Heard of “one man, one vote?” Meet “one file swapper, one lawsuit.” That’s the order from a federal judge March 5, after he authorized a single suit in a music industry action against 203 “John Doe” defendants, but ordered the Recording Industry Association of America to file separate, individual actions against the remaining 202.
P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau hailed the ruling from Judge Clarence Newcomer as underscoring the idea that anyone who is to face any significant penalty under any kind of law is entitled to the full process of the law. Newcomer accepted the single filing, because in this instance, the RIAA offered a detailed case against the individual in question, according to one published report.
“The Recording Industry Association benefited initially form a draconian statute, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was criticized prior to its adoption for dramatically tilting the so-called copyright bargain in the favor of the significant corporate entertainment interests and against the users of information of all kinds,” Eisgrau told AVNOnline.com.
An earlier federal court ruling banned the RIAA from using the DMCA for its subpoenas, prompting the RIAA to take the John Doe course.
Eisgrau also said the ruling “ought to point” policymakers toward re-evaluating the DMCA, but without a “significant public outcry, it is unlikely that the political power and sophistication of the entertainment industry lobbying groups can be overcome.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the Pennsylvania case, also praised the Newcomer ruling. “We’re glad the judge has recognized that the RIAA was trying to skirt around the regular rules for lawsuits by grouping over 200 individuals as a gang of file sharers,” EFF attorney Jason Schultz said in a statement. “We think each individual who is being sued has a right to have their own trial, and have their own privacy interests evaluated independently of anyone else who’s being sued.”
To Eisgrau, the ruling also reinforces the presumption of innocence, a presumption critics of the RIAA’s subpoena-and-sue strategy against peer-to-peer file swapping sometimes accuse the music industry trade group of neglecting or ignoring.
“To my knowledge, no court has yet actively considered in a detailed fashion whether some degree of the kind of downloading activity the RIAA has aggressively sued over falls within the established legal boundaries for what’s considered unauthorized, but still legal, use of copyrighted information,” Eisgrau said.
“In addition, clearly, courts in a broad sense have not determined whether there is or ought to be a difference in the way the law treats requesting a file from someone else, as compared to just making a file available for someone else’s use,” he continued. “It connects to this idea of the presumption of innocence because, were the RIAA permitted to make blanket allegations against hundreds of people, the court hearing that case necessarily would not be making fine distinctions between those cases.”
The RIAA has said only that they are “weighing their options” following the Newcomer ruling, as a spokeswoman told Wired after the ruling came down. The group has offered no other comment on the ruling at this writing.
Eisgrau said his group’s hope in the long term is to get the P2P issue out of the courts and into the halls of Congress and across informal bargaining tables, the latter option the music industry, he said, has so far refused at every invitation by their silence.
“Our longstanding position on the RIAA suits... is that at any given stage of this issue working its way through the courts, the RIAA may have been acting within its legal rights; but it was, nonetheless, wrong as a social matter, and as a matter of what policy ought to be,” he said. “When your primary marketing message is understood to be ‘sue you,’ there’s something seriously wrong with your business model and your view of the public policy process... It’s time to stop the suing and start the talking.”
