Tuesday, June 10, 2008

2 "John Does" in North Carolina move to strike, submit informal opinon of regulatory body that unlicensed investigation violates law

You may recall a "John Doe" case against 38 different "John Does", LaFace v. Does 1-38, targeting North Carolina State University students, which was dismissed as to all but one of the John Does for misjoinder.

The RIAA commenced separate actions against some of the John Does, and in two of those cases, SONY v. Doe and Warner v. Doe, the defendants have moved to

-dismiss the complaint
-strike the Linares declaration, and
-quash the subpoena.

Among other things, the students' motion papers attach an Informal Opinion of the North Carolina Private Protective Services Board, based upon submitted facts, which states:

we understand that individuals claim to have accessed the hard drives of private citizens to look for music recordings that are being stored. If information is found showing that music is being stored, the individual will then sell that information, along with the internet protocol address, to certain companies that are interested in obtaining that information. The information may then be used as evidence in court. In essence, it appears that individuals may be performing services on a contractual basis to determine the identity, habits, conduct, activity, transactions, or acts of individuals.

If the above information supplied is correct and it is found that the individuals do not hold a private investigators license issued by the Board, it is the opinion of the Board's staff that such activities violate the Private Protective Services Act.
Warner v. Doe Motion to Dismiss, Strike, and Quash
Brief
Robertson Affidavit with Exhibit, May 14, 2008, Informal Opinion of North Carolina Private Protective Services Board
Proposed Stay Order
SONY v. Doe Motion (Similar papers filed in support)



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

2 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

Me notes that that Informal Opinion of the North Carolina Private Protective Services Board is not only informal, but very informative and well on point of what MS/MD/BayTSB (the later ironicly advertising on your blog too!) are doing.
Online scalp hunters fishing for dolphins for the money and without a PI license!

So your honorable Judges when do you guys/gals sign arrest warrants so FBI can go after those criminals!
Was the revision 3 incident (*) not enough already?

But what can one expect when even the AG in a certain fruit allegedly is using the services of these fraudsters to catch allegedly cihld porn consumers in that apple?
(Don't get me wrong, me is for the catching and prosecution of CP-guys, but let this be done by lawenforcement and not by private guys like saaf and octavio!)

(*)
http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3

Anonymous said...

From the Brief:

The court in Dendrite described those procedures as follows:

1. make reasonable efforts to notify the accused Internet user of the pendency of the identification proceeding and explain how to present a defense;


Clearly this is exceptionally easy to accomplish by sending the court papers to the ISP, who then matches them to the accountholder and passes them along. Obviously the RIAA expects the ISP to be able to match the supplied information to the accountholder and return that information to the RIAA for further legal action, so they have to know that it would be just as easy to pass the legal papers to the unidentified defendant instead at this point in the case. All arguments that the RIAA cannot serve the defendants until after it has identified them are outright lies.

Where the identity of an anonymous speaker is at issue, the First Amendment simply requires that litigants demonstrate that their claims are more than a pretext for censorship or other improper purpose.

The RIAA's claims are exclusively an attempt to chill peer-to-peer filesharing among the large body of current users of it. They cannot identify a specific infringer, nor even a specific infringing computer, from the information they have presented. Instead they rely solely on fear, intimidation, a lack of legal knowledge by those they target, and a lack of financial resources for their opponents to fight them. The RIAA has no fear of losing in any of these cases no matter how far they purse them because it's not their money that they're spending. Even when the lose, they win, by making it clear how far they will take these cases and how much they'll spend on them.

{The Common Man Speaking}