p2pnet.net special:- The Santangelo family has become a focal point for anyone, anywhere, with an interest, academic or direct, in the way Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) are persecuting their own customers as part of their attempt to gain total control of how, and by whom, music is handled and distributed online.

The Santangelos are American, but the same kinds of horror shows are being enacted around the world as the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and other so-called ‘trade’ outfits in different countries, act as fronts for the labels’ bizarre and bloody-minded sue ‘em all campaigns.

The multi-billion-dollar Big 4 say they’re being ruined by file swappers, the men and women, and even young children, they call “illegal distributors”. File sharing is, however, exactly that. Sharing. No money changes hands and no one has been deprived, permanently or temporarily, of something he or she used to own.

Nor have the labels been able to sustain their claims that files shared equal sales lost. In fact, as Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf state unequivocally in their The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, “Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Lawyer Sharon Thompson has joined Jordan Glass to work pro bono with the Santangelo family. Here’s her take on the issues.

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We have a new kind of ‘terrorist’ in our midst and it’s called the RIAA. Their lawsuits are a new example of the playground bully beating up on defenseless kids. The difference here is the playground bully consists of the recording labels (not recording artists) hiding behind the RIAA, and the ‘defenseless kids’ are people without the resources to fight back, such as elderly grandparents, disabled people, single working parents, and even children.

For several years, now, the RIAA has been waging a relentless, heartless war against Americans who are neither capable of defending themselves nor hiring attorneys to fight back. The overwhelming majority of the defendants find their lives being consumed by the relentless litigation forced on them, often without even a modicum of good faith by the plaintiffs. Some have lost just about everything they’ve worked so hard for all their lives: their savings, their pensions, you name it, just to try to keep from being bankrupted by the costs of protecting their employment, defending their names and reputations, and in some cases, their very lives.

Most people mistakenly believe innocence is all one needs. But nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, before anyone even gets to the point of addressing their innocence, they must first go through months, often years, of being dragged through seemingly endless rounds of responding to a blitz of legal documents from their adversaries (in this case, the RIAA). The process, whether intentional or not, can rob a person of their most precious commodity: their human dignity.

A lawsuit is a daunting prospect even when one is represented by an attorney and I can’t imagine what it must be like to try to survive this nightmare without one. This might explain why the RIAA’s favourite targets are people without the means to hire attorneys: they succumb to the threat of litigation, and settle instead for legalized extortion. Most of these defendants have no choice; they can’t afford the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to defend against such lawsuits.

As a lawyer and as a mother, I find myself telling everyone who’ll listen about the Santangelo family. I do this not because I’m involved in representing them, but because I know just how terrifying it is to have to go through this process, both professionally and personally, and I want to let everyone know just what they have to do in order to protect themselves from becoming yet another casualty of the RIAA’s war.

A mountain of complex legal papers

As a parent and a working mother myself, I feel Patti’s pain every time we speak, and it’s my compassion as a human being that compels me to do everything in my power to help both her and her children. It chills my soul to think that a hard working mother of five children who struggles daily to keep her family intact, has to face each day with the thought ‘What will I be hit with next?’ – from the Goliath machine which is trying to bury her, and so many like her, under a mountain of complex legal papers the likes of which is downright overwhelming.

Patti Santangelo doesn’t have access to many resources other than her own beliefs, the moral support of her family, friends, supporters like you, and, Yes, her lawyers in this case. Contrary to what many people think, we’re not being paid for our work. I’m in awe of her strength and determination, in the face of overwhelming odds, to keep fighting against an injustice so outrageous it defies description. I’m honoured to be able to help, even though I’m mostly limited to the legal arena.

I’m filled with a mix of anger and sadness whenever I sit down to work on anything for Patti and her children; this case represents everything rotten and corrupt with the corporate mentality pervading our business culture.

The RIAA claims that it’s vigorously pursuing these ‘illegal Internet pirates.’ Illegal? Internet pirates? Kids and others who, most certainly at the time of these alleged copyright infringements, didn’t know about downloading as a possible source of illegal activity? Many didn’t even know what downloading even was, or any possible legal ramifications of such activity, and that ’s especially true in the cases where such things only might have happened; that’s right . . . might have, with no proof that anything actually did happen.

Contributed to the development of downloading

Among the many peculiarities of these cases, the RIAA has alleged some of their defendants to have been ’supernodes,’ ie: “massive distributors” who shared files over (typically) high-speed connections.

Of course, the RIAA fails to mention that, in cases where this might actually have happened, it was invariably done without the knowledge or consent of the unsuspecting user of such file sharing programs as Kazaa. Certainly, the RIAA wasn’t deterred in the least by the mere detail of finding out whether the people they have sued, and continue to pursue, were the actual ‘offenders’ who violated their copyright protected material. All the RIAA needed was an IP address.

Most galling to me, as both a practitioner and a parent, is: nothing has stopped the RIAA from its relentless pursuit of truly innocent victims, certainly not the truth, and not even all the negative press.

It ’s sadly ironic that the music companies wanted to tap a new customer base of kids who consider downloading the simplest, most convenient way of getting the music they want.

When the recording industry contributed to the development of downloading, they had all the tools necessary to warn both parents and their children that downloading copyright protected music was illegal, absent consent of the copyright holder or a license to do so.

But where were the RIAA-initiated ‘parental controls,’ the filters major ISPs provide their customers with to protect children from accessing pornographic or gambling sites? The very filters used, for example, by AOL, to prevent kids from accessing such sites were the very thing that blocked all messages from the RIAA (assuming the RIAA sent them as claimed), warning about the consequences of alleged ‘illegal downloading.’

So the question is who is really to blame?

Pornographic and other age-inappropriate sites

The responsible parent was faced with the evil twins: turn on the parental controls and block the RIAA’s alleged warnings; or, leave them off, and expose all their innocent children to the vilest of images or, even worse, sites where sexual predators lurk, according to the RIAA and other entertainment and software ‘trade’ organizations. I pose this query because that was the only option available to parents such as Patti: either turn on the parental controls and protect your children from pornographic and other age-inappropriate sites, or turn off the very same controls so they could read the RIAA’s alleged warning, but face other, most dangerous consequences.

Just as easily, the RIAA could presumably have had code written to prevent their copyrighted mp3 files from being downloaded through ANY ISP without a copyright warning, which the user had to read, and sign, to protect everyone involved, which leads me to this thought: what reason did they have for not doing that? Could it be because they wanted their users to download music – just as long as long as it was theirs? After all, they wanted our kids to not only learn how to do this, but to do it in such a manner and fashion so as to become second nature to them.

The problem the RIAA now faces is of its own making: it helped to create the Genie and let it out of the bottle. It appears that the RIAA was focused on making its own mp3s available for free downloading in order to promote the music and artists it wanted to promote, in the hopes it would entice people to go out and spend $15 or $20 per CD. Well, the only hit the RIAA cares about is the one it’s taking in its own pockets, so now it’s ruthlessly going after the people who, so it claims in its often baseless allegations, are doing the very thing the industry in effect trained them to do.

Now music lovers have grown weary of spending such ridiculous amounts of money for what’s mostly become an inferior product, the RIAA is as mad as can be that its pockets are no longer being stuffed with outrageous profits. What disgusts me most is that these profits, for the most part, don’t benefit the very people who depend on them for a living, namely, the artists themselves. These profits speak to nothing more insidious than corporate greed.

For the record, I’m absolutely and completely in favour of artists being paid for their creative works; indeed, this world would be intolerable for this writer without music. More importantly, the artists deserve to reap the benefits of their hard work and talent. I’m a strong advocate for reasonable copyright protection because everyone deserves to make a living and Yes, a good profit, from their work, and that, of course includes artists, musicians, writers and all of their support staffs.

I do wish, however, the RIAA would take off its fraudulent costume, much like that of the big bad wolf dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood’s sweet and loving grandmother, and the labels should be revealed as they truly are: corporate gangsters hiding behind the guise of benevolent recording companies trying to protect their musicians. They care only for their own greedy agendas, not for the artists they claim to represent.

They surely don’t care about the impact these lawsuits have on their victims.

Bronfman, the father of ‘infringing’ kids

The poster boy for all that’s wrong with the RIAA is one of its key players, Warner Music chairman and ceo Edgar M. Bronfman, Jr. Heis the one who, when questioned about his own children’s use of their home computer to download music, is credited with having said, ‘I’m fairly certain that they have, and I’m fairly certain that they’ve suffered the consequences.’

He’s further credited with saying, ‘I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child. A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.’

What consequences did his children suffer? His response to that was, ‘I think I’ll keep that within the family.’

If only he’d offer the same ‘consequences’ to Bobby Santangelo and all the other children who are being persecuted by Bronfman’s legal squads. With his vast family fortune to back him, Bronfman is now directly contributing to the torture of other people’s children, like Patti’s, by stepping over the bones of the victims of these scurrilous lawsuits for his own personal gain.

I guess it’s alright to teach his children they’re exempt from the consequences of their actions because the rules don’t apply to them.

It boggles my mind to think Bronfman, the father of ‘infringing’ kids, is involved in this and knows first-hand, as a parent, just how easily children are lured into downloading music.

Bronfman heads up one of the Big 4 labels, and even he had no control over what his own kids did in his own household. If he couldn’t prevent this from happening in his own home, how then, can the rest of us be expected to do so?

Sharon G. Thompson
[Thompson says she's a New Yorker, born and raised, who's both a registered pharmacist and a licensed attorney. She says she comes from a family which has been active in both civil and human rights issues, "ever since I can remember, and way before I was born)".]

Slashdot it!

Also See:
focal point – Us, Them, p2p and file sharing, December 9, 2006
state unequivocally – File sharing: zero effect on downloads, February 12, 2007
Associated Press – MySpace Launches Pilot to Filter Videos, February 12, 2007
joined Jordan Glass – Santangelo lawyer speaks out, November 11, 2006

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