Posted on 08/09/2003 9:12:27 AM PDT by PAR35
A Massachusetts court has blocked several recording industry subpoenas that are aimed at college song swappers, saying the universities involved are not immediately required to divulge the alleged file traders' identities.
The decision comes after officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College challenged subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), saying the trade group's requests for information had not been legally filed.
The judge's decisions give the universities--and the anonymous students or staff file traders who are the ultimate target of the subpoenas--some breathing room. The colleges were objecting only on the technical legal grounds that the RIAA had filed the subpoenas in the wrong court, which means the trade group still can revise its requests in order to comply with the judge's order.
[snip]
The RIAA has used a single Washington, D.C., federal court as a clearinghouse to issue all the subpoenas, no matter their destination. MIT and BC's objections were based on that jurisdictional issue. They argued that they were not subject to orders the federal court issued.
In decisions issued late Thursday, the Massachusetts court agreed, saying federal legal rules required valid subpoenas to be issued in the local court.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
Good find, Par35. Yahoo News didn't pick this up until today. MIT and Boston College students should be very happy about this.
This kind of wholesale "attack the public" methodology is probably not what a lot of Congressmen thought they were voting for when they went along with giving private businesses subpoena power under the DMCA. The RIAA may not only be the first, but also the last, private entity to make use of this provision. The RIAA is using this law to spray the cost of its problem onto other people, and they are doing to enough other people that the politics of the situation are likely to turn against them. Certainly they have the right to protect their property, but they do not have the right to compel other people to bear the cost of their enforcement efforts.
One can only hope.
"Certainly they have the right to protect their property, but they do not have the right to compel other people to bear the cost of their enforcement efforts."
Nor do they have the right to invade privacy, no matter their accusations.
Well, actually they do, and that's the problem. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a private business can write and serve its own subpoenas, and these have the force of law. The RIAA has to file copies of ("register") these with a court, but it's a clerical exercise... there is no judge looking at them and assessing whether there is probable cause, or any of that.
My hunch is that Congresscritters were told when this was being debated that these subpoenas would be business-to-business, they would take a load off the courts, and the whole thing would generally stay under the radar. Now they have a nut out there suing kids by the thousands and pissing off companies like Verizon and SBC Communications, plus the colleges and universities. This was not what Congress signed up for. You watch... this provision will quietly disappear from the law Real Soon Now.
One of the RIAA's problems here is that they don't know who these kids' fathers are. IOW, they don't know whose toes they're stepping on. That's probably the only reason the subpoena power is going to eventually be withdrawn.
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