RIAA Appeals Award of Attorneys' Fees

Fishing Expedition writes in with a story in Ars reporting that the RIAA has decided to appeal a judge's decision to award attorneys' fees to defendant Debbie Foster in Capitol Records v. Foster. If the award stands, the RIAA could find itself in trouble in numerous other cases, and they know it. Their real fear, more than the attorneys' fees, is the judge's finding that the RIAA's arguments for contributory and vicarious infringement claims in cases like this one are not viable.

Why do we have to put up with this crap?

[filterban]

I'm glad to see that the RIAA/MPAA's War on Customers is failing, and IANAL, but that article summary is terrible. Can you possibly make it any more confusing?

Very difficult for RIAA to win

[freedom_india]

In this case the victim's innocence has been proven beyond guilt.
Hence no upper court will overturn attorneys fees as RIAA has been proven wrong.

Re:seeing the light

[garcia]

What I want to know is why the blurb includes that line. Is there documented evidence of that being their "fear"? It seems more like an opinion that has no bases in fact.

What the RIAA *is* worried about is other people winning, for whatever reason, and there being prior judgments against them charging for attorney fees -- which means that people will be happy to go to court against them and possibly win meaning that the RIAA can't play the extortion game as well as they have been.

Afraid of losing

[Hrodvitnir]

The mere fact that the RIAA is afraid to lose a case is proof in my mind that they are no less than extortionists.

Re:Courts = state sponsored corporate gambling

[DamnStupidElf]

And that's how it should be. Always. If you lose, you pay, with the theory that you'll learn your lesson and not do it again. Conversely, if they win, they get more money. It's a risk they took from the getgo, and have been getting away with it because there have been few real challenges against them.

The problem is that no one would sue a large company paying $5000 an hour for attorneys, for fear of losing being more costly than any possible judgment from winning. The law should limit the loser to paying only as much as his or her own attorney fees to the winner. That way it only depends on how seriously each side takes its case, and realistically it will have the same effect where it matters, namely where individuals need to sue large corporations. If they lose, they're only out twice as much as they would have paid their own lawyer, not $millions. If they win, the corporation almost certainly spent more than they did on lawyers, so they'll pay the whole bill. It makes even more sense when you consider that the corporation can essentially throw as many lawyers on the case as they want just to frighten an opponent with huge attorney fees because the lawyers are employees and they'd be paying them no matter what they were working on.

Considering all the frivolous lawsuits..

[Lunarsight]

When you consider all the frivolous lawsuits coming from the RIAA, hitting them for the defendant's attorney fees seems more than reasonable, IMHO. Perhaps if they knew paying the attorney fees was a possible outcome, they wouldn't be suing everything with two legs half as much.

The way it should be

[Anonymous Coward]

What REALLY gets me is that if the RIAA had any chance of recovering the exorbitant $$ in "damages" they try to extort they would.
But lets face it what chance does Joe Blow on the street have of paying them....6/10 of FSCH-all. All it does is destory a persons life finantially and emotionally.

Its nice to see someone taking a stand and winning. I personally don't know how the judge could reverse his order.
They initiated litigation and lost, (not)sorry but thats why you don't bring frivolous lawsuits in front of the court. Personally i hope that people DO use this in their own *IAA lawsuits and teach these guys that the destroying the "little man" is not how you stop piracy.

Here in NZ we have even more draconian laws, as previewed in a previous /. article. We have no fair-use, no format shifting, heck even recording a TV show to VHS is illegal (currently, yes it *may change shortly). The *IAA equivelants have only prosecuted (from memory) 2 people, both were mid-sized operations that copied dvd's/music to sell at town/city markets. The average Joe downloader gets a cease and desist letter and thats it; why you may ask, well as in sweden, you can only sue for real damages i.e. 100 illegal mp3 = US$99, this is the way it should be. /end my 2c

Re:seeing the light

[jedidiah]

While it may be opinion, and perhaps pure speculation, the notion that it isn't grounded in fact is highly specious. The nature of the US legal system and how the RIAA is operating makes the conclusion rather obvious actually.

It's less "an opinion that has no bases in fact" and more like a declaration that the sky is blue.

That's how it should work anyway

[Yvan256]

You bring someone to court, you lose, you paid for the legal fees on both sides.

If such a system were in place, we'd see less "I'm gonna sue his ass" crap, a lot less "if I threaten to sue they'll do as we want" crap, and a whole lot less of "we'll sue them into bankruptcy" crap.

Re:Courts = state sponsored corporate gambling

[MindStalker]

Yes, but if you lost would you be forced to pay millions in their lawyers cost?

$5,000 an hour? Hardly.

[msslc3]

No court would award fees of $5,000 per hour in a copyright case, even if the winning party actually paid that much. The law provides for a "reasonable" attorney fee, and that isn't reasonable.

Exorbitant fees are usual in cases where a fund of money is recovered for distribution to a class. The lawyers for the class can get a percentage of the fund (maybe 20%, but it depends on the judge) even if the resulting hourly fee is very high. But this can't happen when defending against a copyright infringement action.

Re:Wow!

[shark72]

"Don't forget that they have a monopoly on music and have a profit margin on the order of 50%."

What record companies manage to clear 50%? EMI's about to be bought. Virgin is no more; it's being folded into Capitol and lots of people are being laid off. Doesn't sound like an industry that's doing that great.

More to the point, Warner had a profit margin [yahoo.com] of 0.27% and an operating margin of 6.3% last year, and their year over year earnings declined 73%.

I'm aware that many Slashdotters point out that the record industry is very profitable, but I haven't seen any data that supports this. Do you know something that I don't?

If you meant the smaller labels... my hunch is that CDBaby and Magnatune have better profitability than the old dinosaurs of the music industry... but they're not the ones suing people.

Re:seeing the light

[JoGlo]

even so, using the plural "bases" would be appropriate if the quote were more like "these are just opinions with no bases in fact" rather than the case where this was being used ("an opinion that has no bases in fact"). it seems like it's understood that even multiple components of a root for a single item would be referred to as a singular "basis".

I sometimes think that the moderatos don't have sufficient classifications for the work they do. "Pedantic" would probably get a LOT of starters if it were available, as would "Droll", "Boring" and "Provocative", but not necessarily on the same post. Perhaps "Off Topic but Funny" deserves a chance, as well.

Re:seeing the light

[robogun]

If everybody stopped buying CDs, the RIAA would still be in business because of its parasitical derivation or royalties from just about everything you buy and every bar/restaurant/club you go to. This is ASCAP/BMI if you want to look into it further - the same people you legally owe if you sing "Happy Birthday," to someone at a birthday party, a song which was written in 1921 and is copyrighted by Time Warner.

I always wondered if hearing-impaired persons should get a refund of their portion of the fee when buying products at ASCAP-licensed establishments because they were paying for music they were not able to "enjoy."