p2pnet.net special:- Normally, every weekday, I get up at between 3:30 and 4:00 am. Saturday, I usually have a bit of a lay-in, and then do a few stories, but not as many as during the week. Sunday, I sleep until around 7:00 am and sometimes, I don’t post at all. Today, though, I’m only going to do one post. Because I was still awake at 3:00 am with Michelle Santangelo (right) on my mind. And her mother, Patti, and brother, Bobby (right).

The Big Four Organized Music cartel, Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), accuse them of being “criminals” and “thieves”. But they’re not. The crooks are the Big Four themselves.

Bobby was 12 and Michelle, 16, when, as alleged “massive” online distributors of copyrighted music, they were supposed to have caused the Big Four so much grief. Briana LaHara , too, 12. She was one of the first Big Four child victims. But today there are plenty of other Brianas and Michelles around the world.

“It is not our intention to target children,” Peter Jamieson declared disingenuously. “But [we will] if they are breaking the law on a very large scale.”

Children? Breaking the law on a large scale? And to the extent a vast, international, multi-billion-dollar industry, is “forced” to go after them, one by one?

Jamieson works for the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), one of the many alphabet shills owned by the Big Four, and running from different countries around the world under the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), an umbrella outfit, with the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) as the only ‘associate’ member.

But although the Big Four want primarily to get at the consumers of the future, your children, they’re not forgetting you, their parents.

You are, after all, the means by which they get to your kids.

Judges who don’t know a computer from a banana

In this the 21st century, the law and justice have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Money talks, but contrary to the oft-quoted proverb, bullshit doesn’t walk. In fact it’s alive and doing very well in courts around the world, to the satisfaction and benefit of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG.

Because these day, Justice isn’t only blind, she’s deaf and dumb as well. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Lawyers versus lawyers, heard by lawyers. No one but lawyers can understand the arcane laws originally created to protect us, but which have become self-perpetuating laws unto themselves. They enslave us. They drive us into penury on behalf of the unbelievably wealthy corporations which use them to control us, the people who made them so very rich in the first place, and who keep them that way.

File sharing isn’t criminal, notwithstanding the costly and deplorably successful PR efforts by the cartel’s RIAA to use the mass print and electronic media to elevate it to that level. It’s a civil matter. And what’s at issue isn’t if someone’s broken a law, it’s whether or not he or she has breached a copyright, a simple commercial infringement and a very long way from “criminal” or “illegal”.

RaeJ (Ray-Jay) Schwartz is a New York mother who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis, a terrible, debilitating disease made worse by undue stress.

According to the RIAA, she’s been robbing its masters blind by sharing music online. So she’s become another of the 20,000 or so American RIAA victims hauled into US courts, often before judges in their dotage who can’t tell a computer from a banana and who, it seems, rely wholly on RIAA lawyers to enlighten them. The RIAA, of course, fully exploits the judges’ ignorance to spin insubstantial and vaporous evidence to suit the people who pay them, the Big Four labels..

Jonathan Whitehead is a man held up by the RIAA as an investigator. But, “It’s obvious that Mr. Whitehead doesn’t know Kazaa from a kazoo … or he’s simply pretending he doesn’t,” says systems expert Zi Mei. “The RIAA’s ‘investigative’ techniques are sloppy and harmful, to say the least.”

RaeJ, says the RIAA, signed up with the AOL and through it, illegally distributed and downloaded copyrighted songs. She insists she’s never had such an account. “Lies!“ - shouted the RIAA, claiming they had the paperwork to prove it.

When push came to shove, however, it had nothing of the sort. On Recording Industry vs The People, her lawyer, Ray Beckerman, says he got a copy of the “proof,” but it contained no reference to “downloading” or “distributing” copyrighted songs. But the damage had been done. The faithful mainstream media had reported it.

Warner, et al, were not, however, really after RaeJ. They want her daughter.

Nor were they truly targetting Marie Lindor, the home health aide who can barely turn a computer on. They were after her son, Woody. And Michelle’s mother, Patti, was never the Big Four’s real target. They had their eyes on Michelle and Bobby, with Patti’s other three kids, Nicole, Ryan and Jack in the background. And by the same token when, a while back, the labels zeroed in on Candy Chan, they didn’t want her. They wanted her young daughter, Brittany.

Who’ll it be tomorrow?

You and your kids?

Terror and extortion

I call Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG ‘Organized Music’ because to me, there’s litttle or no difference between them and Organized Crime.

For a criminal organization to prosper, “some degree of support is required from the society in which it lives,” says the Wikipedia. “Thus, it is often necessary to corrupt some of its respected members, most commonly achieved through bribery, blackmail, and the establishment of symbiotic relationships with legitimate businesses. Judicial and police officers and legislators are especially targeted for control by organized crime via bribes, threats, or a combination.”

But maybe there is difference. Organized Crime doesn’t pretend to be honest.

OC and OM are both pyramid organizations answering only to themselves. The tiny group of people who run them use lies, misinformation and, distortion as normal business tools.

They both use sex and drugs as motivational aids. Both buy politicians to corrupt the systems meant to protect the tax-paying citizens who fund them. They both use terror, blackmail and extortion to get what they want. And if you think these words are mis-used in this context, just ask any one of their thousands of victims what it’s like to have the RIAA, or any of the other **AA ‘trade’ organizations, on your back.

The principal of Innocent until proven Guilty is mocked by the Big Four which, with the active and enthusiastic assistance of the mainstream media, regularly and routinely hold people of all ages up as criminals who have been tried and convicted of the heinous crime of sharing with each other online.

But these people have never been to court. They’re ordinary men and women and they can’t even begin to find the financial and legal resources with which take the RIAA lawyers on. So they agree to RIAA extortion, settling out of court.

And while all of this happens the true criminals, the counterfeiters and duplicators who use the readily and universally available physical software, music and movie CDs and DVDs as masters with which they make and sell their own ‘product’ underground, count their profits, virtually unscathed as they run rings around the cartels.

RICO = Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization

With the comparison to Organized Crime still in mind, Organized Music is currently being sued under America’s famous RICO act, introduced to help law enforcers tackle the Mafia and other major crime gangs. Suing them are Tanya Andersen, an Oregon mother who’s on a disability pension, and Thomas J. Korb.from Illinoise.

It’s also worth remembering that the labels have themselves been deeply investigated at state and federal levels in the US for bribery and price fixing.

The were nailed by New York attorney Eliot Spitzer, eventually reaching “setttlements” without having to actually admit they did anything wrong.

For ‘bribe’ read, ‘the practice of offering something (usually money) in order to gain an illicit advantage’. And for ‘illicit,’ read illegitimate or prohibited. And on top of that, the labels have been repeatedly caught trying to dodge paying royalties to their contracted artists.

If you or I were found guilty of anything even remotely like what the labels routinely get away with, we’d be thrown into jail and fined until we were cross-eyed.

PLAYS (Performance Log Archive of Your Songs) said “thousands of artists” were “united” in receiving “a fair price for the licensing of their music in a new digital world” and that members include small, medium and large independent record companies, as well as the major label groups and artist-owned labels.

PLAYS used to be SoundExchange, once a Big Four Organized Music royalty collection and distribution agency, run under the auspices of their RIAA. But not only weren’t thousands of artists not receiving a fair price, they weren’t receiving anything at all.

“The Internet is an endless smorgasbord,” said Nashville entertainment attorney Fred Wilhelms . “And the RIAA ignored the party until it was too late. And because the smorgasbord was already up and running, they graciously ‘volunteered,’ through SoundExchange, to be the guys sitting at the front door, selling tickets. They also sit at the back door, selling tickets in the form of license fees to the people bringing the musical food in.

“Quite a racket, and completely legal.”

“I’ve been screwed from the beginning,” Canadian singing star and musician Joni Mitchell said. “The deal that I got was just atrocious. I mean, it was like slave labor, really - no points, no budget. And I’ve never really had a good deal in the business.”

She also said, “Now, this is all calculated music. It’s calculated for sales, it’s sonically calculated, it’s rudely calculated. I’m ashamed to be a part of the music business. You know, I just think it’s a cesspool.”

Then there are the cases of old-time stars being forgotten.

Fair and balanced reporting

You’d think by now, the ongoing scandal would have made international headlines and resulted in numerous court cases, with the labels in the criminal box.

Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG sued under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act? Going after kids? Not paying their own contracted artists? Bribing DJs for air-plays? Fixing prices to eliminate competition and dominate world markets?

But forget the idea of fair and balanced reporting, of an impartial press corps. There are splashes, every now and then, but nothing substantial, and nothing consistent.

Individual reporters and editors would no doubt like to run the real, unspun news, but at the end of the day, they do what they’re told. Or they walk. Ultimately, the entertainment cartels are in charge. They own and/or directly or indirectly, through arm’s length holdings and advertising dollars, control most of what we see and hear in the corporate outlets.

There was scant mainstream coverage of the RICO cases, but thanks to the international print and electronic media, the RIAA were able to humiliate and embarrass the Santangelos not just locally, but around the world.

“Having made New York mother Patti Santangelo’s life quite literally a living hell, Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal have now turned their attentions to two of her children, Michelle and Robert, going so far as to blackmail Robert’s best friend into making statements against him,” I wrote.

The story was a follow up to an earlier post centering on an Associated Press wire article which ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post, to name but two major newspapers. It was also everywhere online: US Today, CBS and Fox news, The San Francisco Chronicle, BusinessWeek, and so on.

AP quoted a supposed RIAA court filing, “supposed” because the document in question wasn’t actually submitted until many weeks after the stories ran globally.

Which is nothing new.

Back in 2003, for example, when I spoke to Lorraine Sullivan, one of the first RIAA victims, “I heard about the summons from a reporter and it wasn’t until a week later than I actually got it,” she said. And any number of other people have learned they were being targeted only because a newspaper wanted a reaction for a story.

Warner Music Group chairman Edgar Bronfman, jr, admits his own seven children, “stole music“. But will they be sued? Will they hell. And did the revelation make shock-horror headlines around the world? Did it hell.

The mainstream media are buzzing about the Gower report which says UK copyrights shouldn’t be extended, to the disgust of old-time corporate rockers who are now extremely rich, billionaires, some of them, because you paid to see their shows and bought their music.

Songwriter’s war? What war? This isn’t about them. It’s about us. The people who put money in the song-writer’s pockets.

But all that’s changing, thanks to the Net.

So-called file sharing criminals

I’m just one old guy (65, almost) living in a tiny town on Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia in Canada.

I don’t have much in the way of money. But I don’t need much. My wife, Liz, and I home school our 10-year-old daughter, Emma. We hardly ever watch TV, we go to the movies once in a blue moon, and even then, because we’re not in a big city, it’s the $5 matinees where the staff still keep the floors clean and people with Big Mouths get kicked out.

We love music (it’s what got me online in the first place) and have a large collection of vinyl records and a fair number of CDs. And I have a bunch of mp3s, mostly jazz, blues and pre-80s rock.

p2pnet isn’t a business. It’s not entrepreneurial. It’s a web page which allows me to be a reporter, a trade I’ve worked at for almost all of my adult life, and to talk directly to you without editors and vested interest advertisers getting between us. And you, in turn, can talk to me by email, or you can also use comment posts.Nor is my interest academic. I know first-hand what it’s like to be a party in a terrifying lawsuit with a multi-millon-dollar company on the other end.

Ironically, I’m being sued for alleged libel by Nikki Hemming, Sharman Networks and Kazaa boss. Owned by Australia’s Sharman Networks, Kazaa is the same p2p application application used by Briana and thousands of other so-called file sharing criminals. I don’t have any money either and I’d be on a limb by myself were it not for Dan Burnett, who’s representing me pro bono.

Click here if you want to know more about my case.

Meanwhile, the wheel is turning and Kazaa itself is now being sued in a case launched by a former user.

Keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit

For the fist time in history, we all talk to each other. Around the world.

Information, not money, is the only real currency and today, in the 21st digital century, we can tap it and share it, a privilege once confined solely to the Powers That Used To Be.

And that’s the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to the labels and all the other corporate entities who have hitherto been able to treat us like mushrooms, keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit.

We don’t need them. But they need us. In fact, they literally can’t survive without us and for the first time, they’re experiencing the sheer horror of having to face informed consumers who can pass what they know on to others. And the labels aren’t doing so well in another respect, either.

Also for the first time, they’re facing competition in the form excellent musicians and performers, amateur and pro, who showcase themselves online.

A critical mass is on the verge of being reached and when it gells, the wheel will have come full circle with the labels where they should be, wooing you instead of suing you. Because the RIAA,and all the the Big Four RIAA clones around the world, have achieved one important victory. For us.

They’ve created a brand new consumer class, and one which won’t go anywhere near Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG or any of the 1,637 so-called RIAA member companies.

And why would they need to with the excellent free and independent online musicians to choose from?

I’ve focused mainly on US cases, but this isn’t a localized problem. The American RIAA sue ‘em all travesty is merely one element of a carefully orchestrated, carefully controlled word-wide conspiracy to subjugate ‘consumers’ everywhere —- to bring them to heel.

Under the aegis of their IFPI, the Big Four are using their so-called ‘trade associations’ to sue people in every part of the world.

In Canada, it’s the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), in Australia, the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association), in Hong Kong, the IFPI (Hong Kong Group), in India, the IMI (Indian Music Industry), in Nigeria, the Nigerian National Group of IFPI, and so on.

Big Music is like a huge and ugly octopus with the various trade groups as its tentacles.

Meanwhile:

• File sharing is NOT a crime.
• File sharers are NOT criminals or thieves.
• The Big Four are NOT being devastated by us.
• Files shared do NOT equal sales lost.
• We do NOT owe Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG a living.
• No one is deprived of anything when a file is shared.

Because although the labels and the movie studios and the software groups and all the other cartels are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make us believe we need them, we don’t, especially now the digital 21st century and p2p are changing the world.

The customer is always right. And that’s us.

“Merry Christmas cartels!” - said a reader in a recent email. “Who knows, it may be your last!”

But it doesn’t have to be like that. We’re reasonable people. All the cartels have to do is learn, in this modern day and age, to be reasonable as well.

Cheers!

Jon Newton - p2pnet

Also See:
Michelle Santangelo - Michelle Santangelo: I’m no thief, December 8, 2006
Briana LaHara - We gave up on Prohibition …
RaeJ (Ray-Jay) Schwartz - RIAA builds new consumer class, November 20, 2006
Kazaa from a kazoo - RIAA alters ’sloppy’ testimony, February 23, 2006
Recording Industry vs The People - Letter Contains No Reference to Downloading or Distributing of Copyrighted Songs, December 7, 2006
truly targetting - RIAA attacks Marie Lindor’s son, November 22, 2006
real target - Patti Santangelo update, April 156, 2006
young daughter - RIAA Chan case dismissal, April 21, 2006
revealed - Judge Denies Motion to Dismiss, Says “Making Available for Distribution” is Sufficient Allegation, December 8, 2006
Tanya Andersen - Victim sues RIAA under RICO Act, October 1, 2005
Thomas J. Korb - RIAA again in RICO claim, December 6, 2006
admit they did anything wrong - Warner Music in trouble, May 6, 2006
blackmail Robert’s best frien - RIAA, Santangelo court doc farce, November 3, 2006
earlier post - RIAA goes after Santangelo kids, November 2, 2006
Lorraine Sullivan - RIAA gets $2500 from Lorraine Sullivan
stole music - WMG boss’ kids ’stole music’, December 4, 2006
old-time corporate rockers - Dead stars sign UK copyright ad, December 7, 2006
admit wrongdoing - CBS Radio nailed for bribery, October 23, 2006
anything at all - Big Music Owes You Money !!!, September 29, 2006
endless smorgasbord - Unpaid Artists: Part II, September 22, 2006
screwed from the beginning - File sharing, p2p criminals, March 12, 2005
representing me - Free speech in Canada, June 2, 2006
gone the way of Kazaa - Kazaa deal paid for RIAA victim?, November 18, 2006
suing the RIAA - LimeWire versus the RIAA: Part II, November 18, 2006
Click here - Cyber-libel and p2pnet, July 31, 2006
launched by a former user - Kazaa sued in class action, December 7, 2006

.Slashdot it!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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