p2pnet news view P2P | RIAA News:- Monday will a Capital Letter day for victims of the Big 4 labels in the corporate music sue ‘em all conspiracy, and Big 4 front organisation, the RIAA.

It’s the day federal judge Michael Davis will decide whether or not to overturn a decision against Jammie Thomas, a former user of Kazaa, the Sharman Networks P2P file sharing application which appears in the bulk of the RIAA cases, and which itself is now the subject of lawsuit.

And it looks as though a new RIAA lawyer, Jenner & Block’s Donald B. Verrilli Jr, is being brought in, presumably to attempt to persuade Davis to the contrary.

Verrilli was named by the Hollywood Reporter magazine as one of the top 100 ‘Power Lawyers’ in the entertainment industry for the second consecutive year, bragged J&B a couple of days ago.

Until now, Holmes Owen and Bird’s Richard Gabriel has been handling the case. But J&B is another RIAA favourite.

In July Gabriel himself became a judge in Colorado, leaving a big gap in the ranks of the RIAA’s high-priced attack   attorneys.

Criminals and thieves

RIAA is short for Recording Industry Association of America. Paradoxically, however, only one of the Big 4 —- Warner —- can be said to be American. And even it’s run by a Canadian. The other three are Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and EMI (Britain).

Like similar Big 4 organisations around the world, the RIAA is being used to paint music lovers who share with each other as criminals and thieves who are slowly “devastating” the multi-billion-dollar labels.

The corporate music industry claims music shared online directly equals sales lost.

However, while the labels have never been able to back their assertion up with any kind of supported data, a number of academic and other studies have proved the exact opposite —- that files shared are simply files shared, and nothing more.

Indeed, “downloading the equivalent of approximately one CD increases purchasing by about half of a CD,” says a study from Industry Canada, also stating:

“We find evidence that purchases of other forms of entertainment such as cinema and concert tickets, and video games tend to increase with music purchases …”

The labels have used the corporate mainstream media to create the illusion that thousands of Americans have been successfully sued for the non-existent crime of file sharing.

File sharing is not, though, a crime.

It’s simple copyright infringement, a mundane civil transgression.

But thanks to the hugely expensive, and ongoing, RIAA media blitz, it’s now falsely represented by the corporate press as a criminal matter on a level with burglary and murder.

Nor have scores of alleged infringers been successfully sued in US civil courts, despite carefully crafted RIAA flim-flam.

Of the more than 30,000 victims only one, single mother Jammie Thomas, known online as Tereastarr, has actually appeared before a jury, accused of being a “massive online distributor” of copyrighted music.

Experts predicted the verdict wouldn’t stand up and Michael Davis, the judge who instructed the jury, ultimately admitted he’d been wrong —- that he’d made a mistake in law when he virtually instructed the jury to find Jamie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement, saying she owed the Big 4 close to a quarter of a million dollars.

‘Never … called a single witness on his client’s behalf ‘

The question ‘Did she received an adequate defence?’ also arises.

Says Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman in his recent Large Recording Companies v. The Defenseless - Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations:

“The defendant’s involuntary lawyer never even called a single witness on his client’s behalf and failed to object to the RIAA’s ‘expert’ testifying, even though the expert had conceded meeting none of the Daubert reliability standards.”

The lawyer, Brian Todder, later praised RIAA lawyer, Richard Gabriel, as a “stand up guy“.

Davis, the presiding judge, meanwhile, admitted he’d made a “manifest” error in law he instructed the jury that “[t]he act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without licensefrom the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown”.

On Monday, Davis will make up his mind what to do about it and, “The outcome is likely to have wide-ranging implications in the Recording Industry Association of America’s file-sharing litigation campaign —- 20,000 lawsuits and counting. Most cases have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars and had never broached the topic of whether the RIAA must prove copyright violations, observes Wired, adding:

“The RIAA claims that infringement on peer-to-peer networks is implied, and that it shouldn’t have to provide proof —- because it’s impossible.

“Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners’ rights online,” it has RIAA attorney Timothy Reynolds in a court filing.

Definitely stay tuned.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under RIAA News, P2P. 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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