If the Second Circuit rules as I believe it will, this will mark the end of these abusive litigations by the RIAA.
After this, the RIAA will have to go to court only with proper, scientifically verifiable, legally obtained evidence showing that the person they're suing actually committed copyright infringement, and will have to have proper legal theories and pleadings.
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.
1. "Prosecution" is a criminal term; these are civil cases, not criminal cases.
2. Under American law you are required to give notice, and an opportunity to be heard, PRIOR to the court granting your motion. This has not occurred in the RIAA cases. It has been an ongoing flagrant violation of American law.
If the appellate court forces the RIAA to use the ordinary subpoena process instead of 'ex-parte' with joinder then will that not substantially alter the cost equation for the RIAA?
Yes, if they had been following the law, it would have cost them more. In fact, if they had been following the law, they wouldn't have even been able to file the lawsuits. But it is not about costing them money, or preventing them from bringing lawsuits to enforce their copyrights. The important thing is that the law be followed, and not bent to suit the whims of large corporations just because they can afford to hire a large number of unscrupulous lawyers.
Yeah, the quote was from Jon Newton over at p2pnet.net, who is having a server migration as we speak due to a problem that arose last night. He should be back online later today.
Is this a sign that the judicial system is finally going to start to treat the RIAA like the mobsters they mimic?
That I don't know. But it certainly is a sign that the Second Circuit judges consider the issues raised by John Doe #3 in the lower court to be serious and important.
Is it possible for the RIAA to drop the case in order to stop these proceedings? I know that's a tactic they've used in the past when things didn't go their way. Hopefully, they won't be able to just say "oops, our bad" and stop any investigation into their tactics.
Yes it is possible for it to try that gambit. But it is also possible for the Court to retain jurisdiction over it.
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.
Just seeing it posted on Slashdot makes me nervous, because I now know there at least half a million hackers thinking of it as a fun new challenge. And some of them are accustomed to finding solutions to such obstacles in a matter of minutes.
When I hear that the President of my country, the commander in chief of its armed forces, is getting a "high security" blackberry which is being developed by our National Security Agency, all I can think of to say is 2 words..........
I really don't understand what the GP was saying. But a funny thing happened in drafting my comment. I used those tags and they didn't appear when I clicked on the article, because I didn't know that they were real HTML tags that actually work. I thought the person was just kidding around when using them.
So I'm formatting this comment so they don't work, which I gather means formatting it as "Extrans (html tags to text)".
What I had meant to say was that I think I didn't understand the <rant></rant> part of the comment.
Getting back to the substance, you and I are in total agreement that it is a disgrace that good legal representation is usually only available to the well-to-do or to commercial enterprises. It is the biggest single problem in the RIAA cases, that the RIAA prices its extortionate settlements based upon that inequality. I wrote an article about how the courts are aiding and abetting that problem in the RIAA cases, and making some suggestions about how they could level the playing field a bit. But since this comment is in "Extrans" I can't put the link here. I'll write a separate comment with the link.
Rather than a false analogy, it may be that I misunderstood the GP Post. I thought the person was complaining about not understanding what was going on. I thought the complaint was about the legal complexities and rulings that the GP didn't understand. But now that I re-read it I see that maybe the person is complaining about the money. I don't really understand the part of the post. But if it was about how much lawyers cost, then yes it would have been more than a false analogy on my part, it would have been a pretty meaningless response on my part.
Well I wish computer programming was more accessible to me. What can you do? We live in a complex world. A lot of things require a lot of study to become "accessible", and each of us has only one lifetime. The law, like every other field of study, has its own language, conventions, methods, and processes. It takes time to learn them.
A fine example of a false analogy.
The right to justice is supposed to be a basic right in a country based on laws and should be accessible (read: affordable) to everybody.
The GP wasn't referring to cost, he was referring to language -- i.e. the use of Legalese. I agree with you 100% that the right to justice should be, and is not, affordable.
Socialized medicine works quite well in several countries and the practitioners are getting paid.
Agreed.
Of course they probably cannot charge $300+/hour for their services but I see no reason that lawyers should.
The economics of running a law practice are bad. If I needed a lawyer, I couldn't afford one. I agree that legal representation and advice should be affordable.
I am also under the impression that on the aggregate physicians work harder than lawyers.
I have no idea, other than to say that most lawyers I know work very hard, and most physicians I know work very hard.
while there have been accusations of it, so far there hasn't been any evidence linking either organization to lobbying or being anything but what they claim.
I agree that should such information exist, that would and should disqualify the judge.
I read somewhere that they do lobbying, but I don't have the time to research it.
Apparently you've never heard of smaller or independent music shops that sell used CDs. You think they send portions of each sale from a used CD to the RIAA? Doubt it.
Would the purpose of the organizations (SFU and SFIR) factor in, or is it the fact that organizations with a vested interest in tough-on-copyright are members?
If I were the one investigating this, I would be more interested in the membership and the activities than in the expressed purposes, since crooks like to disguise what they do and their expressed purposes are always benign. Like I'm sure the RIAA's expressed purposes do not include 'extortion, using illegal investigators, making false statements of fact in legal documents, collusion, price fixing, suing children and dead people, using economic might and unscrupulous lawyers to attempt to rewrite copyright law by confusing judges, etc.'. If, e.g., this organization has ever lobbied on behalf of copyright owners, the judges' membership -- if not disclosed and consented to -- ought to result in his being disqualified.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no fan of the MAFIAA at all... However...
Troll alert.
Will there be a full appeal with oral arguments?
Yes!!!
I don't think we'll ever be out of the woods.
If the Second Circuit rules as I believe it will, this will mark the end of these abusive litigations by the RIAA.
After this, the RIAA will have to go to court only with proper, scientifically verifiable, legally obtained evidence showing that the person they're suing actually committed copyright infringement, and will have to have proper legal theories and pleadings.
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.
1. "Prosecution" is a criminal term; these are civil cases, not criminal cases.
2. Under American law you are required to give notice, and an opportunity to be heard, PRIOR to the court granting your motion. This has not occurred in the RIAA cases. It has been an ongoing flagrant violation of American law.
If the appellate court forces the RIAA to use the ordinary subpoena process instead of 'ex-parte' with joinder then will that not substantially alter the cost equation for the RIAA?
Yes, if they had been following the law, it would have cost them more. In fact, if they had been following the law, they wouldn't have even been able to file the lawsuits. But it is not about costing them money, or preventing them from bringing lawsuits to enforce their copyrights. The important thing is that the law be followed, and not bent to suit the whims of large corporations just because they can afford to hire a large number of unscrupulous lawyers.
Yeah, the quote was from Jon Newton over at p2pnet.net, who is having a server migration as we speak due to a problem that arose last night. He should be back online later today.
Is this a sign that the judicial system is finally going to start to treat the RIAA like the mobsters they mimic?
That I don't know. But it certainly is a sign that the Second Circuit judges consider the issues raised by John Doe #3 in the lower court to be serious and important.
Is it possible for the RIAA to drop the case in order to stop these proceedings? I know that's a tactic they've used in the past when things didn't go their way. Hopefully, they won't be able to just say "oops, our bad" and stop any investigation into their tactics.
Yes it is possible for it to try that gambit. But it is also possible for the Court to retain jurisdiction over it.
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.
Just seeing it posted on Slashdot makes me nervous, because I now know there at least half a million hackers thinking of it as a fun new challenge. And some of them are accustomed to finding solutions to such obstacles in a matter of minutes.
When I hear that the President of my country, the commander in chief of its armed forces, is getting a "high security" blackberry which is being developed by our National Security Agency, all I can think of to say is 2 words..........
Uh oh.
This is my article "Large Recording Companies vs. The Defenseless : Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations", which appeared in The Judges Journal in August of last year, in its "equal access to justice" issue. The Judges Journal is a quarterly publication of the American Bar Association for its judicial section, which is comprised mostly of judges.
I really don't understand what the GP was saying. But a funny thing happened in drafting my comment. I used those tags and they didn't appear when I clicked on the article, because I didn't know that they were real HTML tags that actually work. I thought the person was just kidding around when using them.
So I'm formatting this comment so they don't work, which I gather means formatting it as "Extrans (html tags to text)".
What I had meant to say was that I think I didn't understand the <rant></rant> part of the comment.
Getting back to the substance, you and I are in total agreement that it is a disgrace that good legal representation is usually only available to the well-to-do or to commercial enterprises. It is the biggest single problem in the RIAA cases, that the RIAA prices its extortionate settlements based upon that inequality. I wrote an article about how the courts are aiding and abetting that problem in the RIAA cases, and making some suggestions about how they could level the playing field a bit. But since this comment is in "Extrans" I can't put the link here. I'll write a separate comment with the link.
Rather than a false analogy, it may be that I misunderstood the GP Post. I thought the person was complaining about not understanding what was going on. I thought the complaint was about the legal complexities and rulings that the GP didn't understand. But now that I re-read it I see that maybe the person is complaining about the money. I don't really understand the part of the post. But if it was about how much lawyers cost, then yes it would have been more than a false analogy on my part, it would have been a pretty meaningless response on my part.
Well I wish computer programming was more accessible to me. What can you do? We live in a complex world. A lot of things require a lot of study to become "accessible", and each of us has only one lifetime. The law, like every other field of study, has its own language, conventions, methods, and processes. It takes time to learn them.
A fine example of a false analogy. The right to justice is supposed to be a basic right in a country based on laws and should be accessible (read: affordable) to everybody.
The GP wasn't referring to cost, he was referring to language -- i.e. the use of Legalese. I agree with you 100% that the right to justice should be, and is not, affordable.
Socialized medicine works quite well in several countries and the practitioners are getting paid.
Agreed.
Of course they probably cannot charge $300+/hour for their services but I see no reason that lawyers should.
The economics of running a law practice are bad. If I needed a lawyer, I couldn't afford one. I agree that legal representation and advice should be affordable.
I am also under the impression that on the aggregate physicians work harder than lawyers.
I have no idea, other than to say that most lawyers I know work very hard, and most physicians I know work very hard.
while there have been accusations of it, so far there hasn't been any evidence linking either organization to lobbying or being anything but what they claim. I agree that should such information exist, that would and should disqualify the judge.
I read somewhere that they do lobbying, but I don't have the time to research it.
Apparently you've never heard of smaller or independent music shops that sell used CDs. You think they send portions of each sale from a used CD to the RIAA? Doubt it.
They're not required to.
Would the purpose of the organizations (SFU and SFIR) factor in, or is it the fact that organizations with a vested interest in tough-on-copyright are members?
If I were the one investigating this, I would be more interested in the membership and the activities than in the expressed purposes, since crooks like to disguise what they do and their expressed purposes are always benign. Like I'm sure the RIAA's expressed purposes do not include 'extortion, using illegal investigators, making false statements of fact in legal documents, collusion, price fixing, suing children and dead people, using economic might and unscrupulous lawyers to attempt to rewrite copyright law by confusing judges, etc.'. If, e.g., this organization has ever lobbied on behalf of copyright owners, the judges' membership -- if not disclosed and consented to -- ought to result in his being disqualified.
so far I haven't read anything that would cause me to scream "corruption!"
I have. Unless this were (a) disclosed to the defense counsel and (b) consented to by them, it would clearly constitute grounds for disqualification.
Is there suddenly a law against having a different agenda than the RIAA?
No but they're trying to get one in place.
I don't support RIAA music for the same reason I won't watch The Sopranos. Mafiosi scare me.
I didn't watch The Sopranos because there was too much talking and whining about people's feelings.
I didn't watch The Sopranos because I don't have HBO.
Er, isn't this a little off topic?
You know you've really arrived when an avid Slashdot reader finally opens an account and names himself after you.
how did you get a user id in the 1 millions, when other people setting up accounts are in the 2 millions?
The judge could probably hold him in contempt for making out with the court reporter in court
That's a new one. Never heard of that before. You must have a fertile imagination.