Friday, May 01, 2009

Complaint filed against Brittany Kruger in Michigan; SONY Music Entertainment v. Kruger

The RIAA has filed its complaint against Brittany Kruger in the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Southern Division. The name of the case is SONY Music Entertainment v. Kruger. The judge assigned to the case appears to be located in the courthouse located in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Ms. Kruger was one of the "John Doe" defendants who filed charges against MediaSentry with Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

The complaint appears to have added a number of song files to the "exhibit A" list, which had not been included in the RIAA's earlier filings.

Complaint



Keywords: lawyer 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 portable music player

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

This complaint is filed 2 years 3-1/2 months after the Plaintiffs say that they detected the infringement. Isn't that past the statute of limitations?

Given that they allege that the infringement was continuous after that point, must they not present credible evidence at this point to justify that position? Or is this enough to allow them to perform a forensic anal exam of the hard drive seeking to prove that files not on their list were added or modified after that time, as well as continue on with abusive depositions?

This man would like to know.

{The Common Man Speaking}

Alter_Fritz said...

2 Questions:

1) what's that with this alleged related case?
2) are plaintiffs sure that the few songs are really all they want to sue for? Because they state a number over 1700 and the sheet has so much white space as if they just forgot to correctly print out the sheet.

Anonymous said...

Ray, I should add that the case was filed the week of final exams at Northern Michigan. Just another example of the class of people we are dealing with. RK.

Eric said...

Common Man Speaking.

Statute of limitation is 3 years unfortunately leading to lots of possible evidence both for and against being lost. My personal feeling it if the plaintiffs own delay in filing causes destruction of possible mitigating evidence then the case should be thrown out.

But that would just be common sense.

Anonymous said...

This is in Michigan?

If memory serves, I believe that some agency of the executive branch of the state government found RIAA's activities to be unlawful, then the law was changed to basically specifically point at what RIAA was doing.

That being the case, this case needs to be dismissed as a matter of law.

-Quiet Lurker

Anonymous said...

Quiet Lurker:

Yeah it is rather bold of the RIAA to show itself in court in Michigan. There is a seemingly large opening for counterclaims.

XYZZY

raybeckerman said...

It's easy to be "bold" when litigating against defenseless people who can't afford a lawyer.

Anonymous said...

Xyzzy -

This isn't bold, it's just plain stupid.

Unclean hands, and a civil order from the state government (should) serve to bar their claim.

My concern is whether the judge in the case will find some tortuous argument in favor of RIAA which ignores the cease and desist order, or precedent, or even the plain law of the case.

-Quiet Lurker

derivative said...

This is, judging from past performance, and extrapolating objectives from behavior, neither particularly bold nor startlingly stupid. As Ray has pointed out, these guys are merely playground bullies. They can keep doing what they've been doing successfully for years, and once they are really called out on it, they will probably argue they didn't realize it was bad to grab Johnny by the neck and keep bouncing his head off the concrete retaining wall.

The RIAA has (probably successfully in their own eyes, or at least in their lawyers' eyes) pursued a scorched-earth policy for, apparently, at least six years. If you oppose them, they will make it really costly for you. Even if you win, they will fight you tooth and nail on attorney's fees. The more publicity they get about how painful it is to deal with them, the happier they are.

This will continue until some judge kicks them so hard they have to pull down their pants to comb their hair. I'm not talking small fines or even a few days in the pokey for contempt of court. I'm talking at least a few months of jail time, and a disbarment of at least a year.

I've seen it before on the playground. All it takes is a single adult with enough courage to assert authority over other peoples' kids, and then, suddenly, all the other adults realize that they have similar authority and a similar moral imperative to use it.

"Stupid" or "bold" (often synonyms IMHO) will be when the RIAA keeps up the strategy after one of the judges finally stands up and gives one or two of these criminals some serious jail time.

But maybe we've lost the moral backbone for that. Just yesterday my wife noted the cognitive dissonance between us sending alleged Nazi war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk back to Germany for trial, and Obama saying that none of the recent CIA "interrogators" would stand trial.

Or maybe it just means that if you engage in abhorrent activity, you need to make sure you wind up on the winning side, in which case it is doubly important to insure that the RIAA loses severely.