Marie Lindor vs the RIAA
p2pnet.net News:- Marie Lindor, the Brooklyn mother and home health aide who’s never in her life used a computer and whom the Big Four Organized Music gang tried to gag, is again demanding that an RIAA suit claiming she distributed music online be dismissed.
The Big Four, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal, accused of price fixing and bribery in the US, claim every one of their hundreds of millions of customers, including children, is a potential “criminal” and “thief” bent on robbing the labels of what’s rightfully theirs.
A file shared online equals a sale lost, and that’s exactly the same as someone walking into a store and stealing a CD, state the Big Four through their RIAA.
The claims are patently ridiculous, but that’s what the labels say, and that’s what the mainstream media faithfully report.
Even the name, RIAA, is wrong. It’s short for Recording Industry Association of America. But only one label, Warner, is American. The other three are from France (Vivendi), Japan and Germany (Sony and BMG) and Britain (EMI).
Meanwhile, on February 2, Lindor asked for a summary judgment pre-motion conference and since then she’s, “answered the RIAA’s written discovery requests (interroagtories, document requests, and requests for admissions), attended her deposition, made the computer in her apartment available to the RIAA for a ‘mirror imaging’ exam, and made her son and daughter available – without need of a subpoena – to testify at their depositions,” says her lawyer, Ray Beckerman, posting on Recording Industry vs The People.
He goes on:
With all the discovery they’ve taken, plaintiffs are no closer to making any kind of case against Ms. Lindor than when they started this action. There is simply no evidence that she did anything that would subject her to any form of liability. Ms. Lindor has never even used, or even turned on, a computer, in her life. Plaintiffs are content to let the case go on indefinitely, to use it as a convenient platform for a never ending fishing expedition against potential third parties, but it would be unfair in the extreme to the defendant to allow this to continue, as it was unfair for plaintiffs to go this far.
Plaintiffs should have conducted an appropriate investigation prior to commencing suit, and should conduct whatever further investigation they wish on their own time, but defendant should not have to support plaintiffs’ investigation, when it has nothing to do with her. It is an abuse of the federal judicial system to allow a lawsuit against an individual who is clearly not the copyright infringer to be used as a convenient vehicle for investigating to find out who, if anyone, did violate plaintiffs’ copyrights.
No doubt plaintiffs will respond to this letter with a voluminous, albeit frivolous, letter of their own, representing to the Court that they have many good ideas for pursuing further leads against other possible individuals, one of whom who may have infringed some of plaintiffs’ copyrights.
But they will have nothing pointing to the defendant. There is simply no basis in the law to permit a lawsuit to be maintained against an innocent individual in order to give the plaintiffs a convenient platform for investigating to find some other individual who might be liable.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
tried to gag – RIAA deposition blackout, August 10, 2006
Recording Industry vs The People – Marie Lindor Renews Motion for Summary Judgment, August 30, 2006
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