take a look at NYCL's post earlier on. He doesn't 'hate' Gabriel for what he has done, in fact if I read it correctly he respects him as a fellow professional. Sorry friend. You did NOT "read it correctly". I do hate Mr. Gabriel for what he is done and I have ZERO respect for him as a "fellow professional". He is a "fellow professional" in name only. His concept of what a lawyer is, and mine, bear no resemblance. In my view, and that of many other of my "fellow professionals", he has been an embarrassment to our profession.
I can't imagine what you were reading of mine that could have made you believe I felt otherwise. This what I said about him. What part of that do you think shows "respect"? Then when someone said I shouldn't attack Mr. Gabriel just because he was my adversary, I responded with this, saying that the reason I hate him has nothing to do with his being an adversary or taking positions contrary to mine.
I've been a litigation attorney for almost 30 years. Some of the best friends I have are people I met as spirited adversaries in contentious, lengthy, hard fought, litigations. If you think I have anything against Mr. Gabriel because he was "upholding the rule of law" or advancing "a legitimate gripe" or because he was on the "wrong" side of legal issues.... you don't know me at all.
Why, Mr. Gabriel. How nice to see you. Welcome aboard the Slashdot Express... ticket, please. I don't think that AC was Mr. Gabriel.
I think it's some new guy they hired, who doesn't know that I'm 60, that I've met Mr. Gabriel a number of times and communicate with him many times a week, and that I understand Mr. Gabriel's job a lot better than Mr. Gabriel does.
There's always the possibility that he never believed in the RIAA's bullshit and just did it all out of greed, but someone with such loose morals isn't the kind of person you'd want behind the bench. My feeling is that his motivations ran like this:
1. It was primarily for the money, lots and lots of money.
2. It made him feel important; he was pretending to be a lawyer. (Never mind that most of the cases were "ex parte" cases and "default" cases, in which there was no opponent at all, and that in the remaining ones, most of the people couldn't afford a lawyer. So he was always "litigating" against either no one, or someone who had no lawyer, or in a few cases against an unpaid or underpaid lawyer. See, e.g. the eloquent opinion of Judge Otero in Elektra v. O'Brien in which the Judge, talking specifically about Mr. Gabriel's "cases", decried the fact that "the federal judiciary is being used as a hammer by a small group of plaintiffs to pound settlements out of unrepresented defendants.") I.e., Mr. Gabriel is a man who has been making his living the past 2 1/2 years suing children, the disabled, the homeless, displaced persons, the elderly, people living on Welfare and Social Security, and other defenseless individuals, and taking money from innocent people simply because they couldn't afford the cost of defending a federal lawsuit.
And after communicating with him on practically a daily basis for the past 2 1/2 years.... I don't think he feels the slightest bit of shame over it.
Given the RIAA's behavior when will the record companies be hit with the RICO statutes? They are obviously organized crime and in the extortion business. Aren't extortion, computer fraud and abuse, deceptive trade practices, illegal investigations, trespass, and abuse of process good enough for you?
I don't know of anyone doing these cases in Utah. If you get sued in Utah, my advice would be to ask the folks at EFF if they can help you find somebody good.
I do have the trophy wife, but she's been with me since long before I became a lawyer, since back in the days when I was just an argumentative amateur. So would you say you were arguing in your spare time? Yes, it's been a part of my personality since the earliest days, long before I ever went near a law school. I love a good argument. I trust argument more than I trust consensus; it's more likely to get us closer to the truth. Which is of course why I immediately felt at home on Slashdot.
He means your posts exude smug epicaricacy. I don't necessarily agree, but that's the gist of it. Thanks for the clarification. I don't know why he couldn't say it in plain English like you did.
The RIAA doesn't own any copyrights, the member companies do. So all legal filings have to come on behalf of the actual copyright holder (ie ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP).
But it is the RIAA performing the investigations, making settlement offers, and (as I understand it) even employing the attorneys who litigate the cases, at least initially. So yes, as a matter of legal record, it is ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP being represented in court, but as a practical matter it is the RIAA doing so on behalf of all their member companies. Everything you said is correct except for the italicized portion. The RIAA has hundreds of member companies. The ONLY ones participating in the litigation campaign are the Big Four (EMI, Warner, SONY BMG, and Vivendi/Universal) a couple of dozen of their affiliates. None of the other RIAA members are participating. Which makes me wonder whether it's really just the Big Four using the RIAA as a front.
28 + 3 = 31. 30 page brief? The non-frivolous argument must have been in the missing page. OK so it was 27 1/2 pages of repetition and 2 1/2 pages of telling the judge his prior decision was wrongly decided.
If PACER is at one end of objectivity, NYCL has raced past Groklaw to reside at the other. Guilty as charged. I have never professed or pretended to have "objectivity" towards the RIAA's litigation campaign. I hate the ground they walk upon. My blog is called "Recording Industry vs. The People", it starts off "About the RIAA's attempt to monopolize digital music by redefining copyright law, through the commencement of tens of thousands of extortionate lawsuits against ordinary working people.", and later on states "We established this site to collect and share information about the wave of sham "copyright infringement" lawsuits brought by four large record companies to abuse the American judicial system, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children." Does that sound some like someone trying to pass himself off as "objective"?
NYCL's postings all drip with snarky schadenfreude On that I can't answer you. I don't what "snarky" means and I don't know what "schadenfreude" is. But I can tell you, with a fair amount of certainty, that my postings rarely, if ever, "drip".
And thank you for mentioning me in the same breath as PACER and Groklaw.
And it was crazy to waste the judge's time with 28 pages of repetition from the prior motion papers. If they wanted to preserve their arguments legally, they should have put in 1 sentence 'incorporating by reference' the arguments which they'd made, and which the judge had rejected, in the earlier case. What they did here was flagrantly incompetent.
lawyers do that kind of thing all the time I disagree. Lawyers will occasionally, and very rarely, delicately 'respectfully take exception' to a ruling or respectfully call to the judge's attention something they feel he or she might have 'overlooked', but I have never seen a brief which simply tells a judge that the decision -- which he himself decided -- was "wrongly decided". Take a look at pages 28-30 of the brief, where they tell Judge Lazzara, that his prior decision was "wrongly decided", and tell me if you've ever seen anything so insulting to a judge.
It's a trick question!
The actual answer in all cases is (e).
(e) The lawyer gets to bill an excessive amount for generating some paper work and having lunch with the judge. He then goes to his $2.4 million dollar home in his brand new BMW and sleep with his trophy wife and later on in the week sleep with his mistress.
Lawyer's don't care if their motions are granted or not, they only care if they can bill for the time. You sound as if this is the case for every lawyer and have the chutzbah to say so to a lawyer with NewYorkCountryLawyer's standing in the community? Amazing.
You realize of course that you there are many lawyers out there that might sue you over the statement demanding you produce evidence of them owning said $2.4 million dollar home, produce the "trophy wife" and mistress in court as they would like to meet the trophy wife, take her home to the $2.4 million home and in due time visit the mistress. Only thing stopping them would be the full knowledge that your attorney would, if possible, produce all in court at the same time thus informing the trophy wife of the existance of the $2.4 million dollar home and the mistress. Then offer to represent the trophy wife in divorce proceedings to get her the $2.4 million dollar home as well as half your other assets. The trophy wife would no doubt take him up on the offer then get in a lesbian affair with the mistress while the mistress sues you for palimony if applicable in your state of residence or hers if different. Yeah. It's wrong to generalize like that. I don't have the 2.4 million dollar home, or the mistress, or the BMW. I do have the trophy wife, but she's been with me since long before I became a lawyer, since back in the days when I was just an argumentative amateur.
What are "Rule 11 Sanctions?" Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure prohibits "frivolous" conduct by attorneys. This was about as "frivolous" as it gets.
For you litigation buffs out there, let's take a quiz.
The facts.
A lawyer just filed a 30-page brief in which he (a) devoted 28 pages to repeating the same arguments he had made in a motion that was decided less than 8 months earlier, and (b) devoted 3 pages to telling the judge that his previous ruling was "wrongly decided".
Question #1
What will happen?
(a) The lawyer will win the motion.
(b) The lawyer will lose the motion.
(c) The lawyer will have to find a new line of work.
(d) Both (b) and (c)
Question #2
If you are the client who pays lawyers to do things like that you are
(a) A smart businessperson
(b) A moron
(c) A fool
(d) Both (b) and (c)
Note that the RIAA is no longer referring to MediaSentry as its "investigator", instead referring to it as a "contractor" or a "vendor". I wonder if they think that will make their legal problems go away.
my current employer started out as a small outfit, but several acquisitions later it's now part of a huge group Interesting. You didn't mention that when you were pulling out the violins for all those wonderful small businesses that have been dealt a terrible hardship by reason of US copyright law's failure to protect the value of their hard work. This is what you said when I asked you to disclose what you do for a living:
For most of my career, I've worked for small, privately owned software companies (not in the US) that make original, useful products, which in turn have brought in enough to pay the staff a decent wage but little more than that. And yes, there have been instances of copyright infringement that were obviously harmful to the company's bottom line, and yes, there have been redundancies where the companies couldn't keep paying everyone who worked on that software. Why didn't you mention that you work for a "huge group" and that it was so profitable that it was a highly attractive acquisition target? I guess the copyright laws did pretty well by them, and by you, after all. I guess the answer changes depending on who's asking the question.
Which brings me back to the question I keep asking but no-one seems willing to answer: how are the theoretical protections afforded by US copyright law are worth anything in practice, if we accept that the current dubious legal manoeuvring shouldn't be allowed to continue but don't offer any alternative? Thank you for disclosing where you are coming from, and why you feel the way you do.
I can't speak for anyone else here, but can tell you why I am "unwilling to answer" your question. Because it is an absurd question. As we lawyers would say, it "assumes facts not in evidence".
You are starting from an assumption that US copyright law is not up to protecting the rights of copyright holders. As someone who has worked with copyright law for almost 35 years, I respectfully disagree.
If you are sincere in that belief, and I have no reason to doubt that you are, you are about the only person I have ever met who sincerely believes such a thing.
There are shills, trolls, flacks, lobbyists, and even attorneys, who work for content holders, who will publicly say such stuff when you press a button, but none of them sincerely believe such claptrap.
All copyright holders have to do is what they have been doing for decades in the US: -keep an eye open for major violators of their rights, -enter into cease and desist agreements with those violators, and -as to those who refuse to enter into cease and desist agreements, if they are engaged in major copyright infringement, commence a lawsuit based upon (a) solid evidence, and (b) the well established law, and (c) follow the normal rules and practices of civil litigation in the federal courts.
The only people who ever tried to make anyone think that ambushing our populace with wholesale lawsuits against minor copyright infringements was an effective business model were the morons in the employ of 4 large record companies and 6 large motion picture companies who had failed to capitalize on one of the greatest business opportunities in the history of the world, the dawning of the digital age, and were now looking to find a scapegoat for their screwup, finding their scapegoats in children, grandparents, stroke victims, homeless people, and other hapless victims of the content cartel's madness. They, and the lawyers who have profiteered by inciting and exploiting this folly.
I am sorry if their propaganda machine has unduly influenced you. And I am sorry to disillusion you. But our copyright law and our court system work just fine, when they are not being abused by a host of well paid liars.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine what you were reading of mine that could have made you believe I felt otherwise. This what I said about him. What part of that do you think shows "respect"? Then when someone said I shouldn't attack Mr. Gabriel just because he was my adversary, I responded with this, saying that the reason I hate him has nothing to do with his being an adversary or taking positions contrary to mine.
I've been a litigation attorney for almost 30 years. Some of the best friends I have are people I met as spirited adversaries in contentious, lengthy, hard fought, litigations. If you think I have anything against Mr. Gabriel because he was "upholding the rule of law" or advancing "a legitimate gripe" or because he was on the "wrong" side of legal issues.... you don't know me at all.
I think it's some new guy they hired, who doesn't know that I'm 60, that I've met Mr. Gabriel a number of times and communicate with him many times a week, and that I understand Mr. Gabriel's job a lot better than Mr. Gabriel does.
1. It was primarily for the money, lots and lots of money.
2. It made him feel important; he was pretending to be a lawyer. (Never mind that most of the cases were "ex parte" cases and "default" cases, in which there was no opponent at all, and that in the remaining ones, most of the people couldn't afford a lawyer. So he was always "litigating" against either no one, or someone who had no lawyer, or in a few cases against an unpaid or underpaid lawyer. See, e.g. the eloquent opinion of Judge Otero in Elektra v. O'Brien in which the Judge, talking specifically about Mr. Gabriel's "cases", decried the fact that "the federal judiciary is being used as a hammer by a small group of plaintiffs to pound settlements out of unrepresented defendants.") I.e., Mr. Gabriel is a man who has been making his living the past 2 1/2 years suing children, the disabled, the homeless, displaced persons, the elderly, people living on Welfare and Social Security, and other defenseless individuals, and taking money from innocent people simply because they couldn't afford the cost of defending a federal lawsuit.
And after communicating with him on practically a daily basis for the past 2 1/2 years.... I don't think he feels the slightest bit of shame over it.
I guess that about says it all.
He's appointed to state court, not federal court. Copyright cases are in federal court.
Boy are you picky.
I don't know of anyone doing these cases in Utah. If you get sued in Utah, my advice would be to ask the folks at EFF if they can help you find somebody good.
Does that make us guilty of schadenfreude?
Well if I'm accused of feeling pleasure over the RIAA's misfortune, I am guilty as charged.
Picky picky.
And thank you for mentioning me in the same breath as PACER and Groklaw.
And it was crazy to waste the judge's time with 28 pages of repetition from the prior motion papers. If they wanted to preserve their arguments legally, they should have put in 1 sentence 'incorporating by reference' the arguments which they'd made, and which the judge had rejected, in the earlier case. What they did here was flagrantly incompetent.
Thanks ! Don't thank me.
Thank this guy. He provides me with all my best material.
For you litigation buffs out there, let's take a quiz.
The facts.
A lawyer just filed a 30-page brief in which he (a) devoted 28 pages to repeating the same arguments he had made in a motion that was decided less than 8 months earlier, and (b) devoted 3 pages to telling the judge that his previous ruling was "wrongly decided".
Question #1
What will happen?
(a) The lawyer will win the motion.
(b) The lawyer will lose the motion.
(c) The lawyer will have to find a new line of work.
(d) Both (b) and (c)
Question #2
If you are the client who pays lawyers to do things like that you are
(a) A smart businessperson
(b) A moron
(c) A fool
(d) Both (b) and (c)
Note that the RIAA is no longer referring to MediaSentry as its "investigator", instead referring to it as a "contractor" or a "vendor". I wonder if they think that will make their legal problems go away.
I can't speak for anyone else here, but can tell you why I am "unwilling to answer" your question. Because it is an absurd question. As we lawyers would say, it "assumes facts not in evidence".
You are starting from an assumption that US copyright law is not up to protecting the rights of copyright holders. As someone who has worked with copyright law for almost 35 years, I respectfully disagree.
If you are sincere in that belief, and I have no reason to doubt that you are, you are about the only person I have ever met who sincerely believes such a thing.
There are shills, trolls, flacks, lobbyists, and even attorneys, who work for content holders, who will publicly say such stuff when you press a button, but none of them sincerely believe such claptrap.
All copyright holders have to do is what they have been doing for decades in the US:
-keep an eye open for major violators of their rights,
-enter into cease and desist agreements with those violators, and
-as to those who refuse to enter into cease and desist agreements, if they are engaged in major copyright infringement, commence a lawsuit based upon (a) solid evidence, and (b) the well established law, and (c) follow the normal rules and practices of civil litigation in the federal courts.
The only people who ever tried to make anyone think that ambushing our populace with wholesale lawsuits against minor copyright infringements was an effective business model were the morons in the employ of 4 large record companies and 6 large motion picture companies who had failed to capitalize on one of the greatest business opportunities in the history of the world, the dawning of the digital age, and were now looking to find a scapegoat for their screwup, finding their scapegoats in children, grandparents, stroke victims, homeless people, and other hapless victims of the content cartel's madness. They, and the lawyers who have profiteered by inciting and exploiting this folly.
I am sorry if their propaganda machine has unduly influenced you. And I am sorry to disillusion you. But our copyright law and our court system work just fine, when they are not being abused by a host of well paid liars.
I'm sorry you feel that US copyright law doesn't adequately protect copyright owners. I wonder what you do for a living.