New Attorneys Fee Decision Against RIAA 144
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has gotten slammed again, this time in Oregon, as the Magistrate Judge in Atlantic v. Andersen has ruled that Tanya Andersen's motion for attorneys fees should be granted. The Magistrate, in his 15-page decision, noted that, despite extensive pretrial discovery proceedings, 'when plaintiffs dismissed their claims in June 2007, they apparently had no more material evidence to support their claims than they did when they first contacted defendant in February 2005.....' and concluded that 'Copyright holders generally, and these plaintiffs specifically, should be deterred from prosecuting infringement claims as plaintiffs did in this case.' This is the same case in which (a) the RIAA insisted on interrogating Ms. Andersen's 10-year-old girl at a face-to-face deposition, (b) the defendant filed RICO counterclaims against the record companies, and (c) the defendant recently converted her RICO case into a class action"
Precedent! (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a lot of precedents being set against the RIAA lately, and it leads me to believe that maybe... just maybe... there's light at the end of this tunnel.
Re:yeah, well, you can't have everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Settling still seems less painful (Score:4, Interesting)
This is exactly why recording contracts are HUGE.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is this important? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:One step closer... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm the sort of person who buys what he likes.. I prefer to give money to people who provide me with entertainment. My usual MO is to download what I want and if I like it I will look for it on CD or DVD and purchase it. I have a strange collection of movies and many of them were downloaded before I bought them. I make good money and I'm more than willing to share some of it with people who make my life more enjoyable.
When it comes to TV shows I find I can't even buy what I want. It's just not available. My choices are to either download it or sit during the time they put it on the TV and watch it and there is my problem. My evenings are MINE to decide what to do with. I'm not going to give up hanging out with friends just so I can sit and watch TV. I'm not going to give up making extra money to sit and watch TV. I'm not going to give up weekly church events to sit and watch TV.
So I download and hope whoever ripped what I want didn't do too bad a job of it. But you know what? My time is expensive. I would happily pay someone to make sure that whatever I got was good quality. But they simply don't provide that service.
How did things get so completely backwards? What happened to customer convenience? The whole point of capitalism is to provide a SERVICE. When the customer wants a service the customer pays for it and gets what (s)he pays for. Give me what I want(entertainment) and I'll give you what you want(money). Instead we have an organization that expects me to make changes for them and do business at their convenience. And then they have the nerve to feel entitled to this arrangement.
They need to get over themselves and start providing a service again. Until they do that: I'm stuck downloading.
This isn't ancient Greece or Rome... (Score:3, Interesting)
I respect your point that culture and content was abundant in times when there were no copyright laws, but its relative abundance paled in comparison to today. Consider that:
Also, consider that this was a time when:
We live in different times and have a completely different culture, so to compare today's creative content to that of ancient Greece or Rome is misleading. Copyright law was created for a reason. Without it, we wouldn't have nearly the amount of creative works we have today, because those who created most of what we do have today would have taken 9-5 day jobs instead.
Re:yeah, well, you can't have everything (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of money, I had always thought the RIAA was funded by the various member corporations, and was to some degree subject to their will. With the RIAA extracting substantial sums from these settlements, are they functioning now as an independent profit-making enterprise? Are they operating this lawsuit mill at a loss? If not
Very over-simplified and historically ignorant... (Score:4, Interesting)
That is a very simplistic way of looking at things. It assumes, among other things, that all cultures have the same nature, and that therefore copyright isn't necessary. And that is very historically ignorant. The nature of cultures in the past was not the same as it is now.
"Think about all the great poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome. They didn't get a dime when copies were made of their work by amanuenses and sold in the marketplace, but they didn't complain."
Actually, that's not true. We honestly don't know if they were paid royalties or not. We do not seem to have any defenses from the Athenian law courts regarding copying, but that just means that none survived to us - there may or may not have been any. The current documents that have survived suggest that the Athenians were not suing people over copying, but we honestly don't have enough recovered to know for certain.
Aside from which, neither ancient Greece or Rome had a concept of individual rights. People would be sued based on a failure to carry out their responsibilities, but the rights of the individual was a concept that was centuries in the future. There was a concept of obligation, and that went right through to Christian times (for example, in terms of religion, the Romans didn't like the Christians because they didn't fulfill their obligation of joining the rest of their community at sacrifices, meaning that they were not "doing the sacred things" (aka "sacra facere") - and meaning that bizarrely to our conception of religion, the Christians were persecuted for being atheists).
"Indeed, the only time someone had issue with copying, the Roman poet Martial in his Epigrams , it was because another fellow was putting his name on those copies. And even then, Martial didn't demand legal penalties; he just lampooned the guy."
In fact, there was a law I recently learned about passed by the Emperor Augustus that declared that the content being copied belonged to the copyist. That being said, in Ancient Greece and Rome ridicule was a corrective, and it could be very dangerous to somebody. There is at least one case on record of somebody committing suicide because of slanderous poems being written about them (I know because I've spent the last two years working on a book about ancient Greek and Roman humour with a professor of Classics).
I can't speak for the law outside of Europe, but my own inquiries into the history of copyright have suggested that in order for a concept of copyright to develop, there needs to be certain factors in play:
1. A concept of the rights of the individual.
2. The technology to mass produce copies of the work (without this, copying is not an issue).
3. A society capable of mass consumption of the work (for literature, a literate society, etc. - and again, copying is pointless if there is no market to consume it).
4. A free market economy (extremely important, as it means that there is a financial stake for whoever is copying, and whoever creates).
Without all of these, there can be no development of the concept of copyright. As soon as all four appear, however, copyright follows. The Stationer's Log (the earliest form of copyright in England) was at the dawn of this, but copyright as we know it didn't come until 1705 - and at that point, the patronage system was beginning to disappear, society was literate and the printing press had been around for a while, there was effectively a free market economy, and the rights of the individual had become prevalent enough that two revolutions would occur within the century over them. A lot of people may not like to hear this, but copyright did develop naturally as the circumstances developed so that it became necessary.
"In Hong Kong, the film and music industries c
Re:One step closer... (Score:3, Interesting)
I drove to the store last month looking for a specific, recent movie. Could not find it. Get it? I'm actively trying to pay for a DVD, trying to encourage the producer to make more like it -- and it's not in the flippin' store.
But there is a torrent for it.
Don't forget, this is a current movie; the fact I'm a weirdo who also would like the complete run of Misfits of Science does not enter into it. The simple fact is that the torrent providers are doing a better job of distributing niche material than the people who are supposed to be getting paid.
That's not even touching on the arguments about unskippable FBI notices, annoying ads for other movies, and whether I can watch it on a Linux box. Those all presume that at least I can find and pay for the damn' DVD -- but I can't.
Re:One step closer... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Thank you SO much! That's a point I've been unable to formulate, a logical link I'd never seen stand by itself. Yes, the point of downloading things is not only price, but convenience. It is so EASY! I'd happily pay for most content, really. What if my ISP gave money to some artists I name on a list, what with my 100/month bill. In my case, I'd see it that way : My ISP charges 50 for a month, with a 50GByte limit. Beyond that, it's priced 1/GB. I'd be happy to know that some percentage of that goes to the copyright holders of the things I download."
Well, here's the problem with that: you mention "goes to the copyright holder" and "goes to the artist." The record company holds the rights to the recording, and the composer and lyricist own the rights to the music and the words. I think you really meant the latter, in which the record company is cut out of the picture.
Many people have suggested the same thing: that we set up a system in which only the artist is compensated when we pirate music. The trouble is that record companies are typically for-profit ventures and have finite resources. We like to claim that the current business model is dead, but the alternative model of "record companies provide the cash and expertise to record, produce, and promote the music, with money going only to the artists" does not work well, either. Of course, I'd like to be proven wrong... if anybody reading this wants to set up a service like this (where, again, you get the artist's music produced, and they keep all the money from the sales or donations), then please do. If you can make it work, you'll be a hero among Slashdotters everywhere. A flat broke hero, but a hero nonetheless.
As an aside, I think your notion of a socialized music system (where artists are paid a percentage from ISP fees using the assumption that people are using their connections to pirate music and films) might work in Europe, where I suspect people tend to be a little more comfortable with socialized commerce. But here in the US and Canada, I do not think it would work. US residents already pay a tariff on music CD-Rs for much the same reason, and Canadian residents must pay an even higher tariff on ALL CD media. These laws are highly reviled around here. I personally hate them because I don't pirate music or films, and I certainly don't want to subsidize the entertainment industry on behalf of those who do.
Re:Precedent! (Score:3, Interesting)
-your description of our common law system is way off base in many, many respects, and
-in some code countries, like France, people are being prosecuted criminally for p2p file sharing, in order to enrich the coffers of the big record companies. 3 of the 4 big record companies are based in code countries, where they apparently have quite a lot of influence over the "code".
Giant multinational corporations have too much influence everywhere. That is the problem.