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RIAA Awarded $675,000 In Tenenbaum Trial
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The jury awarded the record company plaintiffs $675,000 in the Boston trial defended by Prof. Charles Nesson, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. I was not surprised, since exactly none of the central issues ever even came up in this trial. The judge had instructed the jurors that Mr. Tenenbaum was liable, and that their only task was to come up with a verdict that was more than $22,500 and less than $4.5 million. According to the judge, her reason for doing so was that, when on the stand, the defendant was asked if he admitted liability, and he said 'yes.' The lawyers among you will know that that was a totally improper question, and that the Court should not have even allowed it, much less based her holding upon the answer to it."
What are the consequences for Mr. Tenenbaum? Can't get a credit card for a few years?
Few years? I had a secured credit card the day after my discharge and an unsecured one four months later. I'm now four years from my bankruptcy and have 50% of my annual salary in unsecured revolving tradelines (i.e: credit cards) and can get the same interest rates as anyone else.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's amazing what you can find when you RTFA. From NYCL's site:
[Ed. note. The judge's ruling is erroneous. The question : "are you admitting liability" is a legal question, not a factual question, which Mr. Tenenbaum was not qualified to answer. For the Court to base its decision on that is wrong. -R.B.]
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The judge's role is to decide issues of law, and the jurors' duty is to decide issues of fact.
In this case, both sides agreed that he violated copyright and that he was liable for it. The only issue that then remained was whether he did it "willfully" or not. The jury got to determine this, which determined what his liability was.
He basically walked into court and said, Yes, everything they're saying is true. What sort of result were you expecting?
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Is your credit is, in fact, NOT ruined after a bankruptcy. Why? Because you can't file again for a number of years. Thus lenders don't have to worry about you using bankruptcy to just walk on your debts. That doesn't mean your credit is grand, but it isn't worthless. Companies will lend to you since they know you don't have that as a way out.
The lawyers among you will know that that was a totally improper question, and that the Court should not have even allowed it, much less based her holding upon the answer to it.
The linked article doesn't give a complete transcript of the questions and answers, so I can't speak to whether the question was 'totally improper,' but as Ray Beckerman (aka NewYorkCountryLawyer) should know, it was the job of Mr. Nesson, not the judge, to object to improper questions. Furthermore, Mr. Tenenbaum was almost certainly deposed prior to trial, and Mr. Nesson would know what questions were likely to come up.
Finally, the offending question is presumably "Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings?" Under FRE 704(a), an opinion as to an ultimate issue to be decided by the trier of fact is admissible (with the exception given in FRE 704(b), which does not apply here).
Lay opinion evidence is limited by FRE 701, which requires that the opinion "(a) rationally based on the perception of the witness, and (b) helpful to a clear understanding of the witness' testimony or the determination of a fact in issue, and (c) not based on scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge within the scope of Rule 702." Crucially, the question was not "Are you liable?" it was "are you admitting liability?" The former might possibly be objectionable, the latter is almost certainly not. In any case, Mr. Nesson did not object and so the point is largely moot.
The only reasons to disregard Mr. Tenenbaum's admission would be if the judge believed he was either lying or mistaken. He had no reason to lie, and since the other evidence makes a strong case that he was in fact liable, his admission fits with that.
In any event, Mr. Nesson's strategy has always been to admit liability but argue that the damages are unconstitutional or otherwise impermissible. He has been very clear about this in his public discussion of this and related cases.
Finally, I'll just add that the right against self-incrimination applies only to criminal cases and has no application here.
They submitted fair use as a defense with the likely understanding that it would be rejected. This is Nesson's ticket to appeal.
My guess is that Nesson knows he can't get precedent set at the district court level. MGM v. Grokster made it to the Supreme Court, and I think Nesson wants to take this one to the Supremes. Tennenbaum didn't have a chance with the current interpretation of the law (basically "copyright infringement is bad, mmmkay?"), so he's trying to shake things up.
That's just my interpretation. The other possibility is that he's simply an idiot, but it's already established that he's a very smart guy.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
No, its not. In both a criminal trial and a civil trial there are pleadings, and they are distinct from testimony given at trial. What he did was answer an improper question asked of him as a witness (since the question was one of law not of fact) in a way which was harmful, which is not at all the same as pleading guilty in a criminal case.
Go fuck yourself and your condescending superior attitude. My bankruptcy was mainly incurred by medical problems. You ever need to have emergency surgery without medical insurance? Give it a try sometime and let me know how it works out for you.
I attempted to settle my debts for years before I filed bankruptcy only to find that while I was unable to pay them they had increased nearly 400% from the amount I originally borrowed. It's amazing how quickly debt can pile up when they your APR goes up to 34.99% and they keep piling on late/over-the-limit/because-we-can fees every month.
But that's not the end of it. Once you are unable to make payments to your original creditors they eventually give up and sell your debt to a junk debt buyer. This entity buys your debt for pennies on the dollar and then attempts to collect 200-400% of the original amount owed. They keep 100% of what they collect. The people from whom you actually borrowed the money don't see a dime.
I have no regrets about filing bankruptcy. It wasn't a hard choice to pick between paying back people I never borrowed money from and moving on with my life.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You must be an American, pity you do not have national health insurance program. Sure you may have to wait a bit for elective and non-emergency surgery but at least you don't get bankrupted having emergency surgery. (yes there are a few exceptions, some people die waiting, talking about the vast majority here)
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
FUD. FUD FUD FUD. Speaking as someone living in America now, having lived most of my life in Australia under nationalized health, and the UK under same, and making my living from the health insurance industry here, the system here is a travesty.
You do NOT get fined for being overweight. You don't get fined for being unhealthy. "I'm not going to let the government decide my health care! Instead, I'm going to praise the land of the free because my health insurer chooses to deny me cancer coverage because I forgot to mention I had appendicitis 20 years ago." "Instead of a government bureaucrat (and very rare is this the case), I'll happily let a HMO accountant with no medical training whatsoever decide what medical coverage I am entitled to!"
Instead, I get to pay $500 a month for health coverage, plus high deductibles, high out of pocket expenses, have no coverage for the things my wife and I desire. In Australia I paid 1% of my income as a tax, or 1.5% when my income hit 45,000 a year. Alternatively, I could opt in for private coverage, and pay as much or as little as I liked, and not have that tax.
"But I don't want to pay because you're unhealthy" - right, because when someone goes into an ER now because they have a cold, and walk out without paying the bill, who do you think eats the cost? Hint: an overnight stay in hospital doesn't really cost $10,000+. For bonus points: pay cash at your chiro for a $45/hour session. Pay through insurance and have them bill $150 for the same session. Think your insurance carrier is making that much on your premiums being invested that they're covering their costs, plus this? Nope, you're paying.
America is the ONLY country in the first world that doesn't have nationalized health care. Why is it you mainly hear about all this supposed dissatisfaction all over the world with their supposedly horrible health care from US news, not the BBC, or AP, or Reuters, or any other news agency actually in these countries? Instead, we pay twice as much per capita for health care than other first world countries, and have substantially worse than average first world metrics on everything from infant mortality, to life expectancy, to diabetes, to heart disease, to cancer. Yet for all this, there are people who continue to trumpet that everything is A-OK here, and that it's the best way to be.
Jobs would be envious of this RDF.
... So instead of having the government choose your healthcare, you prefer to have your job choose your healthcare? Instead of joining a plan that must care for everyone no matter what, you prefer to join a plan that can drop people whenever it chooses? Instead of having one open health care interoperability standard, you prefer to have every single healthcare provider roll their own? Then you can have the current American healthcare system, where most group coverage purchasers are too small to demand proper care for their employees, where health insurance plans will routinely deny first and even second requests just because they can, where the overhead of interoperating with so many different health care providers raises medical fees through the roof if you're paying out of pocket. How exactly is what we have right now better in any way whatsoever than any alternative? Hell, Singapore even shows that having no health care insurance at all can work out better than the piece of crap we have now.
For a pretty awful example, and one that scared me as I'm self-employed and buy my own insurance, many people in my situation get denied coverage based on some ridiculously technical reading of their answers to the questions asked when you sign up for coverage. For example, there is an egregious example of a woman whose policy was canceled when she sought authorization for treatment for virulent type of breast cancer. The reason? She forgot to mention she had been treated for acne, her doctor misrecorded her condition, and even after the doctor called Blue Cross to clear up the matter, they wouldn't budge.
So we have a private insurance industry that will take your money and provide nothing in return. Even at the horrible DMV, you will eventually get your license, and they certainly don't try to murder you on a technicality. The notion that the free market is doing a good job at healthcare is simply not well founded in reality, and in fact it is doing SO badly, I think even the government would struggle to fail as epically as the private insurance industry.
In the end, if I can get the same crappy coverage I have now, for less cost and without the worry that I forgot to say I had the measles when I was 6 thus causing my entire policy to be canceled as a result (this is just robbery of premiums), I'd go for it. I just don't expect Congress to actually deliver something like that. They'll just force me to get robbed.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
America is the ONLY country in the first world that doesn't have nationalized health care.
The funny thing is, we DO have nationalized health care. 66% of the cost of health care in this country is paid for by medicaid, medicare, or federal government health care plans.
I DO NOT understand why people are so against nationalized health care here. It's already here. They play it up to be some sort of slippery slope, a plague that will infest every part of our lives and culture. Let me clue you in: the system is ALREADY IN PLACE, and the only people who benefit from the way things are now are the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
~X
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