Duluth RIAA p2p file sharing trial
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- The pigeons are finally coming home to roost.
Today Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) will be forced to step up and explain in-depth and in detail how it’s been able to portray some 30,000 American men women and children, customers all, as hardcore criminals and thieves.
Because today the trial of Jammie Thomas, a First Nations mother of two accused of being a massive online distributor of copyrighted music, opens in Duluth, Minnesota.
However, this time, reporting won’t be left to the mercies of the mainstream media who so far have been distinguished by their consistent failure to present both sides of a story in which the members of the Big 4 organised music cartel claim they’re being “devastated” by losses they say have been incurred because of music lovers using the Net to pass long their favourites.
Files shared equal sales lost, claim the labels, an assertion they’ve never been able to prove but which has, on the other hand, been shot down in a number of authoritative studies, the most quoted being The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis from Koleman Strumpf, professor of business economics at the University of Kansas Business School and Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard University Business School.
The labels also claim file sharing contributes to massive job loss and ravages the US economy.
However, a new Fair Use study states unequivocally:
With more than $4.5 trillion in revenue generated by fair use dependent industries in 2006, a 31% increase since 2002, fair use industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs.
In fact, nearly one out of every eight American jobs is in an industry that benefits from current limitations on copyright.
Now lawyers representing the corporate music industry will try to justify their attack on Thomas and on other women such as:
- Rae-Jay Schwartz, confined tro a wheelchair my multiple sclerosis
- Tanya Andersen, a disabled single mother who depends on a medical pension for income
- Patti Santangelo, a New York mother of five who’s never allowed tragic family events to be used in stories of the persecution of her and two of her children by the Big 4 labels
Their stories beggar belief, as do the means used by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG continue their attacks on these mothers and thousands of other men, women and children —– their own customers.
Despite successful attempts by the Big 4 to use the mainstream media to create the impression thousands of people have been successfully sued for the non-existent crime file sharing, no one has yet appeared in court or been found guilty of anything, let alone copyright infringement.
This will be the first time since 2003 when the RIAA launched its first attack that a case has actually made it to trial. For the first time, the labels will be forced to give chapter and verse on their depredations not to an elderly judge with little or no knowledge of the Net, but to a jury of ordinary people, some of whom will be dedicated surfers.
And that’ll be very bad for the RIAA.
Jury selection and opening statements are expected to begin today with Big 4 lawyers trying to make a case largely based on ‘evidence’ supplied by online scalp Hunter SafeNet that Thomas shared 1,702 files she’d gathered with Kazaa, the seriously discredited P2P file sharing application owned by Australian company Sharman Networks and which is itself the subject of a class action lawsuit.
The labels will try to make the jury believe that Thomas was a criminal and thief, as the labels call file sharers, who illegally distributed the digital downloads online as tereastarr@KaZaA.
Lined up against her are: Virgin Records, Capitol Records, Sony BMG, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings.
RIAA truth alignment specialist Cary Sherman is expected to give evidence.
Ray Beckerman, the New York lawyer who’s representing several RIAA victims and whose Recording Industry vs The People carries the only detailed list of case-by-case court documents and lawyers representing corporate music victims, is dedicating space to reports of the trial provided by citizen journalists.
p2pnet, the only site to have consistently carried victims’ stories since the Big 4 attacks began in 2003, will similarly be featuring reports.
If you live in Duluth or anywhere near it, or you can arrange to get there, attend the trial and let Beckerman know what you see and hear.
This could be the one where the corporate music industry, its shills, its hired legal guns and its professional dissemblers will be shown for what they really are —– not people working in an honest and hard-pressed industry that’s struggling to stay above water in hard times, but a ruthless collection of avaricious executives who will do literally anything to maintain their companies’ dominant position in the music industry, and gain total control of how, and by whom, music is distributed online.
Coverage has so far come from p2pnet.net; Idolator; Knoxville News Sentinel; Groklaw; Geek News Central; TechDirt; Slashdot; The Nerd Insider; afterdawn.com; MetaFilter Community Weblog; Perfect Duluth Day; the Los Angeles Times; pcinpact.com (French); Heise Online (German); FurdLog; Duluth News Tribune; Wired; CMJ 07; File Sharing Talk; P2P Forum Italia (Italian); PP International; Punto Informatico (Italian); BlogRunner/Law; Ars Technica; Associated Press; and WCCO.com.
Definitely stay tuned.
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October 2nd, 2007 at 8:21 am
We are going to win this, because we have bought the judge and intimidated the witnesses.
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Probably won’t find this story on your evening news.
Thank God(ess) for the Internet