Interesting idea of trying to make or get RIAA to pay the attorney’s fee’s if the RIAA drops the case, after all it can be expensive to defend yourself in any lawsuit. Normally it is up to the courts to decide if attorney’s fee’s should be payed by one side or another.

The cool part is that Cliff Thompson is going all the way to the supreme court to get a decision, and maybe tie down some of the nebulous ideas when it comes to getting your lawyer bill paid for by the people who brought along the lawsuit.

Now Thompson is looking to the highest court in the land to give him its opinion. Which way will it go? Well, if convention is any barometer, chances are Thompson will get snubbed again. It’s not customary for the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn decisions made more than once in the past. Though a number in the court’s ranks are known to toss out a surprise on occasion, they’re not too keen on going in reverse. Source: Mashable

The “Sue your Fans” process has not gone down well, and many people have tried to get RIAA to stop, like Tanya Andersen who is going after them for racketeering in Oregon. More over with P2P and Bittorent continuing to set new records of use and membership, the loosing battle is one of trying to contain piracy.

Sometimes, especially if you have tried all legal ways of getting something, and all you want is a song, it is very difficult when outlets like Itunes and Unbox do not carry what people are wanting to get from the back catalog.

Realistically, the only real viable option to taking on piracy is to be compelling, have everything in back catalog that someone will want. People will go to great lengths to find a song from 20 years ago, if it is in Itunes or Unbox, odds are highly likely that they will be purchased. People will generally try to do the right thing until they get frustrated that the right thing means getting nothing. This is the compelling reason that piracy is happening.

That and people generally like to share things with people they know, we trade CD’s, before that Albums and Mix tapes. We record TV shows to share with people who might have missed it. That is something that we have been doing for decades.

RIAA should be forced to pay for lawyers fee’s when they drop the case, that is just the right thing to do, given that doing the right thing is not always the smart thing to do. Taking the idea to the supreme court however offers some intriguing ideas, in that frivolous lawsuits can be dismissed, and the victim should not be automatically forced to pay for their own attorney. This is at least somewhat accommodating when defending yourself against someone who is bringing a lawsuit then dismissing it. Again this is the right thing to do, RIAA should be paying for their mistakes.

Other reporting on this can be found at Wired and at

Keywords: riaa, mpaa, ifpi, Cliff Thompson, Tanya Andersen, lawsuit, supreme court, jurisdiction, enough already