RIAA Filed 62 New Cases In April Alone 243
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Based upon a quick examination of the records in PACER, I detected 62 new cases brought by the RIAA against individuals in the month of April alone. In December, 2008, the RIAA had represented to Congress that they had 'discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August [2008].'"
Re:Surprising (Score:1, Insightful)
The RIAA are poster boys for the Legal profession in my book. Sorry NYCL but this is why we must bust your Guild. We also should replace most of the Judges in this country with lay men with good BS detectors and not lawyers.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Lying to Congress (Score:4, Insightful)
Lying to congress - Congress can't handle the truth.
Stop buying their music (Score:2, Insightful)
There are good independent bands in every major city. Seek them out and support them. And pass the word, make it undesirable for bands to sign on to any RIAA label.
Re:No *new* lawsuits (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way.. so long as the lawsuits they file are legitimate (ie. the person being sued actually broke the law) I, personally, have no problem with it..
Because the laws they bought are "legitimate"?
I hereby propose a law stating D_Jedi may never own a car, see his mother, or use the internet again.
Lawsuits against you will follow.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
remove the NEED for lawyers, then.
you guys are not very smart, are you? you can't quite see that you created this monster and are still arguing that the monster 'needs' to continue living.
so that the monster can continue.
circular, huh?
simplify the laws, put normal 'thinking' people in charge as judges and we could NOT do a worse job than is being done now. not joking about it either, the system is just too complex and needs to be totally broken down and redone.
lawyers are slime and the fact that you 'need' them indicates a bigger social problem.
Extra, Extra, Read All About It (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No *new* lawsuits (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you understand how laws work. Using the word "hereby" doesn't actually make something a law.
For that, you need to donate to a few congressmen.
How is that lying? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
But you're forgetting, there'd be a lot less poor innocents such as the OP being served if there weren't so many lawyers to begin with....
Considering lawyers as the answer is clouding your vision that they are also the cause.
It's a common situation to be in, "What's the answer to x? More x!". No. The answer is "NO x."
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. Simplify the laws. Good answer.
You know what happens in any game, be it online, tabletop, sport, or whatnot? You lay down a simple rule, it will get abused. You tell people they can't do something in general, they'll argue for specifics. If anybody disagrees, without a specific rule to account for the situation, it's all bitch, bitch, bitch.
Now, that's just in terms of games. Which don't mean shit. Move that to the real world, where things matter. Someone spilled hot coffee on themselves? Well, they certainly don't want to be embarrassed, so they'll take advantage of a lack of explicit warnings on the cup and sue the restaurant! Broke into someone's house and tripped over something they left out? Technically, you're in a legal grey area regarding trespassing, and besides, there's nothing in the trespassing law saying you don't have to clean up your junk, so sue the homeowner!
People will fight that much harder to abuse any law you give them until it's spelled out in such explicit detail that they can't find loopholes in time. And thanks to these assholes abusing the "simple" laws, we need to staple more laws on top of them to shut them up when they're being assholes. And that's what's happened. Lawmakers make a law that should be simple, some asshole wants to abuse it for kicks, judges set precedents to attach more detail to laws, repeat cycle.
If you simplify the laws, you'll get nothing but an army of assholes abusing them. Either they'll get their way or they'll keep arguing you to a stalemate, and seriously, what else are they going to do with their day? You've got important things to do and they don't. They'll win. And regardless of your personal views of how reality works, you'll have that army of assholes whether the laws are "simple" or "complex" or if we "need" lawyers or not.
The laws and social norms are the only things keeping some overly creative asshole with too much time on his hands from picking you at random, finding some way to empty your life, and getting away with it scot-free. Yes, even if you think anarchy is teh bestz!!!!1!1 and we'd all be better off if we just did things your way. The legal system didn't make society into what it is. People did.
Unless it's your plan to eradicate all of humanity?
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
simplify the laws, put normal 'thinking' people in charge as judges and we could NOT do a worse job than is being done now. not joking about it either, the system is just too complex and needs to be totally broken down and redone.
lawyers are slime and the fact that you 'need' them indicates a bigger social problem.
"Normal, 'thinking' people" can arrive at drastically different conclusions. See Conservative v. Liberal v. Libertarian. So, if you want the law to be consistent, what your saying is that we should scrap all the existing precendences, but start over reestablishing them, which will eventually require lawyers again.
Or, do you intend to abolish precedence, and let each judge conclude for each case how to interpret and apply the law? Because I see the world where judges can arbitrarily apply law with no regard for established precedence to be far, far worse than the world we have now.
The RIAA didn't really promise anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
The sentence "we discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August" really does not mean anything.
First, it doesn't say that the RIAA "stopped" doing anything. To "discontinue" does not mean to "stop," it means "to break the continuity of."
Second, anything it does say about the RIAA is limited to only the month of August. For example, if I say "Best Buy stopped having 10% off sales in August." That in no way means that Best Buy stopped having 10% off sales forever. It only means they stopped for a period, i.e., broke the continuity, for a single period of time, during the month of August.
Third, more ambiguity is added by the word "initiate." The use of "initiate" gives the RIAA a lot of wiggle room to start new lawsuits. If anyone complains, the RIAA can merely say, "this lawsuit was actually initiated sometime ago when we first started investigating it." And of course it gives the RIAA complete freedom to "initialize" new lawsuits after August.
What I don't understand is why the RIAA is conducting these lawsuits in a quasi-stealth mode. I thought the purpose of the lawsuits was to raise public awareness. But when they're "initialized" in secret, that defeats the entire educational purpose. So what really is going on with these reinitialized lawsuits?
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were to say that we should do the same for programming, engineering or open heart surgery, what would you think about it? If you can't see why law needs people who specialize in it, then you are a fool.
Most lawyers and attorneys are actually pretty reasonable (keep in mind that most are also not involved with trial law), and most judges get that job because of their well-tuned BS detectors. The only thing I got out of your post is that you don't actually have any idea what you're talking about, that you've probably never even been in a court, and that you honestly believe your reading a handful of blogs and news sites that just touch on law actually give you a serious capacity for it.
Re:Perjury (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case it was lying to Congress, so the body capable of enforcing sanctions would be Congress itself, which would have to cite the RIAA's representative for contempt of Congress. I'll let you guess what the chances of them doing so are.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Judges are normal people like you and me. The right to belong to a political party of one's choosing is a pretty fundamental right.
Re:The RIAA didn't really promise anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why the RIAA is conducting these lawsuits in a quasi-stealth mode.
I'm guessing it's because they promised some politicians they would stop, but they can't get over their addiction to picking on defenseless people.
Re:Surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Please mod this down. This is the trite masquerading as the insightful. The entire argument is predicated on the concept that 'normal' people* can agree when they sit down and talk peacefully. I cite precedent** that this is not the case.
Simplification of the law would be great, but it won't absolve the need for legal specialists, nor will it simplify the complex interactions between free agents in a democratic society.
*Lawyers, as we all know, are bred in special vats.
**c.f. the entire of human history
Re:The RIAA didn't really promise anything... (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why the RIAA is conducting these lawsuits in a quasi-stealth mode. I thought the purpose of the lawsuits was to raise public awareness. But when they're "initialized" in secret, that defeats the entire educational purpose. So what really is going on with these reinitialized lawsuits?
I'd guess that they're hiding the lawsuit until they're sure it'll fall in their favor. You know, advertise the lawsuits that go the RIAA's way and which actually show considerable wrongdoing on the part of an unsympathetic defendant and don't emphasize the lawsuits against tech ignorant grannies.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone does it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Er... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a non-story.
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
The rules are largely irrelevant to people with integrity. That is, most laws have little effect on the majority of the population; murder being illegal has no direct effect on me, personally, because I've never murdered nor do I plan to murder. Would you argue that since murder being illegal has no effect on most of the population we should make it legal?
The whole point of laws is to keep the minority of people - the GP's "army of assholes" - from screwing things up for the rest of us. The only way to do that is to make laws more and more specific as those people try to find smaller and smaller loopholes to get out of taking responsibility for their own actions.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish people would stop abusing the McDonald's coffee case, it's basically the hallmark of people who refuse to fucking pay attention. She didn't sue because there wasn't a warning the coffee was hot, she sued because it caused 3rd degree burns in under 5 seconds, as it was kept 60F _above_ what was industry standard.
Re:Surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
true dat. Seems to me that PEOPLE are fundamentally the thing that needs to be reformed. This "monster" is really just a sickness of the people themselves.
You are not separate from the world people! you grew out of it and are as connected to it as an apple is to a tree. It's all YOU. Wake up!
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering lawyers as the answer is clouding your vision that they are also the cause.
Assholes are the cause. Asshole lawyers just make it even worse. In theory, non-asshole lawyers (and judges, and politicians, and just about everyone else) are the answer.
Re:Everyone does it (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it's about a blow-job.
Re:Surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
"Normal, 'thinking' people" can arrive at drastically different conclusions. See Conservative v. Liberal v. Libertarian.
Wait, why are you talking about thinking people in the first sentence and then switch to a totally different topic in the second one?
Libertarians are thinking people. The first two though...
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Like I said, it's pretty clear you'd have to go into a bit more detail. "Do not kill" would have sub-clauses like "Intending to kill someone is worse than accidentally killing someone", "Killing in self defence may be warranted, depending on circumstances" etc.
The point is that rather than explicitly going into details, morals that the government/judicial system holds the population to are described in simple terms, and the details are decided by the judge and jury. Judgements are based on the facts, a handful of moral points, and what seems right.
Think Judge Judy, only without the attitude, and with a jury to avoid individual bias. Like I alluded to, the challenge would be to figure out how to avoid social bias - but the principle of the idea does appeal to me.
As an aside, I'd never heard of estoppel. I went to the wikipedia page to find out more, and I'm still not much clearer. It seems a perfect example of how the feedback loop in the legal system has made the system too closed to the layman. It seemed to be using very verbose language to lay down the details of a specific circumstance, which could just be handled by saying "Be honest" and "Honour your promises", and leaving the details of a judgement to the people listening to the facts.
Re:Surprising (Score:1, Insightful)
The people who try to justify this case are borne of this modern era of the pussification of America. They're enabling all sorts of frivolous lawsuits and yet they think of themselves as enlightened, because they can cite details about the case and yet they miss the forest for the trees.
Re:Surprising (Score:1, Insightful)
"If I were to say that we should do the same for programming, engineering or open heart surgery, what would you think about it? If you can't see why law needs people who specialize in it, then you are a fool."
You are apparently unable or unwilling to discern the difference between a set of man-made rules ( the law ) and a set of knowledge which exists independent of man's whims
( engineering or medicine ).
The law _creates_ the need for the people who specialize in it. It is self-perpetuating, and this makes it fundamentally different from engineering or medicine.
And you, sir, are what we here in the southern US call a dumbass.
Re:Surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
How is driving drunk and running over some other person not murder?
Personally I see 2 things:
a) One is not allowed to drive under the influence of any drugs (drugs == simple list)
b) A drunk person has murdered another person
The question alone of "Is 'manslaughter' by drunk driving murder?" implies that you deal with the existing cornercases of the law. Drop that and you will see that after all it's simply murder.
Killing in self-defense is also murder, people with integrity should be able to decide wether one can get away with that (Very roughly speaking: "Either die yourself or kill the other person" Is something you get away with if you didn't start the physical attack in the first place.)
Re:Surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not going to touch judge judy (ick, get it away), but I am going to go after your comments on estoppel.
Estoppel is actually an excellent example of why the layman is completely at the mercy of the lawyer.
Imagine for a moment that you have a girlfriend, who turns up pregnant. At the time, you have been dating exclusively for a year, and she breaks up with you for some reason around 8 months into the pregnancy.
After the child is born she demands child support, which you agree to in court. (This includes a paternity judgment in most jurisdictions I know of)
Three months later you find out that she was having sex with your roommate the entire time you were dating, and the child looks remarkably like the said roomate.
Heck, lets assume that you and the mother are both blond haired, blue eyed Caucasians, and that the roommate is a dark Italian. The baby was born rather fair, but has darkened remarkably.
Now, Most men would at this point be rather upset at having to pay child support for someone else's son, However, by the rules of estoppel, you cannot challenge the child support case on the grounds of mistaken paternity, due to the previous ruling against you.
Most laymen do not know this, as estoppel is not in any way common knowledge.
However, it is likely that if she notified her lawyer that you might not be the father, he would advise her not to mention that fact to anyone until after the judgment, as estoppel is basic knowledge for a lawyer.
Re:Surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Would that really simplify the law? Instead of having to learn the ins and outs of many years of cumulative documentation, we would have to be adept at reading 12 stranger's minds. We would never know if we were operating in or outside the law.
And, not that I don't condone free thought, but has anyone here actually considered that a lot of very intelligent people have already pondered this problem, both throughout history and the present day? What we have is largely the result of many years of careful consideration and thought, and any radical changes you have proposed have not been successfully implemented in any legal system so far. What are the chances, seriously, that they were all wrong, and you are right?