RIAA Complaint Dismissed as "Boilerplate" 197
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The decision many lawyers had been expecting — that the RIAA's 'boilerplate' complaint fails to state a claim for relief under the Copyright Act — has indeed come down, but from an unlikely source. While the legal community has been looking towards a Manhattan case (Elektra v. Barker) for guidance, the decision instead came from Senior District Court Judge Rudi M. Brewster of the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The decision handed down denied a default judgment (i.e. the defendant had not even appeared in the action). Judge Brewster not only denied the default judgment motion but dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim. Echoing the words of Judge Karas at the oral argument in Barker , Judge Brewster held (pdf) that 'Plaintiff here must present at least some facts to show the plausibility of their allegations of copyright infringement against the Defendant. However, other than the bare conclusory statement that on "information and belief" Defendant has downloaded, distributed and/or made available for distribution to the public copyrighted works, Plaintiffs have presented no facts that would indicate that this allegation is anything more than speculation.'"
magine that riaa (Score:5, Insightful)
reality: your business model is history
think up a new business model, and stop trying to prop up the dead one with the court system
a new business model means less money? too bad. the golden age is over. fucking deal with it and stop sending your barking dogs to terrorize little people in your rage and frustration and denial
Are these people morons? (Score:4, Insightful)
The longer I live, the more I am in a state of sheer awe that society doesn't come apart like Britney Spears fan on youtube.
Re:magine that riaa (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite a few studies have shown that new business models would earn them even more money. It seems more that they aren't content with a slice of pie, they want it all. The notion of IP (intellectual property) has given them the excuse to try to get everything they can, even when things such as fair use and respecting your customers get in the way.
No facts? Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:4, Insightful)
How can they do such a lousy effort this yet be one of the largest sectors of industry?
Perhaps they're more accustomed to people just rolling over with a chilling effects letter. Plenty of hard work keeps things finely tuned, it's evident that there have been a lot of legal people collecting retainer fees who have spent very little time practicing. Seriously, this is pretty amaturish.
My thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
Text Log? could be edited.
If instead of that, you have a text log, verified by the ISP and with a signed statement asserting that this text log effectively shows that the given binary conversation took place at the given time, and that the receiving end has a given MAC address, and if that MAC address can be certainly confirmed as belonging to the accused, now THAT's a completely different story.
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:3, Insightful)
They're caught up with the idea that they can continue to play the game by the old rules. They still seem convinced that the Internet will possess and distribute content solely by the terms of copyright holders. Their efforts to deal with copyright violations are disproportionally stick to carrot, and any benefits technology brings to the table with regard to low-cost distribution and promotion are set aside in pursuit of abusing technology to restrict distribution and limit choice.
Irregardless of the ethics of the situation, the reality is that copyright holders are competing with those who appropriate their content and share/copy it for free. One can't beat them on cost, but there are other carrots that could be offered with legitimate purchases -- "live" Internet webcasts of concerts, real concert tickets, audience-prompted cast interview events, mail-in tickets for exclusive merchandise, etc. Such things may even build fan loyalty or otherwise work as positive public relations.
On the other hand, one could sue handfuls of people and hope that's enough to pursuade millions of downloaders to change their evil ways. It does have the benefit of feeling "right", even if it doesn't alter the calculus of the situation one shred.
just keep it a little longer... (Score:2, Insightful)
My guess is that they know it is dying - they just want a little bit more money before discarding the RIAA as "the evil force that forced us to force the old model - but we have a new one now, and we became good and nice).
1980s laws (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Copyright infringement penalties are excessive! (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds like - what do they call it a wikipedia - oh yes, weasel words.
Oh, I had to check. You copied that verbatim from your fountain of wisdom.
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:5, Insightful)
Confessions of a convert (Score:5, Insightful)
They call themselves the RIAA, but really, they represent companies like Sony, UMG, Time-Warner, etc... The RIAA moniker is used to keep their activities from reflecting poorly on the sponsoring companies.
You know what's interesting? When I was younger, I had heard things about pop music being evil, then rock music being evil, and certainly, gangsta rap was evil. I just kind of dismissed them, thinking, how could listening to music be evil?
Turns out, I was asking the wrong question. The problem wasn't in listening to the music, so much as it was that my paying for music was funding evil things, directly and indirectly. Sure, rappers talking about killing cops isn't a good thing, but it wasn't as nearly as bad as what music purchasers were doing by feeding the record companies:
I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. In fact, I'm probably one of those lost sales the RIAA blames on piracy. The thought that someone might not buy their music because they object to their lack of morality and common decency doesn't even occur to them. They think everyone else is just like them - greedy, money grubbers who can't stand the notion of actually paying for music. (After all, the RIAA member companies do their best to avoid paying the musicians).
You don't need to explain why you don't patronize the RIAA member companies like Sony, etc... Instead, ask the question, "What good has the RIAA done for music, musicians, and society in general?"
The silence will be deafening.
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people are trying to justify their job. They're in major stress, and stupid. So they sue mothers and teenagers.
You know, it's the outcome of the system we exist in. Doesn't justify their nonsense, but I thought I'd put things in a little perspective for you.
The moment that worries me is that it took long, long time for the legal system to start (albeit slowly) reacting against those frivolous suits.
RIAA as a private organization can't be trusted to be just and reasonable in the pursuit of its goals. The legal system however was supposed to handle this properly.
Instead, money speaks, as always.
Re:Copyright infringement penalties are excessive! (Score:3, Insightful)
You're making me laugh. The fines were originally created to penalize organized crime groups creating bootleg video/audio casettes bring them enormous profits from the copying of a single product.
Fining them $10-$20 for distributing 30 thousand copies of Die Hard 4 would be hysterical.
The law needs to be refined. Exempts must be made, the copyright offense should be considered in the context given.
But even in the case about some kido downloading illegal MP3, $10-$20 is a joke. This is not product cost he's paying, it's a penalty. If you don't buy a ticket when you drive the train, if you're caught they don't just charge you few dollars more than the ticket price. They penalize you for working around the system and not paying in the first place.
I would consider $200-$300 per copyrighted material to be closer to how I see it. And with a ceiling if the offense is subject to one of the exempts (so having too much content at once doesn't make you a slave to RIAA until you die).
Face it: downloading music/movies is in fact not moral or just. It's just a side effect of the industry being too stupid and slow to react to the Internet and adapt its business models to it.
Still, it's not moral or just. We just shouldn't let the industry sue people with loose evidence and enslave them for *maybe* copying some movies on their computers.
The evidence must be goddamn solid.
Re:1980s laws (Score:3, Insightful)
To quote "WarGames"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lightman: What's that?
Falken: Futility. That there's a time when you should just give up.
I'm just sayin' (Score:1, Insightful)
Neither is the way the musician is screwed by record companies.
I'm not saying two wrongs make a right. But it's hard to appeal to people's morality when you have none yourself.
It's like Brittany Spears saying girls shouldn't screw around and have babies until they're adults. You would laugh. Kids would laugh. She would be right. But she has no moral standing to make the recommendation.
Re:Don't get too enthusiastic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Confessions of a convert (Score:5, Insightful)
The ability to make a living as a musician in the past 100 years has depended on the difficulty of production and distribution of music recordings, and the willingness of the artists to go on tour. Needless to say, the record companies raked in the lion's share of the proceeds, leaving the recording, performing musician mostly broke. A few people became super stars, which a few generations of suckers for the record labels to exploit, preying on their hopes of becoming famous and rich. Few people became famous; even less became rich. And those that did become rich made their money from performing; record sales, not so much.
Now we have come full circle: music recording and distribution has become so cheap, you don't have that revenue stream available anymore. Musicians who do make a living as musicians will do so by going around performing, just as they did before the 20th century. And the idea that musicians were actually able to make a decent living as recording artists during the 20th century is really a myth -- successful musicians, even those who sold lots of albums, made their money from touring. The record companies took most of the profits from record sales. Sure there were a number of popular musicians, but there were many more who never made any money off of it.
Most people with a Masters of Fine Arts who actually still paint ( and I know a few of them ) have a day job. A few of them are lucky enough to teach college kids to paint. The rest sell weed and/or are starving.
So, being a full time artist is a pipe dream for many people. It many sound like a downer, but I look at it the other way -- for human history, art has always been a folk expression. People got together in the village after they were done in the fields and danced and sang. Simple as that. Your brother will have a hard time making a living solely as an artist, but he can get a 9-to-5 and perform at some bars a few nights a week, release an album every few years, and have a damn lot of fun doing it, all without starving
Re:No facts? Exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, either way is going to leave open avenues for litigious bullying. However, with the new requirement, when the little guy brings a lawsuit against the big guy, and the court decides that the little guy hasn't stated a plausible claim, that's it - there is no legal recourse to prove that there was a violation, because the lawsuit has been dismissed. That's what discovery is supposed to be. Under the old system, with no plausibility requirement, the little guy got bullied, but if he grew a backbone (and money for attorney's fees, admittedly), he could still prove that the big guy was just bullying him. Sure, we're able to dismiss these cases more easily now, but in a few months the lawsuits are going to start being just specific enough to be plausible, because the RIAA has the resources to do a little bit more research.
Basically, under the old system, lawsuits would end at the bullied party's discretion - maybe monetary considerations made it a decision based on more than just the legal merits of their case, but they were the ones who decided to settle. Now, as in Bell Atlantic, there is no way the plaintiffs can do anything more about their claims - the lawsuit was ended at the discretion of the bully (alleged bully - there was never any plausible claim for relief under the Sherman Antitrust Act against Bell Atlantic - but we'll never know if there was evidence that may have made it plausible, will we?).
If (completely hypothetical here, just using the same parties as the actual discussion for convenience) a music downloader brought a suit against the RIAA claiming that they were using lawsuits to scare people or whatever, it would be dismissed because the music companies won't just surrender internal emails or memos discussing this tactic, so there is no plausible claim. If Bell Atlantic hadn't happened, an enterprising plaintiff could bring such a suit, and use discovery rules to compel the companies to divulge such evidence, if it existed.
Like I said, in this particular instance, I'm happy that the lawsuit didn't end with the defendant having to pay either a settlement or damages. However, I think that the law used to achieve this outcome is bad, and will in the long run be a huge detriment to "little guys" everywhere.
Crystal clear (Score:5, Insightful)
This situation, more than any so far, blatantly exposes the true motives of the RIAA. They never intended for any of these cases to actually go to trial. The whole effort is a shakedown, a scare tactic to quickly extort some cash through intimidation and fear and hopefully provide a deterrent to others not to infringe. If they wanted to, they could build more solid cases with more convincing evidence, but that would take far more time, effort, and expense than they are willing to put into it. Believe it or not, their legal eagles are probably involved in far weightier and more important matters than suing a handful of file sharers. To build a case that will hold up in court for each and every one of these people would be extremely cost-ineffective.
To me, this is very much like credit card companies or other creditors who threaten to sue for collection of very small debts. They don't want to actually go to court to get that couple of thousand bucks you owe -- they know that the expenses of doing so would far outweigh the debt. (And getting a judgement is one thing -- actually collecting the money is another.) They merely hope that having a deputy show up at your front door with some scary looking legal papers in hand will be intimidating enough to motivate you to somehow scrape up some dough to settle the case.
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:5, Insightful)
The lawyers here are in the business of making money by doing legal work; the more hours they put in, the more they get paid. Clearly, the lawyers are -- from a business standpoint -- pretty smart. They are getting paid a lot for accomplishing nothing, and for actually causing their clients more harm than good.
The record companies, on the other hand, are in the business of selling music, building brands, creating goodwill among customers, bringing their product out through new technologies, and they're supposed to bring in more money than they spend. Clearly, the record companies are -- from a business standpoint -- pretty dumb.
The lawyers are smart businessmen; the record companies are, at least for the moment, being run by dumb businessmen.
As to having "access to the finest legal minds money can buy", yes they have "access" to the finest legal minds. But if you think they have the "finest legal minds" working with them..... as someone who has worked with and against some of the finest legal minds in our country, I beg to differ with you there. The "finest legal minds" would not even stoop to do the kind of garbage work these folks are doing.
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. the Holywood complex is made up of people who influence _other people_ for a living. That tends to keep the necessary skills sharp. On the contrary, the software industry makes money convincing _bits of silicon_ to do their bidding, which reflects in their (sorely lacking) marketing/PR/lobbying skills. Even among the successful software players a ham-handed, resource-intensive (read SPAM-ish) approach to public relations is all too common.
2. The Mafia. It wields a vast amount of power and is, for historical and practical reasons, wedded inextricably to Hollywood.
Media-player hardware producers (Sony and their ilk), otoh, _are_ gatekeepers to media already. The push for DRM is largely theirs, as they do not want to lose that position.
Re:Bizarre? No. Logical (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Are these people morons? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Piracy" [kuro5hin.org] is a smokescreen. You want the entire top 40? Plug your radio's headphone jack into your PC's sound card, tune to a top-40 station, and sample it [kuro5hin.org]. Just let it run for a couple of hours, and you can make MP3s of each and every one of the top 40.
They're not worried about you getting their music for free, they're worried about you hearing indie music. that's what eats into their profits! E.G, say you like Radiohead. Now, if you like Radiohead you're very likely to buy a CD or some iTunes downloads. You heard a snippet of a tune called "The Fog", so you fire up eDonkey or Kazaa or whatever and enter "The Fog", if you like it you'll buy it.
You're very likely to download my friends' band The Station by mistake, who have a completely different song by the same name. You like this song, so you buy their CD or download the song from iTunes. You now have the price of one CD's less worth of cash - and that stops you from buying an RIAA CD.
There's where their fear of "piracy" comes in. The REAL "pirates" are their independant competetitors, with superior quality and lower price.
-mcgrew
Re:magine that riaa (Score:3, Insightful)