U.Maine Law Clinic Is First To Fight RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "'A student law clinic is about to cause a revolution' says p2pnet. For the first time in the history of the RIAA's ex parte litigation campaign against college students, a university law school's legal aid clinic has taken up the fight against the RIAA in defense of the university's students. Student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law's Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic, under the supervision of law school prof Deirdre M. Smith, have moved to dismiss the RIAA's complaint in a Portland, Maine, case, Arista v. Does 1-27, on behalf of two University of Maine undergrads. Their recently filed reply brief (PDF) points to the US Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, and the subsequent California decision following Twombly, Interscope v. Rodriguez, which dismissed the RIAA's 'making available' complaint as mere 'conclusory,' 'boilerplate' 'speculation.'"

Harvard

[SuperBanana]

Slightly off-topic, but I often see people mentioning Harvard hasn't been targetted by the RIAA.

It's not for legal reasons. If you use any P2P software, Harvard IT shuts off your access; you're blocked on a DHCP level. You get three "strikes" before this happens- unless you're on wireless, in which case, you're booted right away.

Re:arent' they a recording artists union?

[Trevin]

No, the RIAA is a coalition of record labels and distributors, not artists. (It stands for "Recording Industry Association of America".) They're the middlemen in the music industry, neither creators nor consumers.

Re:Harvard

[arivanov]

Which means that they have a DPI box like Ellacoia or P-Cube or a P2P cache box like CacheLogic or OverSee. From there on they are actually right to use this policy. The reason is very simple.

RIAA can subpoena the college IT and get real seeder IPs out of the P2P cache logs. From there on it is "game over". You show up on the cache log only if you have both offered a file and someone has used it. So armed with this log they should be able to prove what they have gone to prove. Check, Mate.

So if a college has deployed P2P Cache or DPI from there on they have no choice but to use it. It is actually in the interest of the students because the college IT dept can be made to provide much better evidence than the laughable junk supplied by MediaCentry.

This is not groundbreaking...

[OakLEE]

I think the blog post on p2pnet gives this motion to dismiss a lot more credit than it is due. The basic crux of motion's the argument is that Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (Decision Here [supremecourtus.gov]) raises the pleading standards for what a lawsuit must allege to a level that the RIAA's complaint, as currently written cannot meet.

The argument used does not challenge law suit on any substantive legal ground (i.e., the law underlying the complaint), but rather on procedural grounds. That basically means that the motion alleges that that RIAA/MPAA failed to meet a proper standard of proof with respect alleging enough facts to merit a suit.

I externed at a Federal Court this summer, and we saw plenty of these motions with this same argument for many different types of cases. Most of the time this procedural error was the fault of some idiot lawyer forgetting to check the validity of the case law cited in some boilerplate form complaint that the submitting firm had in their document library. The cases were usually dismissed, with leave to amend the complaint and refile one a sufficient complaint could be drafted. This is not "groundbreaking" will not stop the RIAA cold in its tracks. They will file another suit once they tweak their complaint to meat Twombly's new standard of proof.

I wish the students luck in fighting the suits against them and hope they win, but this is nothing more than a legal pothole, not the roadblock that the summary makes it out to be.

Re:Say goodbye to student aid.

[Kadin2048]

Well, the House already passed a bill [arstechnica.com] that links Federal student aid monies to the implementation of RIAA-drafted "anti-piracy" measures. I don't think the GP's fear is too farfetched; certain members of Congress are pretty obviously in the pockets of the media corporations.