance'"
What are you talking about? No, because she didn't create the imbalance. The legislators and litigants created it. The legislators by creating the relevant laws, the RIAA created it by suing people, and the people being sued provoked the RIAA by allegedly sharing the files in question. Copyright law exists to stipulate who is within their rights and who isn't, and the judge is there to PRESIDE over the case and the decision, the procedure for which is also constrained by law.
The imbalance exists because the RIAA has loads of money and the people they've decided to sue don't. Did the judge establish that situation? No. To imply that she's at fault for even hearing the case is silly (it's her job), unless you think the case shouldn't be heard simply because one litigant has loads of money and the other doesn't. It would be an interesting precedent.
Punitive damages shouldn't even be given to the plaintiff. Their intent is to punish, not compensate, so the money should just go to help fix that fourteen digit debt we've been racking up.
" companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. "
..." lawyers turned around and sued the very people they represented because they wanted a bigger share of the blood money."
It's a symptom of a broken legal system when self representation is "futile" and legal fees become "blood money". Yes, some might argue that lawyers are expert, trained professionals, so it only stands to reason that it would be futile for an untrained citizen to stand against them in court. That argument would make perfect sense if you were talking about pros vs joes in a different venue like sports or some industry specific contest. But the purpose of a court room isn't to determine the best performance or find a winner and a loser. A courtroom is a place to find the truth in a legal or civil dispute. Now is some of the participants are unskilled at the labyrinthine dance of courtroom etiquette, then the process should merely become less efficient at determining the truth, not less accurate. That this is not the case show a onerous flaw in our system. A flaw which has allowed lawyers to become a elite class within our supposedly egalitarian society, just look at their pay scale and tendency to become government officials.
I realize that I am idealizing what our courtroom and legal system should be, but we have to pursue idealism in our societal systems to minimize the damage done by the imperfect humans that take part in those systems.
We are all just people.
Those terms as you stated, were created before P2P existed, and are no longer accurate, and should be changed to include new technologies and methodologies.
It's doubtful that using the old "This is what they terms have always meant." will fly in a court of law. I am convinced that most ISP's will agree, that P2P users are absolultely "uploading". All networking equipment I have managed calls it that.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
That's a careful, nuanced analysis, which is definitely a big credit to you, but I'm afraid you're treating the meanings of these words as being more fixed than they actually are. The way I read you, you're analyzing and classifying file transfers not only in terms of the sender and the receiver, but also in terms of protocol type (client/server vs. peer-to-peer), protocol role of each party (client, server or peer), and request role (initiator vs. responder). This seems to give us the 6 following possibilities:
Now, I agree with you that the terms "uploading" and "downloading" seem to fit cases (1) and (2) best. But I would seriously entertain the hypothesis that this is merely because, historically, those two were the original file transfer scenarios, and thus, are the prototypical cases.
Now, you seem to be proposing that the terms can or should only ever mean cases (1) and (2). This is just not how language works, however. Basically, faced with cases (3)-(6), with a vocabulary of words that prototypically refer to cases (1) and (2), it will be very common for people to generalize the meaning of the words to cover those new cases. Now, there are several ways the meaning can be generalized, but the one that seems to be at stake here is to drop out the client/server distinction, and making the "uploader" be a responder that sends a file to an initiator that requests said file.
This is quite a natural semantic extension, linguistically speaking. Basically, the original usage examples for "upload" all describe case (2), but nothing about the examples can possibly tell what's essential to the meaning of the word, and what's just accidental to the examples. In simpler words, if you were a computer trying to infer the meaning of the word "upload" from examples that only showed type (2), you'd have no way of knowing whether the client/server distinction was essential and exceptionless, or whether you just happened to get a data set that didn't have any examples of the word being used in another sense. And you can't expect the way people infer word meanings from usage to be any better than that.
So really, I don't think there is any absolute, authoritative answer to give in this case. The best you can do is point out (correctly, I think) that senses (1) and (2) are the "best" in some statistical or prototypical sense. The key thing to keep in mind, however, is that the extension of the meaning of the word to closely related cases is quite unsurprising, and usually follows some sort of rule.
Are you adequate?
Only if coders somehow are granted the power to summon you into producing an application or go to jail.
That's the thing, participation in the justice system is sometimes compulsory even if you have done no wrong. If that happens and you can't scrape together a pile of cash (or a great deal of sympathy), the truth won't help you.
The substitution also fails since coders very rarely become government officials (they do sometimes become minor government functionaries but that's hardly the same).
By the way, you are partially right: there is one category of traffic offenses that are not criminal. Those are offenses recorded by automated cameras. There's no actual human to act as accuser, so it's not possible to defend against (i.e., to exercise the defendant's 6th Amendment rights). So instead, the corrupt bastards in the government made it what you call an "administrative" offense: sure, they lose the ability to put the defendent in jail, but who cares? It removes all those pesky "civil rights" that impede the government's ability to impose and collect fine$!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Coder is a really good analogy. Think back to the days when you needed to punch your fortran code into cards to send an email (and yes I know this is technically wrong). This benefits the coders who work the system, the sysadmins (who are also coders) who run the system, and the OS designers who developed the system (who are also coders). It's a nice legal monopoly, but it is far from user friendly. Of course, it's easier to buy a new computer than to migrate to a new country, so IT been a more efficient market driven system.
Now consider the fact that the lawyers are paid to the work the system, the judges (who are also lawyers) administer the sytem, and politicians and legal advisers (many of whom are lawyers, especially the ones that draft legislation) are also lawyers. It's a nice little piece of white-collar union thuggery, but you can't get away from it without leaving the country, so market forces don't make it more friendly.