Record Company Collusion a Defense to RIAA Case? 275
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Is collusion by the record companies a defense to an RIAA case? We're about to find out, because the RIAA has made a motion to strike the affirmative defense of Marie Lindor, who alleged that "the plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have" in UMG v. Lindor."
Re:That's great.. no wait... (Score:4, Informative)
First result of a Google search for "motion to strike." It would have been faster to look it up than to post a complaint.
Re:Plenty of competitors face common civil opponen (Score:5, Informative)
But this isn't really like a Class action lawsuit or trade union. This is more like all the grocery stores in a town deciding one day that too many people are stealing milk. So they create a fictional association to protect themselves that goes into each home with or without permission to see if there is milk and if the milk was properly paid for. And then if it wasn't, they determine what kind of container the milk is in, the store who sold it (or should have sold it) sues that person for an obscenely large amount of money and offers to settle for a smaller large amount of money. But both sums of money are more then the value lost by the actions.
Currently, something like that is probably against the law. The defense being offered using colluding isn't going to say "i'm not guilty", it is going to say the evidence was collected illegally by companies acting in an illegal manor against US law for profit above the amount of actual damages and it cannot be entered into this trial. So then UMG says this person distributed our copyright covered materials and here is the evidence which is all gone because of the collusion, so you go, They have no evidence, can we just dismiss this and get on with our lives, The judge says sounds like a good idea and bangs the gavel.
Now this doesn't really touch on their right to sue or anything the accused might have done, it touches on the entering computers in a questionable manor and then attempting to extort funds from people, some of which didn't even have a computer at the time they were accused. So the question is, did the record labels and RIAA collude in a way that was against the law (if it harms one person/consumer, it probably is) and if so, can the evidence they gather when working in that manner be admissible to the cases that they brought about? Generally evidence is evidence except on occasions when civil rights were violated or it was obtained illegally by a party that would benefit.
Re:I'm tired of these defenses. (Score:3, Informative)
The have repeatedly asked students to quit school [techdirt.com]. Apparently the RIAA can't wait untill they get a job to pay them. The RIAA needs money so badly, that they think it's worth destroying kids hope of a real life.
They have also sued 12 year olds [foxnews.com], and even dead grandmothers [afterdawn.com] aren't safe...
Re:While I Agree.. (Score:3, Informative)
Like a cross-licensing agreement? It happens in lots of industries.
Semiconductor manufacturing for a start. Even if a would be new entrant had the huge amount of money needed to build a fab, they would still have to pay a huge amount of money on licensing patents. The established companies in the industry have cross licensed their patent portfolios so they do not have to pay this, so they would have a lasting cost advantage over any new entrant.
Your scenario is slightly worse in that it implies some sort of agreement to sue to protect each other, but it is not that different.
Re:While I Agree.. (Score:3, Informative)
And let's imagine for a moment that they called this industry group "The Business Software Alliance", or BSA for short, and that it had a US web site at: http://w3.bsa.org/usa [bsa.org],
but unlike the RIAA, it operated at an international level. If such an organisation existed, it would probably also have an entry on the Internet's favourite toilet wall, which knowing the way Wikipedia tends to name things, would very likely be stored as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Software_Al
Re:We all saw it coming. (Score:3, Informative)
The individual record companies in UMG v. Lindor [blogspot.com] are UMG Recordings, Inc., Warner Bros. Records Inc., Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, Motown Record Company, L.P., and SONY BMG Music Entertainment. But the lawyer for the plaintiffs takes his instructions from the RIAA, and the settlement authority comes from the RIAA, and if one settles with them the settlement payment is payable to "RIAA Client Trust Account".
It may perform some functions of a trade association in other contexts; I don't know. But in connection with the litigations it only represents the 4 major record companies; no other RIAA members are involved.
In connection with the litigation campaign, it is, as you point out, the "agent of collusion".... no more, no less.
Re:Dangerous precedent (Score:3, Informative)
There's no comparison at all.
Here we have 4 multinational corporations who control 80% of an industry. They have pooled all of their copyrights and joined forces in a blood pact not to reach a separate settlement with any defendant. Their settlements are nonnegotiable. It is their way, or the highway.
It is textbook collusion, which has one purpose and one purpose only -- to take the value of their copyrights, which are each lawful monopolies, and leverage and combine them into a greater, more powerful, more valuable supermonopoly. It is a classic, textbook example of copyright misuse.
Re:Legal collusion (Score:3, Informative)