News

RIAA Stumbles in Lawsuit

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 PM - by

The RIAA sued an Oklahoma woman, Debbie Foster, back in August for music copyright infringement, but was rebuffed by U.S. District Court Judge Lee R. West, who awarded attorney fees to Ms. Foster. The RIAA argued, according to a recap at Ars Technica Thursday, that awarding attorney's fees to the defendant would deter other copyright owners from pursuing infringement claims.

With harsh words, the RIAA's motives were called into question earlier in the trial: "the true motivation for the filing of the instant suit can be gleaned from the evidence in the district court file. Thus rather than pursuing resolution of a fairly minor dispute in good faith ... plaintiffs [RIAA] and their council filed and maintained this suit in order to extract a significant payment from perceived "Deep Pocket" defendant, Debbie Foster."

At one point, the RIAA decided to settle without asking for payment. But Ms. Foster wanted to clear her name, and she declined to settle. Accordingly, the RIAA is annoyed that they should now have to pay attorrney's fees when the defendant had been previously offered the opportunity to settle the suit for no payment and elected to clear her name instead.

Other defense attorneys are watching this case closely because the RIAA has used exactly the same tactics in other cases. The stakes are now much higher for the RIAA because frivolous suits may end up costing them more than they had planned.

A Website has been set up by two New York attorneys who are specializing in coming to the aid of RIAA defendants, via the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Recording Industry vs The People. On their site, they state: " In these oppressive and unfair cases, a cartel of multinational corporations collude to misuse the courts, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children. We established this blog to collect and share information about this reign of terror."

15 comments from the community.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:02 pm

:: waiting for Bosco to jump to the RIAA's rescue ::

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:07 pm

Finally the world and the RIAA might start to realize that they have well over-stepped their bounds. It serves them right to have to pay for their own over-zealousness.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:16 pm

This should be the case with all claims against people from the RIAA. They have taken this lawsuit crap way to far and accuse inocent and dead people with there petty claims without any evidence to back them up! If they plan on suing people they better sure as hell pay the legal fees if they are found to be in the wrong like everyone else.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:18 pm

S-C-R-E-W the RIAA. And the big four music corporations as well. They've brought most of their woes on themselves, by not recognizing that digital was the distribution medium of the future, and by consistently turning out sh***y overpriced $18 CDs that had maybe one good track on them. Gee, is that a sustainable biz model in the age of digital? Nuh-ope, ya dopes.

These guys are pointless, and I chuckle every time they have a setback (which is often) because they just have no clue at all.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:44 pm

Let the death by a million cuts begin!

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Biff said:

member since 08 Apr 2004 with 1479 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:06 pm

Quote
Guest wrote:
:: waiting for Bosco to jump to the RIAA's rescue ::
With a cleverly written post in which the humor is so subtle that no mere mortal could possibly comprehend it?

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jbruni said:

member since 14 Jul 2006 with 73 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:09 pm

This is a great thing. Too often lawyers since the 1960s have been using the courts as a means of enacting their own laws and bypassing the legislative process. Most often, people are terrified of getting sued because of the costs of litigation (paying the lawyers) and so alter their behavior, not because their actions are against any law, but rather to avoid the costs incurred by mere suit.

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Bosco said:

member since 03 Jun 2002 with 964 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:44 pm

I was trying to figure out how to phrase this as a fart joke so Biff would understand, but it's not that easy. Anyone here been a Dodger fan for 20 years? Back in the day, the Dodgers had a center fielder named John Shelby. He never won a gold glove, but he was a consistently outstanding fielder. His best batting average for a season was .272. There were pitchers on the staff with higher batting averages than Shelby some years. His career average was .239. OK, let's put this into perspective... That's about 239 times as well as defendants have faired against the RIAA. So have a holiday in honor of Debbie Foster if you like, but don't share your music with 1,000,000 of your closest friends on networks that the RIAA is constantly watching. You can be for or against RIAA tactics, but how can you be for such blatant stupidity on the part of 99.9% of those who end up getting sued at this point?

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 22, 2007 6:08 pm

Quote
Bosco wrote:
I was trying to figure out how to phrase this as a fart joke so Biff would understand, but it's not that easy. Anyone here been a Dodger fan for 20 years? Back in the day, the Dodgers had a center fielder named John Shelby. He never won a gold glove, but he was a consistently outstanding fielder. His best batting average for a season was .272. There were pitchers on the staff with higher batting averages than Shelby some years. His career average was .239. OK, let's put this into perspective... That's about 239 times as well as defendants have faired against the RIAA. So have a holiday in honor of Debbie Foster if you like, but don't share your music with 1,000,000 of your closest friends on networks that the RIAA is constantly watching. You can be for or against RIAA tactics, but how can you be for such blatant stupidity on the part of 99.9% of those who end up getting sued at this point?

The RIAA can suck my nether regions. It hasn't stopped music sharing, and it never will. And this ruling is a precedent-setter that will limit their one real weapon (litigation) even further.

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cdb said:

member since 15 Aug 2006 with 11 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Feb 23, 2007 9:20 am

Quote
Bosco wrote:
That's about 239 times as well as defendants have faired against the RIAA.

I'm probably just remembering old facts incorrectly, so please excuse me if I'm wrong here, but I thought that the RIAA hasn't actually won any cases against actual defendents in a courtroom, just sent out letter threatening to sue, and coming to private agreements with those who don't try to defend themselves.

Can you point me to to those 239 (or more) cases where the RIAA have won a court case, please, I'd be interested in reading about them.

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Bosco said:

member since 03 Jun 2002 with 964 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Feb 23, 2007 2:19 pm

In this particular case (if anyone actually would like to bother to read it). the RIAA was suing both Debbie Foster (the billing name for the broadband connection) and her daughter, Amanda, who did not respond to the RIAA's complaint and whom the RIAA obtained a default judgment! They added Amanda after learning it was her computer that did the sharing. Meanwhile, the court ordered the RIAA to pay Debbie Foster's reasonable attorney fees because by withdrawing from the case after it went to court, the court says the RIAA is the loser of the case.

So in this particular one, they are batting .500. They typically offer to settle for $5K + a promise not to use file sharing networks in the future. They can sue for up to $100K per copyrighted work. If the "Mom owns the network but not a computer" defense becomes common, the obvious course of action is to sue for full statutory damages (if they're not already doing that). The same Copyright Act that gave Debbie Foster claim on attorney's fees will just jack up the award the RIAA gets when it wins against the Amanda Fosters.

As to court cases the RIAA has won, that's not the 239:1 (or better) ratio. Settlements is the ratio. The ones that get to court may very well be weighted to the defendant somehow. But all the people that just settle... You gotta figure they talk to their homeowner's insurance agents, attorney friends, etc. and realize they're screwed.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2001 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Feb 23, 2007 3:12 pm

Quote
cdb wrote:
Quote
Bosco wrote:
That's about 239 times as well as defendants have faired against the RIAA.

I'm probably just remembering old facts incorrectly, so please excuse me if I'm wrong here, but I thought that the RIAA hasn't actually won any cases against actual defendents in a courtroom, just sent out letter threatening to sue, and coming to private agreements with those who don't try to defend themselves.

Can you point me to to those 239 (or more) cases where the RIAA have won a court case, please, I'd be interested in reading about them.

Excellent question. Do a Google search on "RIAA lawsuit won" and see what pops up. I couldn't find an article about suit that RIAA had won in court. One article was particularly interesting and useful.

One problem with these suits has been that RIAA faces little, if any, penalty for screwing up, until now. They have sued and pursued people without computers, minor children (in at least one case, the RIAA tried to get around the child's parents' strong objections and defense by suing the child directly and asking the court to appoint a guardian ad litem; the court refused), and dead people. If there is a big enough stink, RIAA just drops the suit, without penalty to themselves, leaving the person who was wrongly accused with large legal costs.

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A guest said: (hide)

Fri Feb 23, 2007 3:12 pm

There's so many ways around the RIAA. Even if you're legal as hell and use iTunes, you can just take all your legal AAC tracks, burn 'em to CD, pass 'em around to all your friends. They rip the CDs to mp3, and keep the tracks... totally untraceable by the RIAA.

So why again is the RIAA fomenting so much bad will among their customers by suing them? It's kinda pointless, unless someone is running a 'l33t' server dishing out tens of thousands of tracks to whoever drops on by on the 'net.

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Bosco said:

member since 03 Jun 2002 with 964 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Feb 23, 2007 3:52 pm

Quote
Guest wrote:
There's so many ways around the RIAA. Even if you're legal as hell and use iTunes, you can just take all your legal AAC tracks, burn 'em to CD, pass 'em around to all your friends. They rip the CDs to mp3, and keep the tracks... totally untraceable by the RIAA.

So why again is the RIAA fomenting so much bad will among their customers by suing them? It's kinda pointless, unless someone is running a 'l33t' server dishing out tens of thousands of tracks to whoever drops on by on the 'net.

Guest, if you had a math background that included an introduction to graph (network) theory, you could answer your own question in a minute. The scenario you offer in your first paragraph is what has become known as "private darknets". They tend to be small close-knit circles of people without a lot of cross-seeding. The action of copying among members of a darknet takes human effort, so there is a limit on the amount of illicit distribution they can actually do this way. People have to take time out to eat and go to the bathroom (note subtle humor for Biff). So let's say there are 10,000 of these darknets each with 5-10 people in them. Well, for a song to make it to all of them, that's 10,000 sales (or acquisitions outside the darknets).

Now, compare to the file sharing networks. You type in a song name, it finds a computer somewhere on the network that has it, and you download. It only has to be purchased once. Initially, due to high demand, there might be some additional purchases or acquisitions to adequately seed demand, and then after it gets copied, it gets seeded more places and saturates the network without any additional purchases.

Honestly, I don't think many of you actually want to understand the RIAA, you just want to hate them. But if you did want to understand, you could see why Napster, Grokster, and individuals on file sharing networks have been high priorities for them. These systems do the most damage to their sales and are the easiest to find an accountable party. Guest points out above that there are other ways to steal music and not risk getting caught. Giant DUH! Back in the BBS days with commercial software pirating, their were largish darknets with tens to hundreds of trusted users. Someone would usually have to buy and contribute a copy of some software. Leaches (people who never contributed anything and downloaded everything) were frowned upon big time. Contributing meant you had skin in the game. And some savvy software companies used these darknets to create buzz about products or offer "get legit" discounts. It was all shady and illegal on the parts of members, but there were ways the commercial players could play it. At any rate, I still say (and I think guest would have to agree) that if you're publishing files on the file sharing networks at this point, you're an idiot. Guest might not agree, but I think the RIAA are serving a valuable Darwinian purpose in promoting natural selection at this point.

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A guest said: (hide)

Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:57 pm

Quote
Bosco wrote:
Honestly, I don't think many of you actually want to understand the RIAA, you just want to hate them.

Actually, the RIAA has brought that down on themselves, by suing kids. Kind of a big 'DUH' on that one as well.

Honestly, as long as they have the image of a bully and a pariah, all the RIAA can do is run around maniacally, and largely ineffectively, trying to plug the zillion holes that are leaking in the dam wall. That doesn't really work.

They need to change the public's MIND about piracy, in the same way that Apple changed people's mind about paying for downloadable music. And the RIAA will never be able to do that with their current heavy-handed, ogre-ish tactics.

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