Nesson & Camara Increase Attack Against RIAA

eldavojohn writes "We talked about Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law School before, and it may not have been known to you, but he is backing former student and Jammie Thomas' new lawyer, K.A.D. Camara. Ars is reporting that Nesson is upping the charges against the RIAA. Not only is file-sharing fair use, but the $100,000,000 the RIAA has collected through fear is due back to those wrongly accused. He's also increasing the number of fronts he's fighting. On Camara's website, he indicates that in another case, Brittany English (pro bono), they 'are asking the courts to declare that statutory damages like these — 150,000:1 — are unconstitutional and that the RIAA's campaign to extract settlements from individuals by the threat of such unconstitutional damages is itself unlawful, enjoin the RIAA's unlawful campaign, and order the RIAA to return the $100M+ that it obtained as a result of its unlawful campaign.'"

Comments

hey, a modern saint!

[swschrad]

skip the three steps, Vatican, and buy this man a gold chair and cape!

Re:hey, a modern saint!

[DarkOx]

IANAL, but consider this.

Doing this kind of work requires you invest tons of hours and probably a bit of money in expenses for which there is a high likelihood you can never recoup. Like any other investment the greater the risk the greater the rewards must be to attract anyone. Lawyers who do this sort of work are investing with time and materials that they could have been using to do work that was more likely or even certain to pay off.

Its often not something you can do on the side either. You are up against of team of lawyers with corporate backing, If you half ass it you probably don't stand a chance. How big a cut of something like this would it take for you to risk quiting your day job for? with odd that are probably quite long?

****

Now consider you are a member of the represented class you have been abused by the RIAA directly. You fought them and lost, or settled and paid up. You though you were out your 100K settlement or damages. Now someone comes along and puts the smack down on the thugs you could not defeat or did not think it was even to your interest to try and fight. They also manage to return 70% of your losses to you. I suspect most people would be great full to get 70K refunded to them of 100K they thought they'd lost forever.

I don't find the lawyer's take on these types of things all that outrageous when you look at it objectively.

Go, Kiwi, Go!

[mangu]

After reading on Slashdot about this guy and reading more on the internet, I've become his fan. I wish him well.

Re:Go, Kiwi, Go!

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I support the movement, but claiming that file sharing is protected under "fair use" is a horrible legal argument.

Actually the way you, and perhaps they, have expressed the issue is overly simplistic. "File sharing" is a broad term. There are many factual scenarios under its penumbra. Some of those scenarios would constitute fair use, some would not, and some would fall into a gray area to which we do not know the answer. There has been NO litigation of the "fair use" defense in the RIAA v. Individual cases, except for a single 2003 case in which the only question was whether running off unauthorized copies of unauthorized copies on a p2p file sharing network, and placing those in permanent hard copies on the defendant's computer, was a "fair use". The Court held that it was not. But there are many other possible fact patterns, none of which have presented themselves yet in a litigation context.

Meanwhile the constitutionality defense -- that the RIAA's theory of statutory damages fails to pass constitutional muster under the Due Process Clause due to the disproportionality to actual damages -- is certain to succeed, in my professional opinion, once the issue ripens.

Even worse with DoJ in **IA's pocket

[Mathinker]

When seen in the context of an administration which is stuffing the Department of Justice with lawyers with strong ties to the entertainment industries, your post is even bleaker....

Re:Don't let their legal thugs off the hook

[florescent_beige]

Make sure their lawyers are disbarred too.

Especially the five that now hold senior positions at the Department of Justice.

Re:Even the criminals have rights

[QuantumG]

Oh dear god, kindly fuck off.

Copyright is an amoral law that concentrates power over culture into the hands of profiteering publishers.

Re:Even the criminals have rights

[RCC42]

But lost behind it all is the primary problem — "Thou shalt not steal". Because, if the 10 Commandments were a "living and breathing document", the "Thou shalt not copy content without owner's permission" would've been found in it long ago.

The Ten Commandments != The Constitution

Re:Even the criminals have rights

[genner]

But lost behind it all is the primary problem — "Thou shalt not steal". Because, if the 10 Commandments were a "living and breathing document", the "Thou shalt not copy content without owner's permission" would've been found in it long ago.

It's not like they're set in stone.

Re:Even the criminals have rights

[florescent_beige]

But lost behind it all is the primary problem â" "Thou shalt not steal".

The primary problem is not that people are stealing, the primary problem is that people don't think they are stealing.

And the primary question is: is the problem a problem with the moral health of people, or is the problem a problem with the entertainment industry's business model?

Are people as a collective allowed to decide what is publicly transferable? I would say, yeah. That's a bummer for those who profit when copies of works are scarce in the economic sense but then again times change. And the Ten Commandments don't contain any guarantees from God about the minimum level of profitability of the music business.

Of course one should always obey the laws of the land. Except when one shouldn't. For example, civil disobedience in protest of the arbitrary and disproportionate victimization of ordinary people by powerful elites has always gotten sympathetic treatment in the history books.

On this one, I predict the history books will portray the industry as a callous group who tried to enforce their will on the populace by making people terrified of their wrath.

Nonsense!

[Weaselmancer]

Do you turn your back on NYCL so quickly

Who says we have to have just one hero? All we've done here is to go from Superman to The Justice League.

So, more heroes please! Keep 'em coming!

Re:Even the criminals have rights

[reddburn]

Oh dear god, kindly fuck off. Copyright is an amoral law that concentrates power over culture into the hands of profiteering publishers.

Copyright is based on precedent, one that originally promoted original art. Once upon a time, anyone with a printing press could take someone's work and make a book. Authors were getting screwed, particularly overseas authors: American publishers were printing Dickens without paying royalties and British houses were doing likewise to Melville (one reason he died a pauper - he was vastly more popular in Britain, but never saw a cent for his books printed there). Establishing Copyright and an international treaty made it possible for artists to make a buck. Like any law, it needs retooling, but to dismiss the concept of copyright as amoral is puerile.