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Appeals Court Stays RIAA Subpoena Vs. Students
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The procedures used by the RIAA the past 5 years in suing 'John Does' without their knowing about it have never been subjected to scrutiny by an appeals court, since most of the 'John Does' never learn about the 'ex parte' proceeding until it's too late to do anything about it. That is about to change. In Arista Records v. Does 1-16, a case targeting students at the Albany Campus of the State University of New York, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has decided to put things on hold while it takes a careful look at what transpired in the lower court. The way it came to this is that a few 'John Does' filed a broad-based challenge to a number of the RIAA's procedures, citing the defendant's constitutional rights, the insufficiency of the complaint, the lack of personal jurisdiction over the defendants, improper misjoinder of the defendants, and the RIAA's illegal procurement of its 'evidence' through the use of an unlicensed investigator, MediaSentry. The lower court judges gave short shrift to 'John Doe #3,' but he promptly filed an appeal, and asked for a stay of the subpoena and lower court proceedings during the pendency of the appeal. The RIAA opposed the motion, arguing that John Doe's appeal had no chance of success. The Appeals Court disagreed and granted the motion, freezing the subpoena and putting the entire case on hold until the appeal is finally determined. As one commentator said, 'this news has been a long time coming, but is welcomed.'"
This is big. This will be the very first appellate scrutiny. By staying all lower court proceedings until the appeal is decided, the Court signalled that it's taking this very very seriously.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Is this a sign that the judicial system is finally going to start to treat the RIAA like the mobsters they mimic?
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-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
The problem with threatening people at random, is that eventually you make the mistake of threatening someone who has the resources to take you all the way to the supreme court. The RIAA seems to have a pattern of targeting those least able to defend themselves (college students, single moms, seniors) but it look like now they have a ready, willing, and able opponent who wont just roll over. Let's all collective summon up our best Nelson Muntz impressions: "Ha-ha!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sorry for the tyopes, I'm posting this from my balckbrery.
I tried to insert a beer tehre, but the olny thing taht hapepned is i got beer all ovre my laptpo.
Perhpas it would have bene better to use $BEVERAGE insteda fo giving bad instrutcions?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Pigs have been seen flying over local pastures, and hell is recording record low temperatures.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
The procedures used by the RIAA the past 5 years in suing 'John Does' without their knowing about it have never been subjected to scrutiny by an appeals court, since most of the 'John Does' never learn about the 'ex parte' proceeding until it's too late to do anything about it.
Wait, I am missing something. In the US doesn't the prosecution have to have a defendent before they can start preceedings? They can investigate all they like but you can't prosecute without a defendent. What someone is going to knock on my door one day and say "BTW you have been found guilty of murder, your trial happened last month, your getting the chair"??
The RIAA opposed the motion, arguing that John Doe's appeal had no chance of success.
I enjoyed this one... "Your honor, don't grant the appeal, they have no chance of winning. It would be silly to even honor their request. BTW, if you do what we say they WILL have no chance of winning and that makes us right, so you need to do as we say because we are right and you would not want to be on the side of wrong, because we are right."
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
(a) The pirates deserve to be slammed for STEALING (Yes I said it, because that's what it is!)!
(b) The pirates ALSO deserve all the due process and constitutional protection that the US has to offer--and the RIAA assiduously tries to ignore! You can't slam the thieves until the thieves get a FULL and FAIR day in court.
The Pirates deserve to be hammered, but only after every last one of their constitutional rights is respected!
I am constantly hearing on /. that mediasentry does not have an investigators license. I have to say I don't understand the process that well, but I figured it would be illegal to operate without a license. Shouldn't the cops or fbi be shutting down the company? I am glad to final hear that case evidence will final be forming for the RIAA's process. It will make future attempts by the RIAA much harder if the case is thrown out.
>>Sorry for the tyopes, I'm posting this from my balckbrery.
Obama, don't you have country to run or something?
By "short shrift" I meant the Magistrate Judge and the District Judge paid scant attention, and just blew it off without paying careful consideration to the law or to the paucity of evidence.
"Misjoinder" is a legal term. In this case what it refers to is the fact that the RIAA sued 16 "John Does" in a single case, even though the federal rules clearly required them to bring 16 separate cases, and even though in 2004 they were ordered by two federal judges to cease and desist from that practice.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This is the first time an appeals court has examined whether or not having a court hearing without the presence of the defendant (ex parte preceding) is permissible given such little evidence, no real damages incurred by the plaintiff (insufficiency of complaint), whether or not the given court is even the right place to hear the complaint (lack of personal jurisdiction over the defendants), whether or not lumping all of these defendants together as a collective group is legitimate (improper misjoinder of the defendants), and whether or not it's complete BS that the RIAA is using a private group to invade individual's privacy to obtain information (illegal procurement of evidence).
That last description may be a little biased.
nsuficiency of the complaint? It seems to me it states clearly what/when.
How about "who?"
your appeal has no chance of success
make your time ...
HA HA HA HA
For great justice indeed.
I'm no fan of the MAFIAA at all... However...
Troll alert.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
In the Plaintiff's Motion to Quash, they state in footnote 1, "Defendants rely on the same arguments Mr. Beckerman has raised and lost in other cases." Strangely enough, they fail to cite the actual cases in which these arguments have been "raised and lost." Are there actual legal precedents in which Mr. Beckerman's arguments have been found lacking, or are the RIAA lawyers just blatantly lying?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Unlicensed investigator?
An unlicensed investigator is not allowed to investigate at all. You can ask a friend to check what your wife is doing when you're not at home, you can ask a licensed investigator, but if you hire an unlicensed investigator, he or she is breaking the law. In other words, the so-called "evidence" was found by someone who was breaking the law in doing so. That on its own is not the problem, if the evidence can be checked independently of how it was found. If an unlicensed investigator finds physical evidence, calls the police and the police checks the physical evidence, that's fine. But here, the evidence is the investigator saying "I downloaded this music from this computer". Since the investigator was already breaking the law, clearly anything he or she says cannot be trusted.
Hiring unlicensed investigators also means that the person suing cannot be trusted. In a civil court case, the judge goes by the weight of the evidence. If I can show that I am sued by a person who used illegal means to find evidence, that makes it more likely that the same person will be lying about other things as well.
I think that you mean "impermissible evidence" not "illegal evidence". And yes, it does apply to civil parties. If Bob breaks into my house and steals the daily diary in which I lay out my plan to defame him, he still can't use it in court. First of all, if he shows up in court with it, he'll be arrested for theft or receiving stolen property. Secondly, allowing him to use it would undermine the very rule of law which the court is attempting to enforce.
In most states only a licensed investigator is permitted to procure evidence to be used in court. Why? Because if you license investigators you can create oversite for them and ensure that they follow a set of pre-defined and pre-approved methodologies. Otherwise, each and every case has to be prefaced with a hearing on the accuracy and legitimacy of the information collected by the investigator.
How about you bring suit based on your friend reporting whatever. Should the judge basically say "your friend is not a license investigator, you thereby have no argument whatsoever"? I realize the weakness of the analogy, but shouldn't the validity of the argument be discussed rather than dismissed without examining?
There is a difference. My friend is not a licensed investigator, but he can have a look around things if I ask him to, as long as he is not investigating for hire. Perfectly legal. If he goes to court, the judge can ask him questions to find out whether he is a reliable witness, and his evidence would be treated accordingly. The unlicensed investigator, on the other hand, has already broken the law just by taking money for investigating when he didn't have a license. We don't even need to examine what he says in court, he can't be trusted anyway.
You also miss that this unlicensed, illegal investigators testimony is used to breach the privacy of presumably innocent people. You have to have a very good reason to do that. For example, if my friend, he is just an ordinary and presumably honest person, claims that he saw you stealing something, then this may be enough for the police to get a search warrant and then breach your privacy. If that unlicensed, illegal investigator claims that he saw you stealing a car, then this is most likely not enough for the police to get a search warrant. And what the RIAA wanted was the equivalent of a search warrant.
IANAL, etc. and I'm no fan of the MAFIAA at all... However...
I just read the lower court judge's ruling in denying the motion to quash and I frankly don't see a problem with the judge's reasoning.
You don't see the problem because you are not a lawyer.
This is a civil, not criminal matter. Downloading a file containing copyrighted material is not the same as murder. Also, if the network is using DHCP and recording MAC addresses associated with each DHCP lease, and anybody on the network could have used that address, how exactly are they going to prove that it was you? Hint: If you are on Ethernet, use Ethereal to capture all traffic on a LAN segment, then set your MAC address to one of those captured and then use a different LAN segment. Voila -- the RIAA sues someone else for your nefarious deeds! Extra points if you can figure out the MAC address of a tenured Law Professor! All I'm sayin' is that hardware addresses aren't like fingerprints, DNA, license plates or phone numbers. They are more like "HELLO, My Name is ____" stickers. You can fill them in with whatever name you want, which makes them very unreliable in terms of associating you with any particular use of the network.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They'd have to prove that you changed the MAC address - And the only way to prove that against ISP logs went away when the unique processor serial number that started in the Pentium 3 line disappeared because of privacy concerns.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It seems to me that you have a record of losing before exactly TWO judges - one Magistrate and one Real judge
I haven't lost any "cases". I said I lost some "motions". I lost 3 motions on the John Doe procedural issues. In the named defendant cases, I made 4 dismissal motions, each based on 2 different topics: (a) the making available issue and (b) the specificity issue as to downloading & distributing. Here is the track record:
-Elektra v. Santangelo: judge denied motion as to (b), didn't say how she was ruling as to (a);
-Maverick v. Goldshteyn: judge denied (b), deferred (a) until after discovery on the ground that he did not understand the technology;
-Electra v. Barker: judge granted motion as to (a) and denied it as to (b);
-Warner v. Cassin: motion never decided because RIAA withdrew the case before it could be decided. There were 7 different judges, no magistrates.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I don't want to litigate the case online, but there is a lot of misunderstanding here of what this case is about and what will happen from here. Essentially, I asked the Court to stay the subpoena, because the issue is Doe 3's right to remain anonymous, and if Doe 3's identity is disclosed, it would obviously become impossible to get a ruling about that right...cat out of bag, and all that...So by granting the stay, the Court agreed at least that the issues are arguable, and that the subpoena should be on hold while they consider them. And of course Ray is right, that this case is a big deal, since no appellate court has dealt with the RIAA's basic legal strategy in these cases, and now they will be able to take a close look at all of it. The next step is filing briefs saying why I think the District Court judge was wrong, and the plaintiffs filing one saying why he was right. The appeal will be argued sometime in August, I think, and Ray will certainly post everything on his blog as it happens. I hope people can make it to the beautiful courtroom when it happens. And thanks to Ray for keeping these issues alive. I just sort of quietly litigate them in the courthouse, and don't really like to blow my own horn... Richard A. Altman