Tuesday, April 22, 2008

In Capitol v. Weed court dismisses certain counterclaims, sustains civil conspiracy, abuse of process, invasion of privacy claims

In Capitol v. Weed, a Phoenix, Arizona, case, the Court has granted leave to amend the answer to include counterclaims for:

-abuse of process (filing documents for purpose of coercing payment of money);
-invasion of privacy; and
-civil conspiracy to commit computer fraud and unlicensed investigation.

The court held the following claims to be insufficient:

-declaratory judgment;
-civil conspiracy to commit extortion; and
-violation of Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

The court ruled that the counterclaims were not barred by the Noerr Pennington doctrine.

April 21, 2008, opinion and order partially granting and partially denying motion for leave to amend answer* (2008 WL 1820667)

* 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

7 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

That's a start to work with...

Alter_Fritz said...

I respectfully submit that the court someway might have erred in his reasoning when it stated:

Whether this Court has independent jurisdiction over Defendant’s counterclaim, however, is only relevant in determining whether the Court has subject matter jurisdiction if Plaintiffs voluntarily dismiss their claims. Plaintiffs here have not dismissed their claims, and the Court’s subject matter jurisdiction over Defendant’s counterclaim is not at issue. Further, Defendant fails to address Plaintiffs’ argument that this declaratory relief is redundant and unnecessary. Defendant does not allege any issues in Count One of her counterclaims that will not already be litigated in Plaintiffs’ case in chief and Defendant’s own affirmative defenses. Therefore, the Motion to Amend the Answer to File Counterclaims is denied with respect to Count One.

While Plaintiffs have not yet dismissed their claim at least the regular readers of this blog know that such a reaction is the standard modus operandi once Plaintiffs start to face serious problems from the defendants opposing discovery demands and they have no way to trick a ruling judge into dragging that matter on undefinetly without actually needing to respond to defendands demands.

If Weed really failed to address Plaintiffs arguments here so that the Judge did not know why the motion to have counterclaims at least pending for the time till its trialday morning is important to be granted, can Weed even despite the fact that the court dismissed that Claim somehow get the court to rule again/reconsider its decision?

Can the judge sua sponte once he will see that plaintiffs do indeed run non the less reverse his order and handle the matter of counterclaims as if he had not demied the motion this time based on his observation that Plaintiffs did not dismissed them at least not till the date of the writing of his order?

Kathleen Williamson said...

I welcome all feedback and thoughts regarding this, esp from other lawyers, posted to this comment list.
Kathleen Williamson

Alter_Fritz said...

hi katwilie
I googled your Name and the first few entries were about an "interesting"-looking (*) Singer/Songwriter with that name.

I thought for myself "what the F un why want a singer feedback from other lawyers that can't be the right Kathleen so I fast forwarded a few result pages and got that one http://www.williamsonandyoung.com/bio.html and was in for a surprise someway down the text.

Man was I wrong with my prejudice thinking! :-)

Cool!
Can we have a few 128kbps low quality encoded samples for free on TPB from your work?
I'm sure RichardL.Gabriel @ piratebay.org would be happy to seed those for you. ;-)

Please note that IANAL though so if you see comments from me take them with a shipload of salt! (Ray -as far as I'm aware of- has however not deleted any of my comments so far for comment policy 8 violations. Rule 7 however...) :P

A warm welcome to this blog from me and stay in touch with it:
Ray is doing a very special, very valuable and helpfull work for society here!
(If anyone deserves to become Lawyer of the Year it's him, but maybe Rays kind of attitude towards your both profession isn't mainstream enough among most of your peers given what kind of guys get Super Lawyer and Lawyer of the Year Awards. :-(




(*) http://www.kathleenwilliamson.com/busphoto.stayton.jul.05.jpg

Alter_Fritz said...

Ah, me found the samples myself on cd baby

http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-01.mp3
http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-02.mp3
http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-03.mp3
http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-04.mp3
http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-06.mp3
http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-09.mp3
http://audio.cdbaby.com/6e5361ff/k/kwilliamson-10.mp3

http://cdbaby.com/cd/kwilliamson

Anonymous said...

I'm glad to see that Noerr Pennington doctrine doesn't allow Plaintiffs to pummel Defendants at will with no legal recourse through the courts.

-DM

Alter_Fritz said...

2 part comment one on topic to ray and one offtopic to katwillie

Ray, so far you only link to the index of litigation documents section where you have the links to the files on P&F.
I noticed in this case here for the first time that there is a (I think) good feature missing in that way:

I clicked on the weed link above and saw among others the document link regarding HDD protective order stipulation.
Me remembered in that moment that me had commented not so long ago about the importance of some technicalities in such an order (not remembering at that time it was THIS case here coincidently) [yes, not only has the RIAA litigation machine itself and some here not to be mentioned big apple judge lost the overview what is going on and was said and done in specific cases but me gets problems to remember what was what case again just from the index of litigation documents too]

I have not maintained so far a bookmark list of all your blogentries where I commented on so I had to use the google search feature to find here the comment again I was searching for.

So maybe it could be a nice idea if you would add some link information to your actuall blogentries where you introduced those in the index mentioned documents? Just my thought given the hops i needed to find your blogpost dealing with that P&F link

--

the off topic part to katwillie

Wow, listening to the free 2 minute samples me got hooked on track 10 "An Hour to Maggie" of your Album. I totally love that one! Unfortunately me does not have a credit card and isn't rich either to invest 15 bucks (even though thanks to the hard euro that would be cheaper for me) for just one song Me really loves from listening to the sample alone.

I do hope that my remarks about HDD stuff and previlege log problems based on "files" rather then "sectors" were helpful for you and/or other lawyers and if you like to show your gratitude I would be totally happy if you would send me -via the "online media distribution system" googlemail- a full copy of that track. I promiss that I will keep it only for me and that http://thepiratebay.org/user/Alter_Fritz will not distribute it further unless you give me the explicit written permission to do such a thing.

alterfritz BEI googlemail PUNKT com

Vielen lieben Dank im voraus!
A_F

P.S. If you don't know yet how to do high quality FLAC rips from CDDA sources jsut drop me a mail comment too.