p2pnet - rss feed: Thanksgiving — and the RIAA
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- On Monday came news of what Recording Industry vs the People’s Ray Beckerman calls a “cataclysmic event in the history of the RIAA’s litigation campaign”.
He was talking about the creation of a Free Software Foundation Expert Witness Defense Fund which’ll go a long way to at least partially levelling the playing field for the men, women and even young children currently under attack by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG.
It, “represents a coming together of the tech community, which is the community most aware of the faked nature of the RIAA’s cases, and the RIAA’s victims,” says Beckerman.
The fund will, for the first time, allow customers of the Big 4 organise music cartel who’ve been falsely accused of being “massive online distributors” of copyrighted music files to properly examine testimony manufactured by the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to confuse the issues.
“Bullshit baffles brains,” goes the saying, and it’s been the practice of the RIAA to foist BS compiled by so-called ‘expert’ witnesses onto technically ignorant judges.
But the FSF fund will for the first time enable RIAA victims to retain experts able to confidently dissect dodgy RIAA evidence.
Beckerman believes the initiative will have a very broad appeal for a number of reasons:
One, it will help to get the truth out to the Courts, who until now have been hearing almost exclusively from the RIAA’s dubious experts-for-hire. Some judges have admitted their lack of technological savvy. Witness the string of cases, Interscope v Duty in Arizona, Arista v Greubel, Fonovisa v Alvarez, and Warner v Payne in Texas, and Maverick v Goldshteyn in Brooklyn, New York, where all five judges declined to decide a simple question of law because they said they didn’t understand the technology of Kazaa well enough to make a decision.
Secondly, it will be an enormous equalizer, enabling the RIAA victims to have technical experts who are not only as good as the RIAA’s, but who
will be much better, and who will not have a financial interest in the outcome of the case, as the RIAA’s experts - Doug Jacobson and Tom Mizzone - have.
Thirdly, I think it will have an enormous appeal to the computer and internet industries and to the tech community, because (a) it will help to oppose the sloppy junk science the RIAA has been trying to foist upon the courts, (b) it will help stop the RIAA’s attempts to rewrite copyright law and destroy the internet, by establishing precedents in cases against defenseless victims who do not have the resources with which to fight back, and (c) it will enable tech people who take their time to assist RIAA victims to receive compensation for their services.
It’s Thanksgiving in the US and it would be a great time to make a contribution to the fund, Beckerman adds, “so next year, and in years to come, the Thanksgivings of so many decent, law-abiding American families, will not be ruined as they have been during the past four years by the RIAA’s lawless, irresponsible, unscientific, and unAmerican campaign of terror against the working people of this country”.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
cataclysmic event - The Gnu and the RIAA’s worst nightmare, November 19, 2007
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November 21st, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I think that is a GREAT idea!
It is time consumers fight fire with fire!