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RIAA Filed 62 New Cases In April Alone
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Based upon a quick examination of the records in PACER, I detected 62 new cases brought by the RIAA against individuals in the month of April alone. In December, 2008, the RIAA had represented to Congress that they had 'discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August [2008].'"
Everyone hates lawyers until they need one. If you are ever served with a complaint, I would welcome you to the Guild and would look forward to your learning civil procedure in the time given to you to file your answer...if you know how much time that is.
Either way.. so long as the lawsuits they file are legitimate (ie. the person being sued actually broke the law) I, personally, have no problem with it..
Because the laws they bought are "legitimate"?
I hereby propose a law stating D_Jedi may never own a car, see his mother, or use the internet again.
Lawsuits against you will follow.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
remove the NEED for lawyers, then.
you guys are not very smart, are you? you can't quite see that you created this monster and are still arguing that the monster 'needs' to continue living.
so that the monster can continue.
circular, huh?
simplify the laws, put normal 'thinking' people in charge as judges and we could NOT do a worse job than is being done now. not joking about it either, the system is just too complex and needs to be totally broken down and redone.
lawyers are slime and the fact that you 'need' them indicates a bigger social problem.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Sure. Simplify the laws. Good answer.
You know what happens in any game, be it online, tabletop, sport, or whatnot? You lay down a simple rule, it will get abused. You tell people they can't do something in general, they'll argue for specifics. If anybody disagrees, without a specific rule to account for the situation, it's all bitch, bitch, bitch.
Now, that's just in terms of games. Which don't mean shit. Move that to the real world, where things matter. Someone spilled hot coffee on themselves? Well, they certainly don't want to be embarrassed, so they'll take advantage of a lack of explicit warnings on the cup and sue the restaurant! Broke into someone's house and tripped over something they left out? Technically, you're in a legal grey area regarding trespassing, and besides, there's nothing in the trespassing law saying you don't have to clean up your junk, so sue the homeowner!
People will fight that much harder to abuse any law you give them until it's spelled out in such explicit detail that they can't find loopholes in time. And thanks to these assholes abusing the "simple" laws, we need to staple more laws on top of them to shut them up when they're being assholes. And that's what's happened. Lawmakers make a law that should be simple, some asshole wants to abuse it for kicks, judges set precedents to attach more detail to laws, repeat cycle.
If you simplify the laws, you'll get nothing but an army of assholes abusing them. Either they'll get their way or they'll keep arguing you to a stalemate, and seriously, what else are they going to do with their day? You've got important things to do and they don't. They'll win. And regardless of your personal views of how reality works, you'll have that army of assholes whether the laws are "simple" or "complex" or if we "need" lawyers or not.
The laws and social norms are the only things keeping some overly creative asshole with too much time on his hands from picking you at random, finding some way to empty your life, and getting away with it scot-free. Yes, even if you think anarchy is teh bestz!!!!1!1 and we'd all be better off if we just did things your way. The legal system didn't make society into what it is. People did.
Unless it's your plan to eradicate all of humanity?
simplify the laws, put normal 'thinking' people in charge as judges and we could NOT do a worse job than is being done now. not joking about it either, the system is just too complex and needs to be totally broken down and redone.
lawyers are slime and the fact that you 'need' them indicates a bigger social problem.
"Normal, 'thinking' people" can arrive at drastically different conclusions. See Conservative v. Liberal v. Libertarian. So, if you want the law to be consistent, what your saying is that we should scrap all the existing precendences, but start over reestablishing them, which will eventually require lawyers again.
Or, do you intend to abolish precedence, and let each judge conclude for each case how to interpret and apply the law? Because I see the world where judges can arbitrarily apply law with no regard for established precedence to be far, far worse than the world we have now.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The sentence "we discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August" really does not mean anything.
First, it doesn't say that the RIAA "stopped" doing anything. To "discontinue" does not mean to "stop," it means "to break the continuity of."
Second, anything it does say about the RIAA is limited to only the month of August. For example, if I say "Best Buy stopped having 10% off sales in August." That in no way means that Best Buy stopped having 10% off sales forever. It only means they stopped for a period, i.e., broke the continuity, for a single period of time, during the month of August.
Third, more ambiguity is added by the word "initiate." The use of "initiate" gives the RIAA a lot of wiggle room to start new lawsuits. If anyone complains, the RIAA can merely say, "this lawsuit was actually initiated sometime ago when we first started investigating it." And of course it gives the RIAA complete freedom to "initialize" new lawsuits after August.
What I don't understand is why the RIAA is conducting these lawsuits in a quasi-stealth mode. I thought the purpose of the lawsuits was to raise public awareness. But when they're "initialized" in secret, that defeats the entire educational purpose. So what really is going on with these reinitialized lawsuits?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
In this case it was lying to Congress, so the body capable of enforcing sanctions would be Congress itself, which would have to cite the RIAA's representative for contempt of Congress. I'll let you guess what the chances of them doing so are.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Judges are normal people like you and me. The right to belong to a political party of one's choosing is a pretty fundamental right.
You cannot keep making more rules. In your world, integrity is assumed not to exist, and you rely on the rules to keep order. Consider two options. In the first, we rely on simple, clear rules and citizens with integrity to enforce them. In this system, some people will cheat, yes, but when the rules are clear, then we can deal with the cheaters by executing good-faith judgment in a trial of their peers, and delivering the full punishment when the law is broken, in speedy, reliable fashion. The downside is that the citizens are expected to be men of honor and we all then have a burden to keep our word. Abuses will occur. In the second option, which is the system you propose, we assume that everyone will cheat, in fact, we expect it. A little cheating is OK, but a lot is "bad." We punish the eggregious cheats, but let the little cheats slide with a wink, since we all do it anyhow, right? How dare some sanctimonious person dare judge our behavior? In this system, you have to keep making more and more rules to cover the edge cases because everyone is looking for a little advantage. Juries are not allowed to exercise as much judgment, instead the rules keep getting "improved". The good thing about such a system is citizens are no longer responsible for their behaviors -- they can blame the rules when things go bad. Or is that such a good thing? Hmm. The down side is that the rules become so twisted that cheating is the NORM. There is no such thing as 98% integrity. As soon as you accept 98% integrity, then you redefine 98% as 100%, and then you start having 96% integrity, which then becomes the new 100% etc. AT some point, we are going to have to admit that we as individuals are responsible for our entire lives and everything we do and say in them, and really be engaged in our society. It cannot work any other way. So yes, scrap the system, replace it with something simpler, I say, and then let's start actually FOLLOWING THE RULES. :-)
Currently hooked on AMP
There is not really any severe penalty to lie in front of congress. The RIAA aren't required to do anything they say to congress. Tonnes of businesses have done it. And Presidents
I really wish people would stop abusing the McDonald's coffee case, it's basically the hallmark of people who refuse to fucking pay attention. She didn't sue because there wasn't a warning the coffee was hot, she sued because it caused 3rd degree burns in under 5 seconds, as it was kept 60F _above_ what was industry standard.