Court Says Fair Use May Hold In Some RIAA Cases 145
Posted
by
timothy
from the generosity-knows-no-bounds dept.
from the generosity-knows-no-bounds dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Boston RIAA case in which the defendant, represented by Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School, admitted liability at his trial, the Court has entered judgment in favor of the RIAA for the monetary award of $625,000 fixed by the jury. However, the Court left open the questions of whether the amount is excessive, and whether attorneys fees and/or sanctions should be awarded, and has scheduled further briefing of those issues. The Court granted the RIAA much, but not all, of the injunctive relief it requested. In an unusual step, the Court issued a 38-page decision (PDF) explaining in some detail the Court's views of the Fair Use defense in the context of cases like this, and indicating that there are some factual scenarios — not applicable in this particular case — in which it might have concluded that the claims were barred by Fair Use. E.g. it declined to rule out the possibility that creation of mp3 files exclusively for space-shifting purposes from audio CDs a defendant had previously purchased might constitute fair use."
Sounds like the Court got it right. (Score:1, Informative)
Without reading the order, it sounds like the Court got it right.
I.e. the damages question is a tricky one and excessive damages are to be guarded against, attorney's fees shouldn't be a slam dunk, and Fair Use exists - however downloading whatever you feel like just to list to on your ipod isn't Fair Use.
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:5, Informative)
Courts can bloviate all they wish. You're confusing two legal concepts: The case and controversy requirement, and dicta.
A court requires an actual case with actually adverse parties.* This is the case and controversy requirement.
That said, courts can bloviate all they wish. The fancy legal term is dicta. It is not binding on any court, not even the same Court. Sometimes distinguishing between the real opinon and dicta can be tricky.
However, if the Court's reasoning is strong, other parties will incorporate it into their arguments and it will be adopted by other courts making their own decisions.
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:0, Informative)
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mostly the court said the defense sucked (Score:5, Informative)
Right, of course the key fact that Ars ignores is that the defenses that the court says it would have been receptive to were incompatible with the actual facts of the case.
Re:Victory? (Score:3, Informative)
The judge never said that fair use would be a justifiable defense for the case at hand, but that for some future case it could be a justifiable defense.
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:4, Informative)
1. Precedence can only be set by a court higher than the court you are presently in. Even the same judge can ignore the way he ruled on an identical case. This judge was essentially outlining all the loop holes that the defense could have used but didn't, essentially outlining every way in which the defense's lawyer failed to make a convincing argument and creating a road map for lawyers who deal with a similar case in the future.
2. Amicus curiae is a brief, submitted to an appellate court, which deals with to a specific issue in a case, tailored to the facts of the present case to persuade the court to rule in favor the the amicus curiae's position. The case today is not an amicus curiae because it was not written to the facts of a case presently being decided by a court, it is about a case that happened in the past.
This case is a good road map for defendant's attorneys to learn what not to do.
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:5, Informative)
It may wind up being the RIAA that's going to "need an appeal".
That would be good news indeed, can you expound on that a little?
Liability is a foregone conclusion, since Mr. Tenenbaum formally "admitted liability" at the trial. But damages are not.
If the Court follows traditional copyright law principles, it will hold that there was no evidence in the record from which any statutory damages award beyond $750 per infringed work is permissible, thus limiting the award to a maximum of $18,000 under copyright law.
And if the Court then follows traditional constitutional principles, it will hold that any recovery beyond $1.40 per infringed work (or total of $33.60) is unconstitutional.
If the RIAA obtains a monetary damages award of $33.60 I would expect Mr. Tenenbaum to refrain from appealing, and I would expect the RIAA to be the one to file an appeal.
Re:Mostly the court said the defense sucked (Score:4, Informative)
Mostly the court said the defense sucked and they WOULD have been receptive to such fair use tactics but the defense didn't help them out there
So they're saying that "what is right and wrong" is not the focus of judgement, rather who had the better lawyer?
No, the point highlighted in the above article is that instead of making a case for specific types of fair use that might be applicable, the defendants lawyers tried to argue rather broadly that all downloading was fair use, something that the judge couldn't possibly find in favour of. In essence the judge said that they were open to certain arguments being made, but the defendant never tried to make them and instead opted for a bat-shit crazy defense coupled with irresponsible and outright illegal conduct. It's not hard to see why Tenenbaum wound up getting the judgement that he did.
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:4, Informative)
Statutory damages as an alternative to actual damages makes sense, but is there any legal expectation that the statutory damages will be roughly proportional to the actual damages?
Yes. They are supposed to be reasonably proportioned to the actual damages. Usually that plays out to 2 to 4 times the actual damages.
Re:I didn't know they could do that (Score:5, Informative)