The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. What Goes Upload Must Come Download

Here at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab, we're all in favor of blind justice. The problem comes when blind journalism follows close behind.

Yep, that's what we decided this week after close examination of a story that dominated the business press late last month. We're talking about the legal battle between Verizon (VZ Quote) and the music industry trade group known as the Recording Industry Association of America.

At issue, you may remember, is a subpoena that the RIAA sent to Verizon last year as part of the record industry's battle against illegal sharing of copyrighted music. Citing the authority of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the RIAA asked the phone company for information that would identify a certain customer that the RIAA alleged participated in the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network. Verizon, arguing that the RIAA was misinterpreting the music copyright act, refused. That's when the lawyers got busy.

The RIAA vs. Verizon case, by all accounts, is a crucial legal clash as far as Internet cases go. It pits privacy rights on a collision course with the protection of intellectual property rights in the digital age. It's seen as a key courtroom battle in the music industry's attempt to smash online piracy -- a case that may have as much impact as the one that knocked Napster on its rear.

So you'd expect that in a high-profile case like this -- one that conceivably will end up on the doorstep of the Supreme Court -- the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, would make sure he got the basic facts of the case straight.

You'd be wrong.

Yes, when Judge Bates issued a ruling in favor of the RIAA on Jan. 21, here's how he described a key action on the day last summer when the RIAA served its subpoena on Verizon: "Along with the subpoena," wrote Bates on page 6 of his opinion, "RIAA provided Verizon with a list of more than 600 files (predominantly individual songs, most by well-known artists) allegedly downloaded by the user in one day."