Friday, August 01, 2008

Attorneys fee issue reaches Second Circuit in Rolando v. Amurao, as Appellant's Brief is filed

Rolando Amurao has filed his Appellant's Brief in Lava v. Amurao, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, bringing to that Court's attention the issue of whether a defendant should be entitled to his attorneys fees where the RIAA has voluntarily dismissed the case, after first causing the defendant to incur significant expense.

The brief points to two recent decisions of the Seventh Circuit, which held that the fact that defendant's victory was achieved by virtue of the plaintiffs' having "thrown in the towel" does not negate the principle that a victorious defendant is presumptively entitled to an attorneys fee award, and points to Atlantic v. Andersen and Capitol v. Foster -- two other "throwing in the towel" cases -- as examples of what the lower court should have done, but did not do, in Lava v. Amurao.

The RIAA's response is due September 3rd.

The oral argument will be in October.

Appellant's Brief

[Needless to say, a ruling in favor of Mr. Amurao here would have an enormous effect on the RIAA's tactics. They would have to think twice about bringing cases against innocent people like Mr. Amurao, Ms. Andersen, Ms. Foster, Ms. Santangelo, Ms. Lindor, Ms. Schwartz, and all the others who were subjected to the horror of being defendants in federal copyright infringement cases for something they did not do. -R.B.]

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

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm just praying that the RIAA gets slapped hard, Hard, HARD for all of the crap that they have pulled over the last couple of years.

Anonymous said...

Nice to see that Mr Altman is "hot off the press" current on developments in the P2P litigation. His must be the first reference to Ray's Journal Article in a court brief, and hopefully not the last. He also references some of the Patry commentary as recent as July.
Clearly Mr. Altman does his homework. Hopefully the 2nd Circuit will do its homework by reviewing the citations in order to avoid endorsing the clear error of the District Court Judge. The Judge's ruling "from the bench" after oral arguments suggests a priority to "get it done" at the expense of "getting it right."

Fred

Anonymous said...

Nice brief. Unfortunate that references to William Patry's blog are now dead links.

ChrisP

Alter_Fritz said...

In case the judges missed them, the pure text copied from google's cache can be found here
http://pastebin.com/f4d717279

And in case someone also wants to read the comments:
As long as google does not clean its cache, those entries can be found at

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:HERETHEURLYOU NEED i.e
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/07/richie-ramone-and-attorneys-fees.html

raybeckerman said...

Alter_Fritz, please put your comments about the cached material under the post about Patry Copyright Blog!

Alter_Fritz said...

you did it already for me :-)

Thanks Ray, now Prof Patry can sue you too for infringement of the infringement ;-)