Of course we believe that stealing copyrighted works is wrong. But we are also been very critical of the RIAA’s tactics. Herein is a case in point–

But then there’s the case of a New York family accused of copyright infringement. The case, defended by Ray Beckerman, an outspoken critic of the RIAA and the publisher of the blog — Recording Industry v. The People — was awaiting a decision for about a year from a federal judge on whether the case should be dismissed.

Beckerman argued that merely making copyrighted music available on peer-to-peer networks was not infringement, an argument bolstered by recent opinions in other jurisdictions — but a viewpoint shared by only a handful of judges. Beckerman’s argument was that if the RIAA can’t prove anybody downloaded the music from an open share folder, then the case would have to be dismissed.

What is most egregious here is that the RIAA withdrew their suit only to refile in another court with a more favorable judge. In withdrawing the suit the presiding judge should have identified ‘with prejudice’. That would have prevented the RIAA from refilling.

Read the whole thing here.

Man, I have been known to pull a few mistakes in my life. But I have never been so bold as to rip somebody off using somebody else’s equipment. That is what T-Mobile is alleging. –

T-Mobile USA sued Starbucks, saying the coffee chain breached a contract by allowing AT&T to supply in-store customers with free wireless Internet access using T-Mobile’s lines and equipment. T-Mobile, which said it agreed to provide Wi-Fi service at Starbucks in 2002, accused the largest American coffee chain of secretly developing a plan to let AT&T provide free Internet service at more than 7,000 Starbucks stores in the United States. T-Mobile said it is bearing the cost and burden of the free Wi-Fi service offer because it provided equipment and technology at thousands of Starbucks stores.

Could be true. Or they could just be ticked that AT&T has the account now. I hope that T-Mobile had a rock solid contract on the prior equipment and service terms. But you do know Dear Reader that the whole litigation is a fools errand. The cost of even ‘professional’ AP’s is only a couple of C notes. Total cost of replacement would be less than a pair legal teams duking it for 6months in court. Sigh…

Linky.

First, on the record, we don’t support phone phreaking. Its a form of theft. That having been said what is related in the Wired article just does not add up.

Why is an indictment issued in Dallas for an arrest that was issued in Amherst, NH? I am no lawyer but my understanding is indictments generally issue in the jurisdiction where the infraction occurred. Anybody know the answer?

“…that Weigman was not supposed to know where he lived, and that Weigman had arrived in the middle of a Sunday.” This is probably the oddest piece of all. I was able to find Smith’s address in less than 5 minutes using the internet and a couple of search engines. Smith’s presumption of privacy on his part is fallacious. As to Weingard’s visit, yes it was ill advised. However I hold no special significance to it occurring on a Sunday.

If I take the balance of the article on its face, Weingard is in deep trouble. The phrekng piece is the least of it. He faces trespass, stalking at a minimum. Its an interesting case to watch. Not that it affects the majority of what we report here.

The real story? A youth with misdirected ambitions. A security offiicial with a trigger finger. The FBI doing what they are required to do. Its a shame to see a talented mind go to waste.

Well Time Warner mght want to hold off on turninig off the UseNet servers. They got a bigger fish to fry. The City of LA just slapped TW with a nice fat law suit for bad service and failure to comply with the contract terms that won them the territory.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office plans to sue Time Warner Cable Inc. today, alleging that the company caused “major havoc and distress” when it became the No. 1 pay TV provider in Southern California two years ago.

City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo said Wednesday that Time Warner violated state law by making false and misleading statements to subscribers. The 25-page lawsuit, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times, claims the company violated its franchise agreement with the city by having subscribers spend hours on hold with customer service representatives and allowing excessive repair work delays.

“Hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles residents were ripped off,” Delgadillo said in a statement. “Time Warner must be held accountable for its promises.”

Which begs the question of the Lede. How is this different than Dallas, Houston, Beaumont, etc? Lack of interest by the powers that be is the only rationale for the difference. But regardless this should be an interesting lawsuit to watch.

Linky.
Legal brief.

Well this is choice. MediaDefender an electronic hired gun for the RIAA and MPAA brought down the site of Revison3 this past weekend. The attack brought down Revision3’s internal website, RSS and mail systems. FBI is now on the case. –

It’s an open debate whether MediaDefender’s actions were lawful, even when it targets illicit torrent-tracking sites pointing the way to unauthorized, copyrighted material. The FBI is examining the Revision3 affair.

One bureau source told Threat Level that it was a “gray” area in federal computer security law.

Then there’s the area of corporate responsibility. Louderback said in an interview that Revision3 closed the hole in its tracker over the Memorial Day weekend and subsequently got slammed by MediaDefender.

“That’s when MediaDefender went into overdrive and started pummeling us,” Louderback said. “If a tracker was previously open and suddenly shut, their systems are automatically configured to put them out of business.”

So what’s wrong with MediaDefender protected the property of their clients? Well to concede a point, yes Revision3 servers were supporting a bitTorrent feed pointing to locations where copies are hosted. But here are MediaDefenders’ problem(s):

• The feed has an IP address. Doesn’t take much to do a quick whois search and call the assigned tech contact for that listing. MediaDefender made no attempt to contact Revision3
• By MediaDefenders approach the attack is indiscriminate and harms others. SYN floods typically end up as a router level attack to firms like Revision3. That is also where the defense occurs as well. As the flood continues the router is brougt to its knees impacting the service of all rather than the single server that is the culprit.
• Such defense attacks impact not just the receiver but the backbone traffic as well. Why should the public be impacted by such actions when the issuer has not even taken the preliminary steps of contacting the hosting company?
• Finally, such actions by MediaDefender are a form of electronic vigilantism. Our legal system does not permit a victim to take the law into their own hands as MediaDefender has done. Which is the core problem here. To allow the actions of MediaDefender to stand is to open a major pandora’s box. Every person with a grudge would posses legal standing to do this to anyone without recourse.

I hope the FBI invokes RICO, and nabs MediaDefender, MPAA and RIAA. Would do them justice.

Linky

There’s a little known (before now) thriving business of attacking open Bittorrent servers the reduce MPAA and the RIAA’s “losses”. While I have no way of being certain, it would seem that the one company in question could be operating automated attack and destroy systems that cannot differentiate between illicit and legitimate trackers. The liability should be huge, and the RIAA and MPAA have already accumulated a huge karma debt.

CEO Jim Louderback revealed today that the outage was caused by a massive denial of service attack that he says was perpetrated by MediaDefender, a file-sharing mitigation firm that gets paid by Big Content to disrupt peer-to-peer networks.

A SYN flood aimed at Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker clogged the company’s tubes and brought down all of its web services. The traffic logs indicated that the network was getting slammed by over 8,000 packets every second. Revision3 tracked the source of the packets and discovered that the attack originated from MediaDefender, at which point Louderback confronted the company’s executives. ArtistDirect CEO Dimitri Villard and MediaDefender vice president Ben Grodsky admitted to Louderback that they had been exploiting the lax security configuration of Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker and using it to conduct decoying operations, but they disavowed knowledge of the denial of service attack and claimed that their servers were only pinging Revision3 once every three hours. (Ars Technica)

In what is a far reaching non-action by The Supreme Court; they have decided to not hear a case steeming from a class action against T-Mobile and AT&T and rendered by the CA SC. –

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dashed a bid by T-Mobile and AT&T to stave off a class-action lawsuit challenging the carriers’ policies against unlocking mobile phones.

The justices declined to review an October decision by the California Supreme Court that cleared the way for a lawsuit that attorneys claimed could represent “millions” of California customers.

In response to similar lawsuits, Verizon and Sprint, both CDMA carriers, have agreed to provide the software code to unlock cellphones after customers nationwide have completed their original contract, attorneys said. “That was the compromise we ended up with to get the cases settled,” said California attorney Robert Bramson, one of the lawyers suing carriers T-Mobile and AT&T.

As a consequence the CA SC ruling in favor of the plaintiffs suit stands unchallenged. So now the carriers in CA must proceed to trial or settle out of court for some agreed terms. My gut says they settle and agree to unlock phones. If they do that opens the door like the Carterphone decison of the 1980s for serious competition in the handset market in Calif. Calif is the biggest handset market of them all. Representing the biggest chunk of revenue for all of them on a State by State basis. The landscape is going to change very quickly I figure.

Trend? Biggest I see is internet handset sellers/resellers in CA offering unlocked handsets around the country. Once that cats out of the bag the carriers are going to have to open up.

Linky.

Previous posts here., here

In a turnabout, the judge in the Thomas-RIAA case is indicating a new trial for the case. His cover is that he erred in procedural instructions to the jury. My gut says the judge is having second thoughts having reviewed other cases and assessment of the ‘distribution’ component of Copyright law. –

The federal judge who oversaw the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit against Jammie Thomas said Thursday he might have erred with one of his instructions to the jury, and is considering granting a new trial.

In response, an RIAA spokeswoman said, “if we have to re-try the case, we will do so without hesitation.”

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis, who presided over the nation’s only file sharing case to go to a jury, noted in a brief order (.pdf) Thursday that, under federal case law, infringing a copyright likely requires actual dissemination of the pirated content, not merely making copyrighted works available.
Thomas_testimony
Jammie Thomas testifying in her civil trial last October, while U.S. District Judge Michael Davis watches from the bench.
Courtroom sketch: Wired News/ Cate Whittemore

In October, Davis instructed jurors that infringement occurs the moment a Kazaa user makes copyrighted music available to others from their share folder — an instruction he now regards as a “manifest error of the law.”

The Duluth, Minnesota, jury found Thomas liable for infringement and awarded the music industry plaintiffs $222,000 for 24 songs.

The so-called “making available” argument is at the center of the legal battle over file sharing. But whether Thomas could ultimately prevail on a retrial is unclear. After three days of testimony, it took jurors only five minutes to conclude that Thomas was liable, and a few more hours to affix a price tag.

One of the cases Judge Davis cited in his order Thursday is also something of a double-edged sword for the defense. In that April decision, Atlantic v. Howell, an Arizona judge said that merely making a copyrighted work available for downloading wasn’t infringement. But the judge also held that the RIAA’s own investigators can effectively turn it into an infringement just by downloading a copy from the share folder involved.

What this shows is that our legal system is not infallible. Judges do make errors and ordinary citizens are the lesser for the loss of justice before notches. Best guess is that this is not a situation that will overturn the original award. The error was procedural not a fact of case law. So the result will probably be the same.

But our legal system should not be a game.

Linky.

Yes folks were talking the Tanya Anderson case. The one where RIAA accused her of downloading files even though she does not have sharing software loaded and their own expert testified that she had not done so. The outcome is that the RIAA must pay $108,000 in legal fees so far. The class action suit, a seperate action, is still pending. But it ain’t looking good for the RIAA right now in regards to Anderson.

An Oregon federal magistrate has awarded nearly $108,000 to a Beaverton single mother who said the recording industry falsely accused her of illegally downloading music.

The money represents Tanya Andersen’s attorney fees and costs in successfully fighting a lawsuit filed by the recording industry against her.

The attorney fee award is separate from a national class action lawsuit Andersen filed against the recording industry last year.

RIAA’s biggest problem is that once they lose one case they will start losing many. The first winning case becomes a template to all further defense actions.

There is a little law that is intended to protect consumers from, shall we say less than equitable practices of merchants and reporting agencies. For the second time now Verizon Wireless has been caught in a suit for failure to correct material misrepresentation on their part.

Verizon Wireless has been hit with another Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit.

The lawsuit, pending in Alabama federal court, asserts the No. 2 wireless service provider and TransUnion L.L.C. are ruining the credit of a wireless subscriber.

Plaintiff Johnny Howard said Verizon Wireless continues to try to collect more than $1,000 that he said he does not owe and to falsely report the disputed debt on his credit reports. Howard, who suspects he is the victim of identity theft, said he followed Verizon Wireless’ instructions to fill out a police report and send a copy to the carrier. A collection agency later received the police report, according to the lawsuit, but the problem was not resolved. The overdue account remained on Howard’s credit reports, prompting him to contact TransUnion L.L.C. and Equifax. Equifax eventually removed the account; TransUnion allegedly did not.

Sounds like TransUnion should be the one in the hot seat right? Well maybe. The game that is played by the system is that a consumer can challenge a entry in their report. But only the merchant can remove the offending material. Which is of course part of the purpose for the suit. An adverse ruling against VW would require them to remove the material entry.

This sort of thing might be a fluke considering it is only the second out of I am sure is thousands of accounts with this problem. That does not discount the possiblity that this is all computer scheduled and VW has no exception process for resolving valid challenges short of a loss in court.

Linky.