Slashdot Mirror
New Hampshire Law Students Take On RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "We have recently learned that another law school legal aid clinic has joined the fight against the RIAA. Student attorneys from the Consumer and Commercial Law Clinic
of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire, working under law school faculty supervision, are representing
a lady targeted by the RIAA in UMG Recording v. Roy in New Hampshire. The case is scheduled for trial next Fall. That makes at least 4 law schools providing anti-RIAA defense services: University of Maine,
University of San Francisco, Franklin Pierce, and, most recently, Harvard. Hopefully many
more will follow. One commentator theorizes that this news 'will ... [encourage] professors and students at other law schools to take on hitherto defenseless people being pilloried by the corporate music industry.'"
We need more of this to happen! See, not all lawyers are bad.
Don't Tread on Me! Baby!
BUT: "Circumstantial" does not mean any of the following, about evidence: (1) inadmissible; (2) insufficient to prove a fact in court; or (3) unreliable. You can be convicted of murder based on nothing but circumstantial evidence, if it is strong enough. Otherwise, murderers who hide their victims' bodies the best could not be convicted. And the RIAA only has to prove infringement by a preponderance of the evidence, a much lower standard of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt as required for a criminal conviction.
This is about the RIAA's abuse of the discovery process and, in particular, its filing lawsuits for the sole purpose of collecting evidence through discovery. You personally can't just send me interrogatories without having a pending lawsuit against me, and you also can't file a lawsuit whose only purpose is to allow you to send me interrogatories. And that's what the RIAA is apparently doing...
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
dont these people have a site they take donations for the effort, or we just donate to eff.org ?
Yes you can! Go here to donate to the Franklin Pierce Law Center. Let them know why you're doing it, too, because you appreciate the courageous work that their law clinic is doing on behalf of Mavis Roy.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Four kinds of P2P, not 3. That was a typo, sorry
Free Martian Whores!
Nitpick: in our society nobody is legally guilty until proven so in a court of law for criminal matters. In reality someone can still be guilty as sin even if they aren't convicted. If you are going to harp on someone's choice of words make sure that the word doesn't have different meaning in different contexts. In the context he used its clear that "guilty" is not refering to "legally guilty of a criminal offense."
These law schools aren't necessarily representing their own students -- more than likely, they're representing average people who don't have the means to defend themselves.
Correct. In this case, the defendant is just an average person who doesn't have the means to defend herself. (By the way, almost nobody has "the means to defend themselves" in a federal copyright infringement litigation, let alone one brought by the unscrupulous vipers the RIAA uses.)
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful