p2p news / p2pnet: Where EMI Group, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and Sony BMG, the members of Organized Music, are concerned, it’s one ‘legal’ outrage after another.

Recently, Robert W. Sweet, an 82-year-old Manhattan judge, rejected an appeal against an RIAA demand for the identity of a Jane Doe. His ruling came after OM lawyers told him "continuing infringement" from the date of the cartel complaint was justification enough.

Sweet didn’t provide a formal, written document on his decision. Instead, he scribbled it in the margins of the defense team’s court docoment.

Jane Doe’s lawyers appealed and yesterday, “The subpoena issued to ISP Cablevision, in RIAA peer to peer file sharing case Loud v. Does 1-74, has been temporarily stayed by a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit,” says a post on Recording Industry vs The People.

“The stay is in effect until a 3-judge panel of that Court has had an opportunity to consider "Jane Doe"’s motion for a stay pending the hearing and determination of her appeal from the order of District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet denying her motion to quash subpoena.”

Ray Beckerman, who’s representing RIAA victims, says it boils down to the fact that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) brought a case against 74 anonymous people who don’t even know they’d been sued.

“It then served a subpoena on Cablevision asking it to turn over the names and addresses of those 74 people, all of whom are presumably Cablevision subscribers who at one time used Cablevision as their ISP,” he told p2pnet.

“One Jane Doe’ made a motion to quash the subpoena, asking the Court not to let Cablevision give out her personal information. The grounds for her motion were that the RIAA has no copyright infringement case against her.

“The judge denied her motion and ruled that the subpoena could be enforced.”

But, says Beckerman, it’s impossible to tell from the judge’s ruling why came to that conclusion, since he didn’t mention the arguments made by either side.”

But he did say his ruling wouldn’t take effect until after 10 business days so Jane Doe would have a chance to file an appeal, which she did.

“Since appeals take months to pursue and process, she asked the Appeals Court to ’stay’ the subpoena, ie, prevent Cablevision from responding to it, until after the Court has had a chance to review and decide the whole appeal,” explains Beckerman.

“What happened yesterday is that a single judge of the Appeals Court issued an interim ’stay’ of the subpoena until the three-judge panel has a chance to review and decided the motion.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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