Expert Witness Defense Fund
p2pnet news | P2P:- Word of the new Expert Witness Defense Fund is getting around online fast, and not only on English language sites.
Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US), the members of the Big 4 organised music cartel, are engaged in a vicious and bitter battle with their own customers to force them into becoming compliant consumers, just as they were in the heady pre-Net days.
Then, to all intents and purposes, the corporate music industry was all there was.
Now, thanks to the Net, for the first time in history independent musicians and performers of all stripes are hosting their own music on their own sites, producing their own albums in their own web-based studios, handling their own bookings online and generally making it crystal clear to the Big 4 that not only are they longer needed, they’re no longer in control.
However, the old-wave, technically ignorant dumbsters who ran the labels are still suffering under the delusion they can continue to treat their customers like shit and get away with it, launching a bizarre sue ‘em all marketing scheme under which they’re using legal systems around the world to try to sue their customers into toeing the corporate line.
In the US, fronting for the Big 4 is the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
Hundreds of millions of dollars of what should have been shareholder profits had been squandered on this fruitless exercise.
P2P and file sharing are here to stay, and all the screaming, PR flim-flam, lies and half-truths won’t change it, and there’s absolutely nothing the Big 4 can do about it.
However, they insist on continuing to further shred their already tattered images in increasingly high profile court cases in which they’re emerging as overweight thugs.
And one of the reasons they’ve gotten as far as they have is because they’ve been able to use so-called expert witnesses to quite literally, confuse and baffle judges who are at a complete loss when it comes to computer technology, P2P and file sharing.
But those days are about to end.
The fund has been created so RIAA victims can hire their own experts in what Recording Industry vs the People’s Ray Beckerman believes is a “cataclysmic event in the history of the RIAA’s litigation campaign”.
The Free Software Foundation Expert Witness Defense Fund will, “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,” we posted yesterday.
So far, among others, it’s been reported by:
Wired, Slashdot, Hard OCP, Ars Technica, TechDirt and Slyck(US)
The Inquirer (UK)
tweakers.net (Holland)
Linux.org.ru (Russia)
ZDNet.Be (Dutch)
Ratiatum (French)
Afterdawn (Finland)
Punto Informatico, (Italy)
OS News (Poland)
Tom’s Hardware (France)
p2pnet – (Canada)
Do you have a blog or web site? You do?
Then spread the word.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for the download, and here for details. Click here or here to learn how to by-pass censorship in your area.
