In Priority v. Vines, in Indiana, the RIAA has filed papers opposing the defendant's motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim.
In its opposition papers, the RIAA argues that the Court should not follow Interscope v. Rodriguez or Atlantic v. Brennan, both of which held that the RIAA's complaint failed to state a claim.
RIAA's opposition 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
3 comments:
As a direct result of piracy over P2P networks, Plaintiffs have sustained and continue to sustain devastating financial losses.
More accurately: As a direct result of piracy over P2P networks, Plaintiffs may have sustained and may continue to sustain completely unproven financial losses.
many people are bound to keep the downloaded files without buying the originals.
Such a sloppy statement by a Circuit Court. It is equally, if not more, reasonable that if people downloaded highly compressed, damaged copies of originals and did not buy those originals afterwards, that they would not have bought the originals whether or not they downloaded bad copies of them. That they simply would have gone without, rather than pay outrageous prices for forced bundles of music that contain more unwanted songs than wanted ones. Or passed on the exceptionally high iPod hardware tariff required in order to purchase and enjoy music from the iTunes music store.
Usually the RIAA is shouting to listen to what all the other courts are saying about our cases. Now they reversing themselves to say, Ignore the other courts and just listen to us here.
Plaintiffs’ losses from online music piracy have resulted in layoffs of thousands of employees in the music industry.
Has this figure ever been challenged? Right, I didn't think so.
On March 7, 2007, Plaintiffs’ investigators detected an individual…
There they go again. The RIAA should lose this motion for that statement alone. Such lying to the court needs to be punished.
Plaintiffs’ investigators detected the infringement by logging onto the P2P network in the same fashion as any Internet user
And another lie right after the first one. As MediaSentry has testified otherwise, their secret methods the result of tens of thousands of man hours of development. They are nothing at all like any other Internet user.
Here I am only on page 3, and already I can't take any more of their dishonest crap. If the RIAA had a winning argument, it should have taken them far less than 22 pages to have clearly articulated it. The very fact that the Plaintiff's have to coach their complaint in terms of "and/or" says they really don't know what happened and are trying to cover all bases. That can't be considered anything more than speculation on their part to figure that if they throw enough mud surely something will stick.
in each case, the court decided issues concerning the sufficiency of the plaintiffs’ complaint sua sponte and without giving the plaintiffs any opportunity to address the issue.
Excuse me? Didn't give the Plaintiffs a chance to address the issue? Hate to tell you, but the Plaintiffs "addressed the issue" in their original lawsuit filing. The courts found it insufficient and told them so. And the Plaintiffs are now complaining that they didn't get enough of a chance to tell the judge that he was wrong? If you'd done it right in the first place you wouldn't have to defend it afterwards!
That's it! No more RIAA garbage today. This thing should be dead on arrival.
XK-E
On March 7, 2007, Plaintiffs’ investigators detected an individual using the LimeWire
file sharing service on the Gnutella P2P network to engage in copyright infringement.
ah, the good old "detected an individual" lie again :-)
Joel seems to be interested in this Rule 11 thingy too, but at least he admits that unlicensed investigator thingy too! Judicial notice #2074 (or something like that and counting) for just another instance of "investigator" confession
But then a partly new wording to make the next lie a bit more convincing since they have no prove of distributing for free to millions of others.
What internet upload connection does this guy had? A RIAA internet2 one but times 10000?
This
individual had as many as 1,172 digital audio files on his computer and was distributing them for
free both to Plaintiffs’ investigators and to millions of others using similar P2P networks.
And one technical nitpick if i'm allowed.
RIAA-Joel argues that the google case with the tiny thumbnail pictures were dissmissed because the judges said those tiny pics are size reduces and smaller in wide/hight so they are not like the originals and there is "nothing like the copyrighted original" behind this index that google maintains with those "derivative copies" of the original pictures.
While I personly believe the judges in the google case did this only because of the "bigness" of google as a defendant if this argument they used would be the measurement if a copy is infringing or not, then defendants like Vines and all the others so far must walk away free too!
There is nothing behind that index (in the context of google speaking) in the filesharing software too.
These mp3 (if the allegations are true!) are not copyrighted originals, They are in quality and size reduced "preview pictures/thumbnails" of the copyrighted works.
Typicly about 90% of the copyrighted work is missing in those music "pictures". thats even more then what google is reducing from the copyrighted painting(photograph "pictures" they distribute to millions of people!
So where is the consistency in your judges rulings?
What is good for a gigantic defendant with an army of lawyers like google can't be bad for Joe Average, can it.
If a judge allowes those Recording plaintiffs to argue on one hand with google and "nothing behind it and only smaller and not as good as originals" then he must dismiss the case against Joe Average as long as the files are not at least as good as FLAC.
@Alter_Fritz :
The Perfect 10 case is an interesting one but I think it only has limited application towards music.
Music copyrights in the US are more complicated than book or photo copyrights because there are separate copyrightable aspects to music*, namely the composition (essentially the notes), the lyrics and the sound recording. Each is a separate copyright and can be held by separate entities.
In analogy to a photo thumbnail you might be able to say a low sample rate sample is comparable (eg 8 bit, 22 kHz) or a short sample. You'd have a much harder time arguing that a CD sample rate (16 bit 44.1kHz) moderate bit rate mp3 file (128 kbps) which some people can't distinguish from the CD is equivalent to an uncompressed CD. And, even then, you'd only be able to argue the Perfect 10 case in regards to the copyright on the sound recording, not the composition or lyrics, which copyrights are not affected by the quality of the copy, only that they are intelligibly copied.
As for me, I'm still disturbed by the RIAA's claim that giving them a copy of a song is illegal distribution. They might just as well make the case that if an RIAA agent approaches you in a record store and asks to see a CD you are holding that that is unauthorized distribution. In fact, that is a "stronger" case than the tenuous one they are trying to make since at least that involves a physical copy as required by statute.
*You can copyright the text of a book and the layout separately, but this distinction isn't really comparable to the very entrenched separate copyrights in music.
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