RIAA Accepts $300 Offer of Judgement In Carolina

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a North Carolina case, Capitol v. Frye, the RIAA has accepted a $300 offer of judgment made by the defendant. This is the first known use, in the RIAA v. Consumer cases, of the formal offer of judgment procedure which provides that if the plaintiff doesn't accept the offer, and doesn't later get a judgment for a larger amount, the plaintiff is responsible for all of the court costs from that point on in the case. The accepted judgment in the Frye case (PDF) also contains an injunction — much more limited than the RIAA's typical 'settlement' injunction (PDF) — under which defendant agreed not to infringe plaintiffs' copyrights."

Decent Resolution

[GizmoToy]

Seems like a reasonable resolution for the defendant. $300 to make a lawsuit like this go away could be worth it if you don't really have the financial means to mount a decent defense and there's no way the RIAA had spent less than $300 to that point, so they lost money on the deal. This a very low settlement amount for the RIAA, so it's possible others may be able to utilize this.

It'll be interesting to see if the RIAA accepts it if anyone else tries it.

Re:I'm no lawyer, but

[Nefarious Wheel]

The blog said no precedent was being set, that it was clear it was the best the RIAA could expect from the case given that the subject was not likely to give much return on the collection effort, and another high-handed collection effort from a penniless mum would work against them. There was very little that could be taken from her, being another single mother receiving housing and income assistance. I'd say that that $300 was a pretty big whallop out of her budget though, and will make the RIAA look even worse as a result.

Providing that's possible, of course...

Re:I'm no lawyer, but

[GizmoToy]

Nowhere in the entire post did I say either that I didn't think they could prove their claims or that I thought the defendant was guilty. You should re-read the post.

I said that since I don't know the details of the case I have no idea if it was possible for the RIAA to prove their claims, and that the defendant may have been guilty and wanted to end the suit. Neither is unreasonable given the posted article and the case's resolution.

Re:Sanctions?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I notice that the settlement offer explicitly excludes any claims for sanctions that the defendant has already requested. Can you give more information on possible sanctions against the RIAA and/or their lawyers?

Those of us who believe the RIAA's litigation tactics are frivolous would like to move for sanctions under Rule 11 (c) [cornell.edu], but the rule is quite limited, providing the offending party with a "safe harbor", and many judges are reluctant to invoke it altogether, as the consequences of a Rule 11 sanction against an attorney are very severe. So it is invoked rarely. I am not aware of any successful invocation of Rule 11 in the RIAA cases by a defendant. I am aware of one instance in which the judge disagreed with the defendant's lawyer on the merits of the underlying motion, found the Rule 11 motion to itself be frivolous, and has held that the defendant's lawyer should be sanctioned, based on several things he had done that irked the judge.

Re:Sorry for being picky, but...

[The One and Only]

Since most written languages in the Western world were standardized by their translation of the Bible, the Bible is a great source for this information.

Re:Something Doesn't Compute

[Shihar]

Think of it like this. Defendant offers plaintiff a $1 judgment. The three possible outcomes for the defendant are:

      1. Plaintiff accepts. Defendant pays plaintiff $1 and everybody goes home.

2. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is awarded more than $1. This is the same outcome as if the judgment offer was never made at all. Filing pointless motions does two things. First, it pisses off the judge to have to wade through your bullshit. Pissing off the judge is never a good idea because they can and will make your life miserable. Second, it costs money to file anything. Even if the filing itself is free, it costs lawyer time... and by lawyer time costs money out of your pocket.

3. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is not awarded any judgment. Plaintiff has to pay defendant's legal costs.

If no damages are awarded, then this rule does not apply. There is a separate mechanism for potentially recouping losses from a civil suit that fails. You can potentially recover lawyer costs (and potentially more in some cases) if someone files a civil suit and you successfully defend yourself, but this is not the mechanism that does it. This mechanism only kicks in if you are found to have committed damage and the amount of damage was less then what you offered.

The point of this mechanism is not punish someone for demanding more money than they are entitled to. The point of this mechanism is to prevent needless litigation. Imagine if your neighbor threw a baseball through your window because he was sick of hearing loud music coming from your house. You take him to court and claim $10,000 worth of damage. Normally, you could be a dick and just carry on suing him because you want to make him pay his legal expenses as extra punishment and see how large of a settlement you can score. You know you are asking for a bullshit amount of money, but lets pretend your a rich jerk and just want to make your neighbor suffer. Your neighbor knows he is going to lose because he did indeed break your window and you can prove that it did damage to you. What he can do is offer to pay up $200 in damages via this mechanism. You can still bring it to court if you want, but if the judge decides that you only did $150 in damages, your neighbor just pays that $150 and then drops a few thousand dollars worth of legal expenses with your lap. So, being wise you grumble and accept the deal because it is a fair amount. By accepting the deal you don't waste the court's time and do your small part to help keep state legal costs down.

The point is just to force people to accept fair settlements before it ends up costing a judge time and the state money to sort out the mess.

Re:Something Doesn't Compute

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, seems odd to me. but not surprising... I am an MPA, not a lawyer, and my experience is that the gov't is heavily tied into the credit industry and basically uses it as outsourced/privatized financial and security management for both business and hiring decisions.

As far as I can tell, you can be denied employment for a non-sensitive position that doesn't involve finance, regardless of a lack of an criminal history or civil rulings, based entirely on your credit report. I've had credit reports required for non-sensitive volunteer positions. The gov't supposedly has to tell you if you are rejected for employment or a promotion, but somehow I doubt that always happens--as there appears to be limited oversight. Amusingly though, I recall a university in NC having a position paper stating that credit based hiring may represent a system of discrimination against minorities that is illegal (this is highly likely, but a test case might be hard to find and argue). In addition, misuse of credit reports may not apply to federal or "security" evaluations--even irrelevant ones, because it's hard to show they are irrelevant. I have horrible credit, but that's due to my economic situation and the less-important nature of business contracts (they are always entered into with an amount of risk to be understood) and not reflective of my ethics or a predictor of my potential to be blackmailed. Regardless, I'm going back into the private sector, mainly due to incompetent personnel and hiring practices that make even the most respected government organizations, such as the GAO, seem unprofessional.

Re:I'm no lawyer, but

[Phil John]

Exactly, otherwise companies wanting easy lawsuits in the future could be very dishonest and pay someone to be sued (and lose).

Re:I'm no lawyer, but

[Paradise Pete]

a formal Rule 68 offer of judgment is something different than that. It's kind of a dare.

It seems like such a powerful tool that it would be almost automatic to offer a small amount. What happens in cases where it isn't done? Are costs typically shared evenly?

Re:I'm no lawyer, but

[Lloyd_Bryant]

(You're not the kind of dummy who downloads more than one song at a time, are you?)

To the best of my knowledge, the RIAA have not yet sued a single person for *downloading* music. What the suits revolve around is *uploading* (or "making available").

If there's only a single song at issue, then your analysis would be valid. But for most of the defendants in the RIAA suits, the allegation is that they "made available" (had in a shared folder) hundreds or thousands of songs.
Since that's $750 per song, in these cases the bottom line is a hell of a lot more than $300.

The fact that the RIAA accepted this offer is suspicious. It make me believe that they had no real case against the defendant, and knew it (gee, big surprise there). It's a shame that the defendant was unwilling/unable to actually fight it out...

I had a offer of judgment procedure

[t0qer]

One of the dot coms I worked for imploded. During the implosion there was a lot of confusion over who owned what, at the center of all this controversy was a little sun box that contained the source code for the company product.

At the time I was the IT guy for this company. I took my orders from the CEO because the CTO was just psycho. In one of the meetings between me, the CEO and CTO the CTO accused me of being on "Mind Altering drugs" at work because I had a can of get this.. Jolt Cola on my desk (This CTO was a devout mormon)

The CEO fired the CTO, then decided to pack up our office and head north from Sunnyvale to Alameda. Being the IT guy, it was my job to make sure the computers made it up there safely. A few months later the company completely imploded, everyone went off to work for different companies, and that was that or so I thought.

About a year later I got a court summons. The CTO was suing me for $15 million dollars. I was being accused of "Stealing his source code" because apparently the company didn't own that little sun box I moved. After a few initial rounds in pre-trial we were all set to go to trial.

My lawyer and I were sitting out in front of the courtroom when we got a surprise. The judges assistant came up to us and started telling us the CTO was willing to settle for $1500. He explained it like this..

"You know toq, we're really sick of this asshole. Me, the judge, the other lawyers all think he's a cocksucker, but you already know that. Just take the settlement"

Me, "But I didn't do anything wrong"

Assitant, "Well let me put it to you another way. If you don't take this settlement, it's going to mean a trial, which is going to mean jurors, and a whole bunch of menusha I don't want to get into, but it's going to cost ALOT of money. The judge is going to look at the fact that you didn't take this $1500 settlement, and wonder why you costed all these people time and money"

Me: "So the judge just wants this out of his hair, is that what you're saying?"

Assistant: "Yes"

So I took the settlement, nothing went down on my record.

I'm guessing this $300 RIAA case is the same deal. The judge probably got sick of the team of lawyers that represent the RIAA tying up his courtroom with petty bullshit, and i'm guessing the person taking the settlement got the same speech I did.