Judge to take a ‘fresh look’ at RIAA case
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Once upon a time, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA could pass just about anything it wanted through the US civil court system with barely a murmur from judges hearing the cases.
But those days are long gone. Now, the courts are dropping the tendency to accept RIAA ‘evidence’ at face value, instead demanding proof.
In the latest setback for the RIAA, “In the Western District of North Carolina, in Elektra v. Does, the Raleigh, North Carolina, case targeting NC State students, District Judge Louise W. Flanagan has issued a ruling indicating that she is going to take a ‘fresh look’ at the RIAA’s John Doe cases, and has stayed the subpoena which the RIAA served upon the university,” says Recording Industry vs The People, going on >>>
The ruling came in response to two John Does’ motions to dismiss the complaint, strike the Carlos Linares declaration, and quash the subpoena.
Judge Flanagan held as follows:
Plaintiffs have filed nearly identical complaints against this defendant, and others named as defendants in the prior pending action, and many of these actions have been assigned now to me. In this case, and one other, bearing court file number 5:08-CY-116, defendant has moved to dismiss, to strike plaintiffs’ affidavit,to quash subpoena,and to stay enforcement of the subpoena addressed to North Carolina State University.
In furtherance of dismissal, defendant in court file number 5:08-CY-115 seeks the court where plaintiffs’ agent is asserted to have engaged in criminal activity, to strike “the second-hand [Carlos] Linares Declaration and Plaintiffs Exhibit 1 that it supports,” and, where “[t]he remaining bare allegations are not enough to survive the Twombley standard,” to dismiss the action. Similar argument is offered in court file number 5:08-CY-116. Urging First Amendment anonymity interests, defendant in each case seeks for the court to quash the subpoena at issue. In the interim, prior to decision on the motions, defendant in each case seeks the court to relieve North Carolina State University of any responsibility to respond to the subpoena.
In all cases before this court, the undersigned has allowed plaintiffs’ expedited motion for discovery. Several of the cases assigned to me, all originating out of the prior pending action, recently have been closed upon voluntary dismissal.
For good cause shown, the motion to stay enforcement of subpoena addressed to North Carolina State University, served upon David Drooz, Associate General Counsel, is ALLOWED pending decision on remaining motions.
While motion to dismiss was raised on behalf of defendants denominated as Does #1,#18, #19, #26, #31, #33, #35, and #38, and denied, it is unclear whether defendant in either court file number 5:08-CY-115 or court file number 5:08-CY-116, were among those Does in the prior action, and, moreover, the basis for dismissal pursuant to Rule 12 is argued in these cases on grounds not fully raised in court file number 5:07-CY-298. Accordingly, a fresh look at the arguments in support of and in opposition to the motion to dismiss before the court,and attendant motionto strike, is called for. The court refers pretrial motions pending in this case to Magistrate Judge James E. Gates, for decision on the motion to quash and for memorandum and recommendation on the motion to dismiss and attendant motion to strike.
Stay tuned.
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.Stumble It!
Recording Industry vs The People – North Carolina court to take a “fresh look” at the NC State “John Doe” cases, July 4, 2008
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July 4th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Ok, so it’s all a bit legalese and I didn’t get all of it, but the main point of this is… that the RIAA are fucked, right?
AWESOME!
July 4th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
The days of hollering that one’s guilty without proof is coming to an end. Enough hanky panky has been shown in the past along with legal shinnagins that would not be allowed in any other court, to make the cases of infringement to look like pure abuse on the part of the RIAA. When they win they want paid now. When they lose, they wanna drag their feet, raise every objection they can, including some I am sure they know before they raise them that won’t float, and to put every road block in the way to drag it out, at the cost of the courts time as well as the victims.
Dropping cases when it looks like it is going bad for them, trying to stick the accused with the bill which would never have been a bill had not the RIAA and gang had the sense to even look at evidence beyond what they want to see; the whole thing as left a distaste in both the courts of the land as well as the public eye. This was one reason why they quit crowing about sue’em alls in national news and went to local news to do it. Less bad publicity from the national eye and less black eyes on the PR front.
This will continue till the legal system gets a sense of just how bad this group of thugs is taking advantage of statutory penalties, never designed for the non profit trading of material but rather for those selling for profit their works. I congratulate the major labels in turning the public away from their products and towards gaming and indies which are showing profits couldn’t be better and with a public that looks at them with the thought of it being a better value for the buck than the majors with all their conditions, what buyers can and can not do with the product they bought and the high cost of that product compared to other items not of major label control.
They are doing what no one else can do for them. Alienating an entire generation of future potential customers, ensuring they won’t have a future with the public.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
This means, in effect, that we have a judge that is very aware of the actions of the RIAA. The RIAA files for expedited discovery, realize they do not have cause, and then voluntarily dismiss their case. All the while, it causes much distress to those that are guilty as well as those that have nothing to do with the actions implied. I think this judge is one of the first to show an understanding of how the RIAA has subverted the legal system to their own end. Like tossing a stick of dynomite into a pond to see if there are any fish to go fishing, the RIAA cares not about the destruction caused by their actions.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Go figure, I came to this site one more time, trying to get a chance to read articles that are no longer possible to do because of the time lag involved with opening and posting pages.
Opening page time to front page…less than 6 seconds
Opening time to article………..more than 5 minutes
posting time for responce………no time can be counted, too fast
Opening other sites….no time can be counted in opening time, too fast.
I made the above reply, intending to once again show how slow the opening speeds have become since The Planet incident. As you can see, the opening time to this article exceeded 5 minutes while I surfed other sites where no troubles exist with lag and delay. I miss this site but the usual of an opening time of 5 minutes per page and usually a responce time of longer when posting an article eats so much time, that I’ve begun to seek the sources of the articles and info myself and come out with a times savings over viewing it here that this site. That’s a shame as I have been here quite a while and have grown to really like the site. But the delay times are just too much when you consider there might be 20 articles on the front page.
Normally, almost no article goes by without me looking at it and reading it. Now almost no articles are read because of the lengthy delay in getting to see the material.
July 4th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
opening page .. less than 3 seconds.
Opening article .. about 1 second.
I don’t know what your problem is, but it is not the site.
( this is a 1ghz machine with 512 mb of ram running winxp ).
buh byee
July 4th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“Normally, almost no article goes by without me looking at it and reading it. Now almost no articles are read because of the lengthy delay in getting to see the material.”
I’m sorry about that. I have no idea why it’s happening but for a while, quite a few weeks back, delays were affecting me too.
Bob (who does the tech work) couldn’t find anything wrong with the site, and suddenly, things returned to normal and have been OK ever since.
Cheers!
July 4th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Try using an RSS feed. Come here only when you want to read comments/post your own.
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Jon: Cheers with the website, but the legalese confuses me in the quote. Legalese doesn’t usually confuse me, so please explain more in detail next time a document similar to this comes up.
July 4th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
As a matter of fact, I also had a delay in opening the article on this web page. However, I also suspect that what is causing this is not due to my machine on a local level or the remote endpoints. If I open the page and it stalls, rather than let it time out and resend the packets required to open the article, I merely click on the “Stop” icon to freeze the current processes and then hit “reload” and the page immediately downloads. Why this happens? I don’t have the understand the code sent back and forth, but the handshake between both ends is being interupted somewhere in the middle on first attempt. It is annoying at times, however the content I read here is worth putting up with that interference/interception. As a matter of fact, the reaction of my peers to these articles is at times of more importance than the article iteself. I get a sinking feeling as I watch the corrupt manipulate what is left of our legal system decimating what is left of our rights.
July 4th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
probably they are fucking the loading thingy since there are so many in my no script /adblock page overview
suspect “quantserve” and or “intellitext”
those are forbidden “no scripters” here and for me the page loads flawlessly even over thousand seamiles away from the serverlocation (germany)!
July 4th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I use NoScript as well, and have never had any problem with slow loading of pages. Which is a good thing, because I am here most days to read that day’s news.
July 4th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
No Script is good, but I migrated to PreBar. Just wish I could block those annoying “surveys”
July 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am
looks like the beginning of the end of the RIAAs rubbish cases…
July 5th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Havvy gave good info and I can again see articles through the RSS feeds. I used No Script long before troubles began without issue. In fact for several years as I am a long time reader of this site. I followed Jon here from his previous site, as it didn’t quite seem to fit me. The other site was for indie artists more than for p2p type stuff.
I have often from time to time been quoted at both sites so evidently something I have to say strikes a responding chord somewhere along the line.
Thank you Havvy for the clue to once again see articles here.
July 7th, 2008 at 3:23 am
OldPhart:
If you ping the site, does it take long to look up the DNS, or is the ping
July 7th, 2008 at 3:25 am
OldPhart:
If you ping the site, does it take long to look up the DNS, or is the ping less than 250ms starting immediately? If there’s a wait before your first ping returns, then they all come in quick, it’s probably a DNS issue… in which case you should take a look at http://www.opendns.com – which might be a good idea anyway. I know that some ISPs (e.g., Bell Canada) do what appear to be DNS filtering, a friend of mine in Montreal couldn’t open her own web page with the default DNS setup, while I had no problem from Norway. She added one of the OpenDNS servers to her DNS lookup entries and the site showed up at once.
(repost – LessThan sign interpreted as HTML code..)