The RIAA is no stranger to outlandish legal arguments in P2P copyright infringement cases. This isn’t particularly surprising given that they’ve very successfully avoided arguing most of them in court, preferring instead to use the obstacle of expensive litigation to frighten defendants into settling. But sometimes a judge gets the chanceto shine a light on their creative readings of thelaw. In one such case a federal judge has denied the RIAA’s claim for damages on the grounds that they must first prove their losses.
It seems like an obvious enough point. For example, it’s a long established tenet of contract law that you can’t sue for losses over a deal you might have made with someone. And if someone steals physical merchandise you can’t get restitution from a list of what you think was probably stolen. But music, movie, and software conglomerates have always characterized every free download of a copyrighted work as a lost sale.
In a decision related to the criminal copyright case against Daniel Dove, Chief United States District Judge James P Jones noted “The downloaders in this case could have purchased songs over the Internet, rented movies, borrowed DVDs from the local library, or purchased CDs or DVDs at the full purchase price. But the victims have not made any attempt to assess how many Elite Torrents downloaders would have used these various alternatives or no alternative at
all.”
He was referring to requests from both the RIAA and movie studio Lionsgate Entertainment in which each asked for restitution based on some interesting calculations. Judge Jones agreed that the RIAA “provides proof that 183 sound recording albums were transferred through Dove’s server a combined total of 17,281 times” but questioned the claim that “member companies suffered economic loss in the amount of $124,768.82.” Among other problems he pointed out “RIAA only proves that the first 20 albums are held by record labels that are RIAA members; there is no such proof as to the remaining 163 albums.”
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Result for: elite torrents
According to a Department of Justice press statement, Daniel Dove, administrator for the defunct EliteTorrents torrent tracker has been found guilty by a jury of his peers and now faces 10 years in jail for criminal copyright infringement.
To give a quick refresher on the situation, EliteTorrents, for at least a 3 year period ended 2005, was the most popular public torrent tracker in the US and was the site responsible for the pre-release of the workprint version of “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” before its theatrical release. It was all downhill from there for the site and its 3 administrators. The MPAA, FBI, local police and US Customs all came together as part of Operation D-Elite and forced the site off line while arresting the administrators. Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley, the other administrators, pleaded guilty to their crimes and were sentenced to 5 months of prison.
“The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as “Uploaders,” who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group,” the Department of Justice press release states. “The evidence showed that Dove recruited members who had very high-speed Internet connections, usually at least 50 times faster than a typical high-speed residential Internet connection, to become Uploaders. The evidence also showed that Dove operated a high-speed server, which he used to distribute pirated content to the Uploaders.”
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