RIAA Case Against Mother Dismissed

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Capitol Records v. Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma, a case against a mother -- whose only connection to the alleged filesharing was that she was the person who paid for the internet access -- has been dismissed with prejudice. Faced with the mother's motion for leave to file a summary judgment motion dismissing the case against her, and awarding her attorneys fees, the RIAA made its own motion for permission to withdraw its case. The Court granted the motion and let the RIAA drop its case. The Court went on to hold that the defendant, Ms. Foster, is the 'prevailing party' under the Copyright Act and is therefore eligible for an award of attorneys fees. The Court then indicated that it would decide the attorneys fees award question upon receipt of a motion for attorneys fees."

Attorney's Fees

[StarWreck]

That means the RIAA actually lost money on this one. Hopefully A LOT!

Solid ruling

[tmittz]

One particularly good thing about this ruling is that is seems to be very solid. The linkage of "prevailing party" under the FRCP and the allowance of attorney fee recovery under the Copyrights Act looks difficult to challenge. While this ruling is not binding on much of anyone (yay Western District of Oklahoma), I have no reason to assume the Cantrell case is a drastic departure from most other circuit's opinions on the FRCP. Not to mention the SCOTUS case they cite, which I haven't read but is probably still good law.

While she has to specifically file for attorney's fees, I'm sure she will. Even though the bar is set fairly high in that the court shall not award fees "routinely or as a matter of course", the standard of review (almost certainly abuse of discretion) means that if the court awards them, it'll be almost impossible to overturn.

Re:Attorney fees

[Ichigo Kurosaki]

Accually there was not a precident set down by this case. There would have to be a ruling for that to happen which is exactly why the RIAA withdrew so there would not be a precident set down.

Re:Booyah motherfuckers!

[pluther]

I keep seeing people saying these kinds of things on slashdot, but has there ever been an actual case of somebody facing criminal charges because of something done by someone using their open wireless connection?

Re:Attorney's Fees

[apflwr3]

That means the RIAA actually lost money on this one. Hopefully A LOT!>

Considering they won a default judgement against the daughter (if you RTFA) I think the RIAA will still come out ahead.

Not the death of the RIAA

[Bullfish]

This really is a black eye for the RIAA in terms of publicity. If I remember the facts right, the woman didn't own the computer or use it, she paid for the internet access for her weasel jailbird boyfriend. She apparently (again, if I remember correctly) didn't know a computer from a microwave. As the facts have borne out enough for her to win, the judge really had a no-brainer on his hands. All she was guilty of was a poor choice in kanoodling companions. The RIAA is (and has been) guilty of poor judgement as well, mainly of the not knowing when to quit and try another way variety.

In the end though, this will cause some bad press (what's one more bad article anyway) and the loss of say, 25 large. It won't cripple them. That will happen from the ongoing erosion of their outdated business model.

Re:BRAVO

[Overloadplanetunreal]

We still win because it cost the RIAA money. If they know it will cost them their own lawyer fees, plus their defendant's lawyer fees, and not even win the case, they will stop doing this crap.

Re:Attorney fees

[rts008]

While I agree with you, my pessimistic side wants to cry out Dream On.

Sorry, just the way things seem to be going lately.

I deplore the trend to advance corporate profits/outmoded business models over individual's freedoms and fair use, it is a trend none the less.

I understand that there is a fine line between consumer's rights (damn, I hate the term consumer) and artist's rights, I also understand that it seems more an issue between the distributors and consumers....How the hell did we get to this point?

It will not be easy, but reform/revolution of the current system is much needed IMHO, but where/how do we go on from here to make it right?

p.s. in Firefox, the "Phoenixbay" (used to be piratebay) is on my bookmarks toolbar (Arrrrgh! Matey's!), I also support and utilize a lot of indie bands and their downloads.
I have no problems with the actual artists getting paid, I just have developed a very bad attitude with both RIAA and MPAA over the past couple of years.

Default judgments

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

They have thousands of default judgments they haven't collected a nickel on, and never will collect a nickel on, and the default judgments cost them a lot of money to obtain. So don't think they're making money on the default judgments. They're only making money on the settlements.

Re:Attorney's Fees

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

You are absolutely right. Once the judges start granting the attorneys fee awards, it will act as a deterrent.

Re:It is not the victory portrayed by the story

[DavidD_CA]

If only the daughter was a lawyer.

Then the mom could have hired the daughter to defend her case, RIAA drops the case, is forced to pay legal fees, which then go to the daughter......... to pay back RIAA in a settlement.

Follow that?

Mission Not Accomplished

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

1. The case against the mother is closed. 2. The mother's case against the RIAA for attorneys fees is still open. 3. A precedent is established that by withdrawing a case the RIAA does not immunize itself from liability for the harm it caused by prosecuting its meritless lawsuit in the first place. Sounds pretty good to me.

Re:yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely... but look at pornography. You never hear of people getting sued for copying gigs and gigs of porn; that industry adopts and capitalizes on new technologies rather than trying to crush them. It's simply not going to stop until the music/movie industries stop hoarding their product. Millions of people are disobeying the law to get what they want how the want it... can't they hear the banging? If the industries tried earnestly to give it at a fair price, people would be dropping cash with the quickness.

Anecdote: Legal issues aside, within the past five years I've spent $20 or so on music CDs (about two)... when I found out about allofmp3, I spent over $100 in less than two weeks. It was convenient, reasonably priced, and let me choose how I wanted my music. I've tried downloading songs from iTunes, and I don't care for it. I make decent money and I don't mind paying reasonable prices for music, but let me have it how I want it please!

Re:Attorney fees

[ClickOnThis]

Okay, but the judge ruled for the mother with prejudice. Doesn't that mean at least there's a precedent to protect internet subscribers from the use of their service by others to access copyrighted material? And if so, would this let, say, unencrypted WiFi hotspots be a "loophole" for obtaining copyrighted material with no practical way for the RIAA to prosecute anyone?

Just wondering.

Re:Sharks win

[Cheapy]

Whoo, nevermind the fact that an RIAA case was thrown out and even turned back at them, only the lawyers would ever benefit from that.

Even if you miss my point, atleast the mother won. Far more than her lawyer atleast.

Re:yay

[Mark Maughan]

No. A god can no more make it moral to rape and murder a 3 year old girl than it could make 1=0.

Gods cannot define morality. This has been known since ancient Greece.

You are both wrong.

And your responce also reflects things wrong with this world. The 911 terrorists thought as you do now.

Circumventing the RIAA at the source

[crusher-1]

As I've posted before. I'm a musician that has opted to go the home studio route due to the level of development in the software and hardware available. Well, it seems that others are taking heed of the this trend and bringing the worst fears of the RIAA into reality. Many local (and regional/national) artist are taking advantage of other channels to promote and sell their wares. Case in point: Here in my home town (major U.S. city) a local radio station is perusing the local uploads on MySpace and playing their music on their radio program. Then they have votes by listeners as to which songs played were their favorites. None of these bands or musicians are "signed" by a label. The winner of the vote is slotted into the regular play rotation.

This is a win for all involved and puts the RIAA affiliates in the light they deserve to be - Mind over matter. The radio station, listeners and musicians don't mind the RIAA dregs because it doesn't matter. These bands/musicians get the exposure they so desperately need and deserve and get a change to get signed by a indie label (or an RIAA label if they see fit to). Where the RIAA/labels are concerned they are dealing with musicians that have decidedly more leverage than they may have had without this exposure.

I for one welcome and highly advocate this trend. Personally I may not get any airtime. But at least I have an even shot and the "listeners" will decide my musics' marketability, not some coked out narssicistic R&A rep. And if I don't fair well with the listeners, perhaps I'll get an objective critique, which is something I likely wouldn't get by and "industry" goon.

This latest advent in court shows two things as far as I'm concerned. 1) they're getting desperate. 2) It just goes to show how out of touch these morons are - they just set precedenct. Unfortunately for themselves (the RIAA legal team) it's in the opposite direction they had intended. Next time some innocent gets randomly targeted by these clueless idiots their lawyer will have a tool to use against the RIAA - and all thanks to the RIAA's efforts. It's nice when the thugs hand you a gun! Bang! Bang! Baby!

Re:BRAVO

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Not unless he's got a wealthy client who is willing to pay a lot of legal fees. Which is never the case in these cases. All the lawyers I know are doing it on a pro bono basis or on a drastically reduced fee basis. I myself have probably given away around $300,000 worth of legal services by doing the cases on a drastically reduced fee basis. But there is a limit to how much each of us can stand. If a single practitioner takes on one of these cases pro bono, he could wind up doing $100,000 worth of legal work on it for free. He may not be able to afford to do more than one case at a time. But if the client gets a $75,000 attorneys fee award, and the lawyer gets paid $75,000 that way, he can afford to take on 4 cases at a time.

RTFA? NFW!

[Anonymous Coward]

The /. blurb makes it look better than it actually is. This FA is particularly hard to read, as there's simply a PDF of the court proceedings imbedded in some legal firm's web page on their site. But I actually did RTFA.

As IANAL I may not have understood it completely, but it appears that what happened here is that RIAA sued this lady, Deborah, who owned the internet account, as well as her daughter Amanda whose age is unknown; it doesn't say if the daughter is an adult or a child. Deborah answered teh suit and denied downloading anything. Amanda ignored the summons, so the RIAA asked for the case against Deborah to be dismissed. As I said, IANAL, but it seems that if you sue someone and then drop the suit, you're going to have to pay their lawyer.

The RIAA still got its pound of flesh, it appears. However, some good news may be that this will create some kind of common sense precident; just because you own a computer and an internet connection doesn't mean you're the one using it. What if there were five people using it and all denied downloading? What if Amanda had hired a lawyer and denied downloading?

And the legal proceedings say "On November 18, 2004, the plaintiffs filed this action against Deborah Foster alledging that she had infringed their copyrights by unlawfully downloading music to which they owned the copyrights." This confuses me; I thought the NOTA said downloading was legal but uploading was illegal?

Is there a non-RIAA lawyer in the house that can explain this to me?

Lawyers looking out for lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm delighted by this decision, it has the same glaring error that comes out of every such decision. Why may this woman simply get her lawyers fees paid? Yes, it is nice that her lawyers will be able to bill their time at perhaps $350/hour. But why shouldn't she be able to bill, at least at the rate she ordinarily earns money. If she had to take a day off work without pay to consult with her lawyers or to be in court, why can't she bill that? Why when a defendant wins, does all the money end up in the pockets of lawyers? Why do courts fuss over that and not say one word about any damages a defendant/victim may deserve for the harm done them? This is business in usual in the court systems of our country. Lawyers looking out for other lawyers as they go about their task of screwing the public. In that sort of situation, the fact that we can, at great cost, hire a lawyer to defends us from the misdeeds of another lawyer means little. --Mike Perry, Seattle

Re:Booyah motherfuckers!

[schmiddy]

Allowing other people who you don't even know to use your internet connection is just plain dumb. Downloading music is the least of the problems you could face: what if they downloaded kiddie porn or used your connection to communicate with "terrorist groups"?

Am I the only one that's saddened that the Internet has come to this point? I remember, not so long ago, before the *AA and Homeland Security and god knows who else started poking their noses in the Internet, that it was much more of a friendly place. Sure, there were and will always be scourges like spammers and viruses, but it's just sad that you can't even be generous with your WiFi connection these days without worrying about legal troubles.

Meanwhile, the telecom monopolies are tightening their squeeze, threatening to hold VoIP packets and anything else that threatens their business model hostage (not in so many words, but what do you think net neutrality is really about?). The Internet has such great potential to be a distributed network run by us, for us, but there's all these ridiculous obstacles in the way. Not surprisingly, these "obstacles" are set up by aging monopolies with no sense of how to make money in an age where Internet connectivity is approaching ubiquity, and people are learning how to make use of it.

The obvious solution is a physically separated, anonymous network ("Freenetwork") , set up by us geeks, privacy advocates, pirates, and anyone else with some backbone – perhaps a mesh WiFi network + short ethernet links, starting in densely populated geek-happy regions like SoCal, or the Northeast. Some brave souls could set up Internet -> 'Freenetwork' gateways, perhaps the gateways to the Internet could be set up in a distributed, load-balanced fashion themeselves, like the current Tor network. You could get LAN speeds within the 'Freenetwork', and the pirates could play all they wanted to without fear of getting caught (If it got really big the *AA might come sniffing, but they'd need real hardware skill to track down anonymous WiFi mesh network users. They seem to be a lot better at manipulating the court systems than doing stuff like that). And, of course, it could even be set up to use onion routing within the network (like Tor), or perhaps even like Freenet. Boom, true anonymity and privacy.

The other alternative is for existing networks like Freenet, mute-net, and others, to improve to the point of genuine usability (Tor is already there, but it's good only for web browsing at this point). A comforting fact is that, barring the outright prohibition of them by our friendly Congressmen, they will expand into usefulness. It might take a while, but it will happen. Computers get faster, hard drives get bigger, and Internet connections slowly get faster. That's enough.

I guess the point I'm getting at, is that true Privacy is something that's really needed online. I suspect that once the general population gets a taste, they'd love it. The legal and political ramifications of this are quite large, but I for one think it's up to the legalities to catch up to us rather than the other way around. As I said before, it's a technological certainty that the existing Freenet and others will eventually get big enough to work, even if my dreams of 'Freenetwork' never come to pass. Distributed, anonymous communication thanks to strong encryption is already a reality. The legal system, thankfully, hasn't even begun to consider the ramifications of this. Let's hope they stay away for good. (Even if they wanted to, they'd have to more or less openly establish a police state to really quash something like 'Freenetwork'. That's a whole different can of worms.).

The only question is how long it will take for something like this to really get off the ground. I guess that's up to me, us. Thoughts?