Fighting RIAA Without an Attorney 407
2think writes "Yahoo News is reporting that Patricia Santangelo of New York will be taking on the RIAA in court without an attorney. It seems that Ms. Santangelo has committed over $24,000 due to her case and simply cannot afford to continue with the services of an attorney." From the article: "Her former lawyer, Ray Beckerman, says Santangelo doesn't really need him. 'I'm sure she's going to win,' he said. 'I don't see how they could win. They have no case. They have no evidence she ever did anything. They don't know how the files appeared on her computer or who put them there.'"
Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Informative)
The RIAA's Achilles heel is that they do not actually download the file and verify its contents. This is why they've taken action against innocent people in the past; for example, they went after a professor named Usher for allegedly sharing songs by the rap artist Usher, because the word "Usher" appeared in the shared file names. The MPAA went after some GPL'd TCL code, claiming that it was X-Files episodes [sc.com], even though the file was barely 100KB. These organizations employ others to spider P2P networks looking for violations, then they shoot first and ask questions later.
This is the exact case that defense lawyers - or defendants with no other choice but to act as their own lawyers - should be making. The RIAA sued this woman because an IP address that was (maybe) associated with her ISP account was (maybe) sharing a file with a title that (maybe) was related to someone else's copyrighted material, but (may or may not have) actually contained anyone else's copyrighted material. That's a lot of maybes, and we're still operating under the assumption that the RIAA and the ISP both had impeccably accurate data.
If I were her lawyer, I'd make a video showing me creating a ~3MB file comprised of random data, naming it to reflect a popular song, sharing it on several P2P networks, searching for it and finding my own file in the results, then watching, perhaps over several days, as people downloaded my bogus file. Exhibit A: video evidence proving that a filename does not a copyright infringement make.
If I were the RIAA, I'd start actually downloading the files that are supposedly being shared, playing them to verify that the contents are as advertised, and recording _that_ on video. Unfortunately for them, it's a bit difficult to automate that.
Re:No Lawyer equals no rights (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.organicconsumers.org/politics/mclibel2
Furthermore, in the United States, you have a Right to self representation, any Judge who would refuse to read a brief from someone self representing would be overturned on appeal, something no Judge wants.
More recently, the Supreme Court has expounded the right to represent oneself, holding first in Faretta v. California 422 U.S. 806 (1975) that the power to choose or waive council lies with the accused, and the state can not intrude, even as it later held Gidinez v. Moran, 509 U.S. 389 (1993) if the state believed the accused less than fully competant to adequately proceed without council.
The circuit courts have narrowed the right to exclude appeal procedures as in Martinez v. California Court of Appeals 528 U.S. 152, 163 (2000), and again by reference in US v. Moussaoui (4th Cir. 2003) (No. 03-4162); however, this restriction is new, inconsistent with precedent, and has yet to be tested in the Supreme Court.
Re:Imagine if a trend started... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Informative)
The RIAA used a modified version of Kazaa Lite to access the Kazaa network and track down people who shared copyrighted music. Kazaa Lite is an unauthorised version of the Kazaa client, which is why Sharman Networks is suing the RIAA for copyright infringement in a separate suit.
Re:More than reasonable doubt (Score:5, Informative)
How many times is it necessary to say this? "Proof beyond a reasonable doubt" applies to criminal cases only. There is no finding of guilt or innocence in a civil case, only a determination of legal responsibility, a judgment for the plaintiff or defendant based on the simplest and most plausible interpretation of the evidence.
Re:Imagine if a trend started... (Score:3, Informative)
less than 20x the minimum wage you can settle in the small claims court, but in such case neither party is entitled to a lawyer.
Re:Out of Curious Interest (Score:1, Informative)
What happens when I downlaod a file is that the uploader sends a copy of the file over the net and then I save a copy of the data I recieve from the net. This means that both people are in fact making copies of the file.
The reason that the uploader makes a copy is because I do not have access to his filesystem. I can only _ask_ him to send me a _copy_. He sends me a copy simply because he does not loose the original.
Re:Imagine if a trend started... (Score:2, Informative)
Simple, Just ask the lawyers! They will tell you that you can't afford it.
Why shouln't everyone get an equal change to prove their case (both the guilty and the innocent)?
I know that without a lawyer, even when you have a bulletproof case as this woman supposedly has,
there is a heck of a lot more change for the other side to slip something past you
that you might not even know is significant until it is too late!
Don't push your own misconceptions ... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, several of premises are actually false, or are putting words in the RIAA's mouth.
1. Copying and sharing, the basis of all human culture and advancement, are somehow heinous crimes in the digital age.
No one ever said copying and sharing are heinous crimes. Unauthorized copying and sharing of copyright materials is against the law (copyright infringement isn't a criminal act, but it can get you sued).
2. Seeing something is the same as doing something.
I'm not sure what you meant, so I can't refute it. Please elaborate.
3. The US's laws apply to everyone in the world, and are superior to every other law.
Within the United States, copyright infringement is most certainly against the law; in fact, Congress is explicitly given authority in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) to make copyright laws. While the US Constitution obviously has no authority outside the US, copyright is virtually universal through international treaties and most (all?) countries have their own copyright laws.
4. Legality is more important than morality.
I agree with you
5. Your property belongs to some corporation instead of to you.
Actually, in the world of copyright, this is often true. If you buy a copyrighted CD, you do not fully own the material. The copyright owner still owns the copyright to the CD; you own a license to it. When you buy the CD you don't "own" the music; you are, in a sense, leasing it from the copyright owner. Even Richard Stallman, who appears to deeply dislike the *intention* of copyright (I know, the GPL is enforced through copyright; I mean copyright's intention of restricting redistribution) has said this (though in the context of software, not music).
6. Creativity cannot exist without cartels and monopolies.
I don't know of anyone who is saying this. It's just as easy for you to copyright your own work as it is for a large company. But given the context here, I'm not sure what's so "creative" about copyright infringement.
7. Guaranteed profits are better than freedom.
Profits are rarely, if ever, guaranteed, but your wording is rather misleading. You're trying to appeal to the hatred of the faceless CEO and his corporation by contrasting it with the word "freedom." By "freedom," you really mean "the right to freely redistribute copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder." By "guaranteed profits," you certainly mean the RIAA making money through selling music (even though most Slashdotters argue that consumers wouldn't buy many of the CDs they pirate, so that means these profits are hardly "guaranteed"), but the profits could just as well be a small software company selling its copyrighted program and making enough money to stay in business, or a fledgling artist scraping together a living.
In any case, when an individual buys copyrighted material, he is fully aware that he does not have the right to redistribute it; if he doesn't want to be under such restrictions, he is perfectly free to decline to buy it. If I sign a contract with you to clean your toilet every Saturday in exchange for some "guaranteed profits," I am fully aware of the fact that I'm giving up the freedom to do something I'd much rather do on Saturday. But perhaps I can't find any other job, and having the "guaranteed profits" minus my "freedom" on Saturday sounds more appealing than starving.
If you do not oppose the existence of copyright, I apologize for putting words in your mouth (I did so because several of your statements seem to imply that you do oppose it). I most certainly don't defend ever
Re:No Lawyer equals no rights (Score:3, Informative)
Judges simply do not read briefs unless they are written by lawyers.
I call BS. I can testify that this is not the case. I personally kicked a lawyer's butt in court. My motions were read, and granted. Both at the Federal District level and at the Appeals level. I did concede to the 'caste' system when the Court asked for 'formal' briefs (effectively, making oral argument unnecessary, which was to my advantage). But before that, I filed several motions and won all of them.
Now, granted, the person who sued me was a net.kook, but he had a real lawyer who was known for playing the system. That concerned me, of course, but I followed the rules to the letter. And I won.
Let's be clear - this was a no-brainer, since there were jurisdictional problems (the net.kook sued me in North Carolina State Court, and I live in Illinois, and have no contacts with North Carolina). The key was, I made absolutely sure I followed the court's rules, looked at sample pleadings, wrote my own stuff. And won.
One major caveat - I would never do this in a criminal case. Way too many pitfalls, traps, etc, that one could fall into. And that's where you need the lawyer - they know the system and the rules (or at least they are supposed to). Hopefully, though, I'll never be in THAT position.
Her Lawyer's Blog (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
Re:Don't push your own misconceptions ... (Score:1, Informative)
2. Not sure what you mean here.
3. You can cite Artice I Section 8 all you want - but the fact is that it's in the main body of the constitution. This is modified by Amendment I, protecting the right to free speech and freedom of the press. Congress is explicitly prohibited from passing any law that will interfere with this right, including a copyright law.
4. Copyright that interferes with the right to free speech is certainly unethical, and in any sane reading of the Constitution, illegal.
5. Ahh, the old "license" fallacy. When you buy a CD you DO own the music. You may or may not have the right to redistribute the music for profit, but you certainly have the right under the Constitution to share it without profit. And nowhere in copyright law, even the unconstitutional bits, is there anything that turns a sale into a "license".
6. You're fooling yourself if you think no one is saying that creativity cannot exist without monopolies and cartels. Take a really good look at what the RIAA and MPAA really want the law to be. They certainly are saying it, not in their public stuff, but to their purchased congresscritters.
7. I'm not the OP, but I certainly oppose copyrights that go beyond resale for profit. You can't equate toilet cleaning with copying, not every contract is legal, not every law is constitutional, and I don't want a world where anybody can "contract" for anything, without restriction. I can't sign myself into slavery - the contract is invalid. I can't contract to kill someone, if I fail to perform, the contracting party has no legal recourse, and if they attempt one, they admit to a crime. And if the Constitution were properly interpreted by those fools on the Supreme Court, I couldn't make a binding contract giving away my right to free speech, as no court would enforce it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Come full circle (Score:4, Informative)
Digital recording makes a PERFECT copy of the analog original. Even though it seems that only bit samples are made while analog is "continuous" the math involved proves that nothing is lost. (NOT talking about MP3 here!!!!). However CD's use a sampling rate that is TOO close to the nyquist limit. Practical low pass filters need at least an octave of room to work without distortion. CDs sample at 44khz with a cutoff of 20khz requires brick wall filter design that would need at least 8 poles to have the required shape. A filter this sharp will ring like crazy unless built with extreme precision. (We are talking
closer to 250khz, the filter design would be a lot easier and the sound would be a lot better. Only now can we put enough data on a opto disk (DVD's) to make this possible. Too bad DVD audio never got off the ground. CD's sound as good as they do thank's to clever digital filter tricks, but such tricks probably leave some 'water marks' in the sound.
Finally, few people have ears that CAN hear the difference. If you are over 35, your hearings upper range is probably no higher than
15khz if you are lucky. If you lived all your life away from loud noises (never been in the subways, never attented a 'stones concert, never been near loud machinery, etc) maybe your ears can still tell an MP3 from the original. At age 53,mine no longer can.
(Quick test. Listen to the back of a tube type TV set and see if your can hear the Horizontal deflection coils 'singing' I used to be able to do this...That's 15khz. I used to be able to hear the burgler alarm in the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of gems. That's 20khz. No longer)
Misleading information (Score:5, Informative)
First, Ms. Santangelo is not being charged with just downloading. The complaint actually says that Ms. Santangelo used Kazaa "to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others." As evidence for this charge they present a series of screen shots of Kazaa showing an account that is offering thousands of songs available for upload. Their claim is that this account corresponds to Ms. Santangelo's computer, although no evidence for that has been presented yet at this stage of the proceedings.
They did not inspect Ms. Santangelo's computer, which supposedly is in her ex-husband's possession and has had the disk wiped due to virus infections. They got the data from Kazaa by looking at the files which were (supposedly) being offered by her computer for upload.
So this is not a case of "downloading", it is a case of downloading and/or offering to upload. If that account actually does correspond to Ms. Santangelo's computer, the simplest explanation is that her kids were doing it, and she is responsible for their actions.
Even if it is the kids' friend, it's unlikely that he downloaded thousands of songs onto their computer without the kids knowing it. And even if he did, Ms. Santangelo could still be liable herself, and then she would have to sue the friend to recover damages on her own. In other words, she would owe millions of dollars to the RIAA, and then she would sue the friend for millions to cover her debts. But the RIAA would not depend on her success in suing the friend.
In short, instead of paying a few thousand to settle this and make it go away (and punishing the kids for getting the family into this mess), she is now out many times that already, and is likely to end up owing an astronomical sum. Her only recourse will be to declare bankruptcy.
There are two lessons from this. The first is that parents ought to keep better track of what their kids (and their kids' friends) are doing on the family computer. But the deeper lesson is that even with cases like this in the press, the odds are still so much against any given person being caught that most parents still don't worry about it. Unless or until we reach the point where most people have personal friends who have been sued, or at least friends of friends, nobody is going to take these threats seriously. At this point it's still like being struck by lightning or killed by bears, a theoretical threat that is so abstract and rare that few people take it seriously.
EFF Defends Santangelo (Score:1, Informative)
Thankfully, the EFF has sent its lawyers to defend the poor lady.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/200
Re:Imagine if a trend started... (Score:1, Informative)
Dude, just 5 cases a year at $24K a pop is $120K a year in raw income. I don't know what defendant's ex-lawyer's student loans look like, but if he can't pay them off in a single year with that kind of income, even after taxes, overhead, etc, he got ripped off by his law school.
I'm sure this attorney would love to think of himself as a nice guy caught up by circumstances. As a college professor who makes about 3x $24K a year before taxes and overhead, I have a hard time feeling he's anything but a leech who just sucked a host dry and then wandered away from the husk.
Sort of... (Score:5, Informative)
This is correct, but it's not the only reason.
The legal system functions like a club. Even if you're fully aware of your rights and the laws, if you're not in the club, you will grossly mistreated no matter how right you are, and when all is said and done, you'll end up screwed.
When I was a broke college student, I tried to represent myself in court one time against a minor offense I was accused of. I thought it was going to be open-and-shut, with me being the beneficiary of our fine system of justice. I had incontrovertible proof that I was 100% right. (Incontrovertible proof in the "photographic evidence" sense, before the days of digital cameras and desktop photo editing.) I was up against an assistant prosecutor who was obviously trying to get a promotion (aren't we all, right?) and two police officers who flat-out lied on the witness stand. (Again, I had incontrovertible photographic evidence that they lied.)
While I was testifying, the prosecutor objected to my pictures because she hadn't seen them. (I'm sorry, since when does the prosecution have the right of discovery?) The judge cut me off while I was questioning one of the officers about how he knew where I was at a particular time (which was the crux of the case against me) because it was "irrelevant." Before the case, the judge told me that I was not entitled to a jury trial, and after the case, when the judge said, "Guilty," she literally leaned over the bench as I was walking by and said under earshot of everyone else in the room (including the court reporter), "You know, you never really had a chance."
I saw the prosecutor a little later, and she said, "You can appeal if you want to, but they never overturn these cases, and it will cost you thousands of dollars. You should just pay the fine and be done with it."
If I had money backing me and a lawyer with me in the room, I'm 100% sure it would have been a totally different story, and I'll never set foot in a courtroom (or a police station, for that matter) without a lawyer representing me. Not because I think they're particularly smart or because I don't think they're scummy like everyone else does. In my estimation, the vast majority of them are not providing a valuable service, they're just bottom scrapers who leech off benefits from a crooked system.
Needless to say, I have a very grim view of our (lack-of-) justice system to this day. While most people are so worked up about how a miniscule number of guilty people walk free because of it, I'm much more concerned about the opposite problem, which is how many innocent people get screwed by a system that is geared to find everyone guilty regardless of the truth, and how many people get extorted by this stupid system. Now, whenever I hear of someone who's been accused of a crime, especially a poor person, who pleads not guilty and is convicted, I keep a much more open mind to their situation. I'm just glad that I found out how it works on, as I said, a minor offense that ended with a fine, and not something serious.
Thanks, Judge Nancy Campbell of Cobb County, Georgia. I used to have a lot of respect for the law and for judges. I really appreciate you showing me just how naïve I truly was.
Re:Come full circle (Score:2, Informative)
scharkalvin - I'll address this reply directly to you, since you posted an intelligent, good-faith reply. Also, since you're posting in this thread, I assume you aren't one of the clowns who modded me troll and flamebait, respectively. (note to mods: just because somone who you don't agree with is slightly outspoken, doesn't merit troll or FB status)
First point - the 'warm' sound of tubes. What is meant by this, is a type of sonic coloration. You are entirely correct in that tubes and FETs have a much more pleasing overload characteristic, but older tube designs tended to have a lot of coloration in general. For that matter, many conventional tube designs rely on classic circuit and transformer designs, and thus express the same colorations. Take a listen to Marantz, Harmon Kardon and McIntosh gear of the classic era - each has its own sound, each is individually pleasing, but none of them are particularly correct. That said, if I had to live with a Marantz solid-state unit vs. a Marantz tube unit, I'd take the tubes.. they are just easier to listen to (irrespective of accuracy).
Your comment about digital being able to make a PERFECT copy of an analog source is still subject to some debate - and I say this, having a reasonable understanding of the Nyquist math. However, you are dead-on with the statement about the sampling rate of CDs being too close to the frequency limit of the source material. I'm also slightly sad about the failure of the DVD-A format, which held great promise as a truly solid digital representation of an analog source. For now, we are still stuck with the legacy of computer hardware and storage density from 1982 - 44.1Khz sampling, with a 16bit wordsize. Frankly, I'm amazed that it works as well as it does.. at least digital recording and mastering techniques (and hardware) have improved a lot in 25 years, and these days it's possible to make a CD sound pretty darn good.
If only they'd had just a little more CPU power and storage density in those days, they would have been able to implement a 'true' digital audio format - when I say true, I mean one that has robust error checking and correction. Redbook audio CDs have no true form of error correction at the bit level, and this is one of their great downfalls. IIRC, the blocksize on a CDrom is 2352 bytes long - but for a computer CD, only 2048 bytes. That remaining space is used for error correction data on a computer CD, but on an audio CD it's used for music. The engineers of the 80's needed every byte on board, so they could get their 74 minutes of music on a CD. Thus, it's never guaranteed that the data on the disc is precisely what the CD player sees at the input of its DAC. It's OK for audio (I guess..) but for actual data storage and transfer, it's a joke.
Lastly, the bit about us humans losing our high-frequency hearing with age is quite true, but therein lies a huge red herring. Whether or not one can hear a 20Khz tone (which might be part of some audio program) is not as absolute as you might first think. Despite the fact that you might lack the ability to hear such a tone, does not imply that this has no effect on your perception of the rest of the program. Those high-frequency components still impact your eardrum, and affect the way in which you perceive other sounds in the program. Think about this: when you are ascending in an airplane, and your ears begin to load up from the change in barometer, everything starts to sound different (at least prior to the "pop"). That's a (essentailly) 0Hz signal being applied to your ears - and while absolutely nobody can 'hear' 0Hz, it's certainly affecting your perception of other sounds, isn't it? Point is, any frequency components - whether directly heard or not, have an impact on one's overall perception of the material.
Anyway, I've done enough trolling and flamebaiting for one day ;-) Thanks for your time
Re:Imagine if a trend started... (Score:4, Informative)
Not all PD's are bad. Some of them are really good.