Friday, January 18, 2008

Dawnell Leadbetter Files Appellate Brief from lower court determination that she was not "prevailing party"

Dawnell Leadbetter has filed her brief, in support of her appeal from the lower court's ruling that she was not eligible for an attorneys fee award because she was not a "prevailing party", in Interscope v. Leadbetter

Appellant's Brief*

* Document published online at Internet Law & Regulation

Keywords: digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property






9 comments:

Art said...

Well written brief!!!

If the plaintiffs dismissed without prejudice and the statute of limitations has run out, then they cannot be the prevailing party. If the plaintiffs aren't the prevailing party then who else besides the defendant is the prevailing party?

The appellate court should clearly vacate and remand for costs and attorneys fees due to the defendant.

Regards,
Art

StephenH said...

I am suprised that Capitol Records v Foster and Atlantic Recording Corp v Andersen were not sited cases in this brief.

Anonymous said...

I'll second Art's compliment, and add that I think it would be interesting to couple this argument about prevailing parties with the discussion about illegal, mass joinder of suits by the RIAA. If they want to try and join dozens of suits together to save on filing fees, then they should be saddled with paying the costs of any prevailing adversaries' legal fees, particularly in cases like this where "dismissal with prejudice" occurs after the statute of limitations runs.

Alter_Fritz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Alter_Fritz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
raybeckerman said...

?

Anonymous said...

In the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, anything is possible.

They should recognize that in this case, the defendant has received all the relief possible in the sense that the case has been dropped with the fully knowledge on the plaintiff's part that it can never be refilled again - unless they can make something out of their "continuous and ongoing" argument. That's a very material alteration in the relationship of the two parties.

The shameful district court maintains that Ms. Leadbetter never prevailed on any motions before the court. This so ignores the fact that Ms. Leadbetter prevailed on the fact that plaintiffs didn't, AND NEVER HAD, ANY EVIDENCE that she had actually committed copyright infringement.

And that's the real key here. Plaintiffs knew from the very beginning that they'd never been able to identify the actual individual doing the file sharing. Heck, they can't even identify the actual computer or its hard drive, since there could be a thousand Ghosted hard drives, all identical, only one of which ever was part of a computer performing actual file sharing. Plaintiffs knew all this, and filed suit anyway, claiming from the outset that the necessary evidence to win in court had already been secured.

Plaintiffs deserve to be punished severely for this.

In fact, the RIAA should be beating a path to the defendant's door with settlement offers, before the Ninth Circuit can actually consider this case.

Of course, this would all be fixed in a flash with a simple and straight-forward Loser Pays system.

-Dodge Magnum

Alter_Fritz said...

ray asked: "?"

I just thought to give you a laught too but did not want to spam your corporate email address with it.
So I just used the most logical way where i could be sure you would see it: your blog

Oviously someone "hacked" the RIAA webpage
-(I swear under penalty of perjury that it wasn't me and I do not even know how to do this kind of stuff but I know how to copy URLs into the browser and I have now not "missspoken" like the Pariser did!)

Torrentfreak put it that way;

Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-website-hacked-080120/

[Thanks for cutting me much much slack here and switching the privious postings live. I will delete it myself in a few hours if you don't object since its not only WAAY off topic, but also a mean example of what we germans call "Schadenfreude"]

As Avenue Q put it:
NICKY:
Oh, Schadenfreude, huh?
What's that, some kinda Nazi word?
GARY COLEMAN:
Yup! It's German for "happiness at the misfortune of others!"
NICKY:
"Happiness at the misfortune of others." That is German!

Anonymous said...

I think this is reference to the fact that RIAA on Sunday was hacked.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-website-hacked-080120/