Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Report on Second Conference in Elektra v. Santangelo, taking place on August 5th

The second conference in Elektra v. Santangelo took place on August 5th, in federal court in White Plains, New York.

I appeared for Ms. Santangelo.

The RIAA plaintiffs were represented by Maryann Penney of the Cowan Liebowitz firm in New York City and by Timothy Congrove, a partner in Shook Hardy & Bacon, in Kansas City, Missouri.

Mr. Congrove spoke for the plaintiffs. He participated by telephone, rather than in person.

The judge concentrated on the dismissal motion and asked Mr. Congrove to justify his position. Mr. Congrove said he would be citing cases in his brief on August 8th, but the judge wanted him to cite his cases then and there.

The first case he cited was a case we had ourselves cited as a reason for dismissing the complaint.

He made his arguments, and I made mine, and the judge had many piercing questions.

She indicated that she would decide the motion after all the papers had been submitted.

She did not schedule any further court dates at that time.

I am attempting to obtain a transcript of the proceedings, and when I do will post it on this site.

The final motion papers were submitted on August 15th.

Ray Beckerman

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whoa. My mom's name is Patricia Santangelo. She lives in California, though.

How many Patricia Santangelos could there be?!

Anonymous said...

I just wanted to comment on how great it is that you're giving the blow-by-blow on this case.

I wonder if anybody can clear something up for me: When was the defendant's computer siezed to determine the copyrighted information stored there? Or is all of the plaintiff's evidence derived from KaZaa network information?

It seems to me that the connection between her IP address, the KaZaa login name, and her physical computer are all highly circumstantial, if not speculative. But I haven't seen this in the defendant's claims (yet)?

raybeckerman said...

Reply to Eric: as you have surmised, it's purely speculative.