First RIAA Lawsuit to Head to Trial 616
mamer-retrogamer writes "Out of 14,800 lawsuits the RIAA has filed in the past two years, none have gone to court - until now. Patricia Santangelo, a divorced mother of five living in Wappingers Falls, New York, found herself the target of an RIAA lawsuit and vows to contest it. Santangelo claims that she knows nothing about downloading music online and the likely culprit is not her but a friend's child who used her computer. The RIAA disagrees."
My question for the legally saavy: (Score:4, Interesting)
Who to blame more than the RIAA? (Score:3, Interesting)
The voters elected a Congress with no concern for their enumerated and severely powers. Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Independents are equally evil.
The voters continue to vote, robbing everyone of their basic rights. The crazy majority has given their power away to a government more concerned with growing its power.
Don't confuse the RIAA with evil. You, the voter, are evil. They just followed the letter of the laws you wanted.
Re:My question for the legally saavy: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'd like to see this go to a jury. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'd like to see this go to a jury. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not Good for the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Does being a divorced mother of five make you immune from having to obey the law?
I'm not saying that I agree with the RIAA on this issue, but the burden of proof in civil court is "preponderance of the evidence," and has nothing to do with
Jury nullification notwithstanding, the jury must decide for the plaintiff or defense based on the evidence presented in court, not the ideology, for or against, pertaining to downloading music on the Internet.
My two cents, and IANAL, but I have spend a LOT of time on the witness stand as an expert witness.
She should be more aggressive (Score:5, Interesting)
She could ask the ACLU to defend her on that basis and they might very well jump at the idea.
I've always hated that provision of the law (DMCA), which allows them to just bypass the courts and hire the cheapest lawyer/firm on the block to use their very deep lawyer funds chest to threaten the average joe with massive suits and see them capitulate, regardless of whether or not they are guilty.
You can't use a badly formulated law to punish the unjust and expect complete compliance from the masses.
Further, when copyright (copywrong?) can be extended to insane lengths of time far beyond what was intended (e.g. steamboat willie) and fair use takes a back seat to corporate profits, can we be very surprised at the disrespect/disobediance thses laws are receiving?
Money and technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'd like to see this go to a jury. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you been selected to jury duty? I remember being screened for a jury in a trial where one of the lawyers asked the jury whether they would pass a guilty verdict for battery if a defendent had touched the toe of someone that had asked them not to touch it. Everyone, but me, said they would. Felony conviction for touching someone's toe. I think you grossly overestimate the free thinking capabilities of your fellow citizens.
Re:hmmm..... (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Monitor P2P network
2. set up settlement hotline
3. Sent threatening letter (something like hundreds of thousands of dolars if you go to court, a more "resonable" ammount if you settle)
4. Profit!!
Re:The right side? Yeah.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not a divorced mother of five, but I am a 40 yo married father of two. And I happen to like Godsmack. OT, I know, but it is possible for her to have been interested in those songs.
Possiblity of Innocence (Score:5, Interesting)
These I suspect have been root-kitted to act as zombies or proxies. These people have no idea what kinds of traffic is running through their machines and connection. It sounds as if such people are getting sued in some instances, but probably don't the know well enough to realize what is happening.
It doesn't seem to me that a list of bittorrent peers associated with a copyrighted file proves guilt. The environment is too insecure to guarantee who the actual source is. It seems to me the RIAA should have to prove a couple things:
1) That they downloaded the file with the copyrighted name and verified that the content is actually the copyrighted material.
2) That the activity from the IP address of the peer being charged actually represents the activity of a particular machine's owner. They would probably need to confiscate the machine for this - is this feesible? Just charging the owner of a connection seems unreliable, many machines can sit on a home or business network. Can one be held responsible for hijacked traffic running through their pipe?
Where this is headed it seems is a battle over regulating net communication. The RIAA will begin to push technical mandates through congress to make the internet more "secure," which will be difficult at best without implementing lots of centralized control and monitoring. How long till we have sign our packets with keys? Then how long till "sponsored" packets become free, while others cost?
A recent slashdot story featuring Doc Searl's opinion piece, Saving the Net from the pipeholders" [weblogs.com] sum's up this position very well. It's kind of long, but but offers an insightful view of what's ahead, and is worth reading for anyone with interest in the future net as a decentralized, unprejudiced peer to peer medium.
Re:I'd like to see this go to a jury. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's usual for the judge to instruct the jury "if you believe beyond a reasonable doubt the defendent downloaded these songs
This might sound a bit far out but I have a remote suspicion the reason none of these cases has ever gone to court is because an anonymous person steps in to pay the usual $3000 fine and the defendant, having been threatened with penalties of up to $500,000, willingly signs the non disclosure agreement not to discuss the settlement and the case is thus settled out of court and the RIAA is seen to have won
The anonymous philanthropist is, of course, an unidentified RIAA rep. Let's face it, it's cheaper for the RIAA to fork over the $3000 themselves and pretend they won than face the negative global publicity they'd receive if this actually went to trial.
I agree this might be stretching it a bit but it's the only reason I can think of that after thousands of cases over several years none has ever gone to court and the ones that contest always settle in the end.
I could be completely wrong.
Re:Who to blame more than the RIAA? (Score:2, Interesting)
Root of the problem remains that the process of creating the copyright laws has been subverted and even perverted by one particular group that is only concerned about maximizing their own profits. The whole point of copyright was to benefit society by encouraging creativity, and the supposed targets of encouragement are the people who actually do the creative work. All this stuff about maximizing profits for the publishers was added later.
Me? I actually think it isn't a problem. The copyright system is so badly broken that no amount of legal life support can sustain it indefinitely. Death to Mickey Mouse!
Yes, I am flaming Mickey Mouse. It's not that I have anything against Walt Disney (even though Mickey Mouse is a derivative work that would be illegal under current copyright law), but he's dead, after all.
RIAA problem fester, won't fix it - revolting (Score:3, Interesting)
RIAA for shame. Crows about "rights" while fueling the festering problems. 30+ yrs is enough, put up or shut up and get out. The current regime is simply an obnoxious, parasitic force begging to be slapped down hard by an angry public. I am kind of morbidly curious to see the public reaction if and when the court system fails again.
Support share-friendly artists (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Go to http://www.archive.org/audio/etreelisting-browse.
2. Listen to commercial-free streaming audio via ITunes (Radio) and other internet media.
3. Reward the artists whose work you enjoy this way by going to their concerts. Reward any artists whose albums you can hear from front to back for free, like Nickel Creek on CMT.com and the Ditty Bops on dittybops.com.
Re:14,800 lawsuits (Score:4, Interesting)
No wonder it takes two years for a murder suspect to stand trial, 23 months to deal with the paperwork of RIAA lawsuits, one month to pick a date everyone can agree on that ain't a holiday.
I love America, but baby, sometimes you make my blood boil.
It's more significant than the common sense aspect (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, a court of law has numerous restrictions on the ways in which "common sense" can be applied. A perfect example would be when a jury is instructed to disregard testimony it just heard, even if the basis for the instruction is not that the testimony is false or misleading. Honestly, a lot of jurors are intimidated by court rooms and lawyers and judges, and find themselves contemplating things like justice and The Rule Of Law on a level more personal than anything that came before jury duty. This makes the fact that we have a formal constitutional right to jury nullifaction much more than a minor assist to common sense... it allows jurors who want to follow strictly legal pathways to do so, even when nullifying a law.
Re:14,800 lawsuits (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I know the average settlement cost is $3,000. After 14,800 lawsuits that's $44.4 million. I don't really know the law in this area but is that $44.4 million even taxed? Or did they just make $44.4m sans some minor legal fees? And if they did just make this huge sum of money, how much of it is going to the artist who was 'starving to death' because of 'piracy'? $44.4m over 2 years would be about $61,000 a day, or about $2,500 an hour, that's a crazy $0.70 per second.
I could be totally wrong though.
Re:Juries can judge the law (Score:4, Interesting)
The phrase "a jury of your peers" has nothing to do with the American legal system, really. It was an English Commonlaw right that guaranteed a nobleman couldn't be tried by peasants. The only holdover I know of that it still has is that an officer facing a court martial can choose for his jury to only be fellow commissioned officers and not enlisted personnel or warrant officers.
How bout support to set precedent? (Score:2, Interesting)
It would go a long way in bringing public awareness to just how heavy-handed the **IAs are coming down on individuals and send a clear message that we're ready to fight back!
Just a thought.
Question about the facts: "Downloading"? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a question about the facts of this case: is this case, or any of these cases, concerning someone illegally "downloading" songs? TFA explicitly says this. I thought that all of these cases were against people who distributed songs for others to download. The imprecision of terminology in this matter is confusing. Has the RIAA actually begun suing people who download but did not distribute songs?
I am particularly interested in what the legal proof of music ownership is. Has this ever been determined? (I've never been able to find it, if so.) E.g. If I move and lose a CD, but have a song from it on a mix CD, how do I prove I own a song? If I digitize a cassette (or LP or whatever), must I lug around the cassette tape for the rest of my life to prove I once bought it? If a judge asks a citizen "prove that you own this song", what does the citizen have to do?
Re:I'd like to see this go to a jury. (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually did a study like this, and though i doubt it was one of the ones you read, i did indeed examine the relationship between sales and new album releases. in fact, my final model found three statistically significant variables that accounted for most of the variation in record sales (at the 95% confidence level).
those three variables were %change in GDP (year on year), Personal Consumption Expenditures (which helps account for people's changing spending habits in times of economic uncertainty and such), and New Album Releases.
I ran dozens of different models in an attempt to capture the "piracy" effect, and after two years was forced to conclude that this effect, if it exists at all, is indistinguishable from random noise. in other words, it is insignificant.
I am continuing my research into this area and I have actually recently found a couple of additional economists interested in helping my research, so hopefully we will be able to contribute more to the literate on the subject in the future. regardless, there is already an awful lot of evidence that at least makes us seriously question the veracity of the industry's claims, and makes us wonder how the flying fuck they justify their rather ridiculous conclusions.