Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Joan Cassin Moves to Dismiss RIAA Complaint in Warner v. Cassin

In a Westchester case, Warner v. Cassin, the defendant has made a motion to dismiss the RIAA's boilerplate complaint.

Defendant's Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Dismiss Complaint*

* Document published online at Internet Law & Regulation

Keywords: digital copyright online law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs

2 comments:

Jadeic said...

As ever, Ray, your submissions to Court are calmly and thoroughly reasoned and should, if there was any justice, be clinically devastating to the plaintiff's case. I especially appreciate "The technologies of the Internet present a challenge ... it is the role of Congress, not the courts, to repair this omission". Much of the RIAA case relies on their distorted view of how they wish that copyright legislation was written. This has allowed them, with what seems to me mystifying success in your courts, to invent meaningless copyright violations and set their own evidential criteria. The sooner someone has the courage to burst this bubble and bring the RIAA crashing back to face the real world the better - where they have to prove real breach of copyright using the correct terminology and the indisputable evidence.

AMD FanBoi said...

In addition, I'd say that the complaint shows no evidence to connect an IP address – which combined with the alleged, possibly inaccurate, time of the event, is the only identifier Plaintiff's have of the "logical" (not physical) location of the alleged infringing computer on the Internet – and the purported owner of the Internet account, to any actual computer, let alone the alleged, but not yet identified or produced, computer involved in the charges made in the suit.

In short, they don't know what computer they actually detected, where this computer is physically located in the real world, or who was using it at the time indicated in the lawsuit. As such, there is no reasonable belief that they are suing the right person, even provided that the information collected and used to identify this Defendant is actually accurate.

You know, with proper software, your laser printer can be hacked to share, or appear to share, files on the Internet. Would be interesting if someone brought in one of those as an example that the device on the other end of in IP connection might not even be a computer in the first place.

You might also point out that they have not provided any proof of ownership of the copyrights to the songs in question. Even if they have these certificates, they should be required to provide them early on in the proceedings to establish their very right to sue in the first place.

There's that damn "continuous" argument once more. Plaintiffs have never proven "continuous" even once. Now another defendant has charged them with outright fraud, maintaining that the computer in question was destroyed in a fire in the previous year to the Plaintiffs maintaining that the alleged infringement was ongoing and continuous. Plaintiffs have presented NO evidence of continuous infringement in any of these filings. Not even once!