Saturday, June 27, 2009

RIAA files Appellees' Brief in 2d Circuit in Arista v. Does 1-16

In its case targeting students at the State University of New York at Albany, Arista Records v. Does 1-16, the RIAA has filed its Appellees' Brief in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The "John Doe" proceeding in the court below has been stayed pending the determination of the appeal.

Appellees' Brief



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

4 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

It is absolutely unbelievable how these lawyers from HRO and Co. always try to get away with blatant lies!

They lie that they identified defendant as an infringer! (If at all they have identified a network device that was running the p2p software.) They have ABSOLUTELY no idea who was operating the device or if defendant has anything at all to do with the infringement in the slightest beside the fact that he might be the party that had a contractual relationship with his Internet service provider to provide him with internet connectivity!

Plaintiffs layers lie when they claim that the company /institution who provides internet access has identified the defendants as infringers. They have not done so!
Just because Plaintiffs write in their subpoena that they want the names/adresses and such stuff of infringers from the ISP's does not make the answer the ISP's into such a thing.
In fact even at least one university was smart enough to read exactly what Plaintiffs demanded from them and told them that they can NOT identify INFRINGERS, only persons that had a contractual relationship with them to lease a particular IP at a particular Time!
And I know of at least one court (*) that ruled against Plaintiffs demand for a subpoena which makes the lawyers statement that no court ruled against their demands just another lie.

It is unbelieveable for me where the HRO lawyers take the guts from to lie and misrepresent in their paper here even more objective (technical) facts so blatantly even to an US appeals court!


(*) The University has adequately demonstrated that it is not able to identify the alleged infringers with a reasonable degree of technical certainty...[C]ompliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery....[T]he Court declines to authorize discovery and quashes the subpoena as to Does # 8, 9, and 14" -Hon. Nancy Gertner, Dist. Judge, Dist. Massachusetts, November 24, 2008, London-Sire Records v. Does 1-4

Anonymous said...

I can't wait until the RIAA's lies catch up to them!

Anonymous said...

The general argument of the RIAA that we cannot pursue these cases and protect our copyrights under the existing rules and laws and therefore we deserve special dispensation because our buisness is being killed otherwise should be rejected outright. You don't get to rewrite the law just because it doesn't favor you.

{The Common Man Speaking}

Eric said...

p2/3pdf. How is this not fodder for the class action/collusion angle. The disclosure page is a who's who in audio publishers probably representing over 90% of all sales in the market.

p14 in pdf. "This appeal concerns only one issue - whether one party can obtain identifying information about the user responsible for an Internet account from which copyright infringement activity occurred on a specific date and time".

1) MS downloads are not infringement.

2) They are now arguing *point in time* and not continuing distribution. Can estoppel be claimed moving forward if this cases does get bumped back? Does this mean they can *only* argue the MS downloads at trial ( which are not illegal since MS was an agent of the copyiright holders ). This is a BIG misstep as far as I'm concerned. They also contradict themselves on p38pdf.

3) There are serious questions as to the legitimacy of the identification.

4) The user is only the putative copyright infringer whose right will be constrained by a civil case that will essentially wipe them out. They might as well be carrying out this case in Bankruptcy court as that's where a win for the Plaintiff's will end up.


p15 in pdf "the conduct of the Recording Industry Association or America ( not even a party to this action )".

OMGWTFBBQ, they are the ones who have coordinated the lawsuits, they are the ones who appear to be profiting from the lawsuits, their lawyers are the ones working these suits, they talk about it on their website, how the hell are they not a party to this mess.

p19 pdf: Statement of facts REEKS. "sustained devastating losses" -lie there is 0 proof of a devastating loss of profits to the copyright holders.

p20pdf: "P2P users who disseminate (upload) and copy ( download) copyrighted material violate the Copyright Act" - oversimplification to the point of being a lie.

p21pdf "Doe 3 was identified as an infringer" - HUGE LIE, the mac address assigned to Doe 3 at the beginning of the school year was "identified".

p21pdf "no court has denied on the merits Plaintiff's requests that identifying information be provided by the infringes ISP." - Um, except for those other cases where the John Doe subpoena's were quashed.

p38pdf. This is really the lynch pin. They argue that they don't have to prove a specific act of infringement in order to proceed to destroy defendant legally. This should be read aloud to every jury reviewing these cases.

p40. Infringement happened at 2:15am EDT. Doesn't Doe 3 just have to prove that he was, more than likely, asleep like everyone else to show that he was not controlling the computer at the time the alleged infringement occurred. Even more likely his computer may have been off leaving his mac address a candidate for theft by anyone else on the same subnet ( thousands of ethernet jacks ).


Q for the lawyers. In a case where defendants have been unable to make an argument in a lower court because proceedings have not gotten that far are they still barred from bringing it up at the appellate level in a unique case such as this? Especially when those arguments are about the bad acts and motives of the Plaintiff's whose sole goal here is to make a statement, not reclaim any profits ( their best case for recovery here will not even touch the costs racked up so far in this case ).