p2pnet news | RIAA News:- “i am a single mother of 3 in new jersey and i too am being sued just like the rest of you. i cannot afford an attorney (even though i should be sooo very rich from ‘intent to distribute and profit from’ . I will fight this until i die..we did nothing wrong either..there was NEVER ANY DISCLAIMERS, REQUEST FOR PAYMENT, WARNINGS or anything when my 12 year old daughter listened and danced to some songs. AGAIN, I will never agree to give anyone a penny..When i was 12 and i got a tape recorder for christmas and taped all my favorite songs off the radio onto cassettes should me and my parents have been sued? what about people taping their favorite tv shows onto videos? When my favorite bar band plays the beatles should they send some money to paul or ringo? SHould i send the meteorologist some money for giving me the weather report online? GIVE ME A BREAK..I am burning mad!! I go to court on OCT 18,2005..no money so no lawyer..i intend to win and fight this battle against these money hungry monsters of the music industry..if any lawyers can help me..call me ….”

And …..

“I recieved my summons THIS WEEK, I live in Hawaii. I did not download from Kazaa, i had my 17 year old son living with me at the time, i was a working single mother. (poverty income) Now i remarried, my son is 20,and my new husband is suppossed to hire me a lawyer or pay the settlement. What a strain on our new marriage. I am going to try and respond Pro Se, I just cannot burden my new husband with this cost, he works so very hard. I really dont know what to do.”

The comments above both came in ‘The ‘We’re Not Taking Any More‘ club post three years ago.

When it went up, p2pnet was running under a different content management system which didn’t show Readers Write’s as they came in.

Consequently, and to my deep regret, I missed them both, seeing them for the first time yesterday. There was a phone number with the first post and although it still appears to be active, calls haven’t so far resulted in an answer.

When I looked at We’re Not Taking Any More yesterday afternoon, 75,421 people had visited the page. At 6:32 AM Pacific today, the number had risen to 75,802.

Well over seventy five thousand visits.

That’s a lot, and some of the increase comes via Ray Beckerman’s Slashdot post, Business Week Takes On the RIAA, in which he links back to the story, and from his own site, where he also mentions it.

Ray is, of course, the lawyer behind Recording Industry vs The People, one of the very first, and still very few, sites to actively and consistently carry reports detailing the plight of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG RIAA victims.

Equally important, RIvTP is also the only online repository of legal documents centring on scores of RIAA cases.

But neither Ray’s blog nor p2pnet are the only sites carrying the latest Tanya Andersen story.

Does the increasing coverage mean five hundred thousand people know how Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and their RIAA are treating Tanya and all the other people who are keeping them in business?

A million, perhaps? Two million? Fifty million?

Who knows? But whatever the number, it’s a sure thing ‘consumers’ around the world are well aware that as far as the Big 4 music labels are concerned, the customer isn’t only wrong, s/he’s also a criminal and a thief.

‘Don’t be intimidated …

Yesterday, Andersen and I were talking about how frightening these lawsuits are.

She went from stark terror through acceptance to a decision that she wasn’t going to take any more and, thanks to to Lory Lybeck and Ben Justus, her lawyers, she’s throwing the RIAA dirt back not only in its face, but also back at Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG.

“I never had any intention of ever being in a lawsuit,” she says, going on >>>

It was the RIAA’s choice to continue to pursue me, an innocent person, and make my life a living nightmare.

I think other people who are in a situation similar to myself should know they don’t have to back down and pay the RIAA for something they didn’t do.

You can fight, no matter who you are.

Don’t be intimidated because they are big companies.

It used to be the few online sites highlighting infamies visited by the corporate music industry on not only American men, women and children, but on people everywhere, were all there was.

The entertainment cartels own, or control in one way or another, significant sections of the mainstream print and electronic press which meant only one side of the story was getting out.

Thanks to blogs, news sites, IM, texting, cellphones and all the other means of untrammelled 21st this digital century communications, ordinary people have become their own news and information outlets, carrying stories and data untainted by vested interests. And this upsurge in publicly available materials means the traditional media are now being forced to cover stories they’ve been ignoring.

“For the first time since Thomas Alva Eddison began selling wax cylinders, the music industry is having to deal with an informed customer (NOT consumer) base whose constituents can, and do, communicate with each other via blogs, emails, IM, chats, text messaging, and so on,” I wrote, also three years ago, going on >>>

And what they’re saying is: We have a choice, and we’re exercising it.

If the record labels think their persecution of online customers who include schoolchildren and and disabled mothers is going unnoticed offline, they’re wrong.

The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] doesn’t mention the failure of Organized Music (Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, EMI ands Warner Music) to accept the reality that it’s now in the digital 21st century and not the physical 1970s and 80s and that its business models need to be updated accordingly.

OM’s members are in addition being found guilty - and very publicly - of one seamy practice after another and if they believe it’ll all just go away, they’d better think again.

It’s not going to get better, it’s going to get worse. For the Big Four.

But it’s going to get better for us as more and more options to stale and over-priced formulaic corporate ‘product’ continue to become available, and as more and more avenues and means of communication open up.

Stay tuned, and for now, continue refusing to buy anything produced by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), or Warner Music (US), or anyone or anything associated with them.

They’ll keep on saying the drop in sales results from CD burning, high prices, competition for consumer dollars from video games and DVDs, so on and so forth.

But that’s only a small part of the answer, and we know the rest of it.

As Tanya Andersen says, “The more people who stand up to these people, the more of a difference it is going to make.”

Because we don’t depend on them. They depend on us.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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Times Online - Thousands of old cases unearthed as Old Bailey goes online, April 28, 2008

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under RIAA News. 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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