The RIAA against Celeste Lewis
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- It looks almost like a warped kind of amnesty.
But it isn’t.
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and their RIAA are trying to convince the world they’re abandoning the vicious sue ‘em all campaign against their own customers, also saying major US ISPs have agreed to take over as the heavies in the corporate music effort to gain complete and exclusive control of online music distribution.
According to the Wall Street Journal, their RIAA is, “set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy”.
The Big 4 “trade group” said it’s “hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider`s customers making music available online for others to take.”
However, the RIAA was a very long way from a reaching a signed, sealed and delivered deal: its statement was merely another disingenuous claim farmed out by the mainstream media, with the Wall Street Journal up front, and attributed to New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo.
However, the Big 4 extortion unit has now gone too far in its attempts to make sure the media present its point of view, and only its point of view.
“Fourteen news organizations, including The Associated Press and The New York Times Co., are urging a federal appeals court to allow online streaming of a hearing in a music downloading lawsuit the recording industry filed against a Boston University graduate student,” says the Associated Press.
With the specious claim that its pulling its sue ‘em all campaign in the background, none of the subpoenas shot-gunned at thousands of innocent men, women and children across America have been withdrawn, with two spurious cases against single mother of two Jammie Thomas and Boston student Joel Tenenbaum – the case the RIAA is desperately trying to stop from being televised live – also continuing.
And the RIAA claim that it’ll stop suing people may have serious consequences other than once again proving the RIAA routinely speaks with a forked tongue.
“When it dropped its attack on seven University of Michigan students, Recording Industry vs. The People wondered if the move was linked to three investigations, with MediaSentry as the target, before Michigan`s Department of Labor and Economic Growth,” p2pnet said recently, going on to quote LSA sophomore Erin Breisacher as saying in the Michigan Daily although she stopped downloading music, now the RIAA has stopped pursuing lawsuits she “might start downloading again”.
And in the same story, “I figure, if there aren`t as many lawsuits they will come out with more software to allow students to download more,” said LSA senior Chad Nihranz as saying.
But, “if the RIAA has a plan to work with Internet service providers (called ISPs) or to curb downloading, they have not shared it with UW-Madison,” says Wisconsin State Journal.
‘Impossible to do’
“We haven’t gotten any formal communiqué from the RIAA or the (Motion Picture Association of America) or anybody else who represents them saying this is the approach we’re going to take,” says Brian Rust, communications director for UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology, in the story, which goes on »»»
“Basically, the music and movie industries want higher education ISPs like us to completely filter any kind of illegally exchanged music and movie files, which is very difficult to do without impinging on other network traffic,” Rust said. “Our network engineers actually feel that’s impossible to do.”
The movie and music industry lobbies also won a measure of support in the recent reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act. It requires institutions that get federal funding to protect the copyrights of the movie and music industries or face losing that funding. UW-Madison receives a tremendous amount of federal research money, second only to Johns Hopkins University, Rust said.
The university has made it clear, however, that “we do not filter content,” Rust said, not only because UW-Madison believes in the free flow of information but because filtering could interfere with legitimate materials that would appear to software to be similar to illegal music and movie files.
It’s unbelievable that a purely corporate entity entity answerable only to it shareholders should be able to order a national government and the people who run a country’s university system to develop, implement and pay for a system designed wholly and solely to maintain, and ultimately boost, company profits.
Instead of telling Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian) to stick their demands where the sun doesn’t shine, universities are addressing them as though they’re legitimate.
And all the while, innocent people suffer.
Multi-billion-dollar Big 4
Celeste Lewis, “an only child whose mother is in prison” and whose “father is dead” is “in a pickle that could prove costly,” the Wisconsin State Journal says.
Lewis, an only child whose mother is in prison and whose father is dead, is the first member of her family to make it to college, according to this story.
“A dean’s list student, she aspires to work in child development or in the juvenile criminal justice system when she finishes school.”
But describing her situation as “a pickle” trivialises it to the point of absurdity.
Celeste is in very serious trouble, thanks to the multi-billion-dollar Big 4 whose total failure to be able to move from the 20th into the 21st century is being blamed on people such as her instead of themselves.
She, “fears that an expensive judgment against her could force her to leave school,” says the story, stating »»»
Lewis pays for college through scholarships and said her family doesn’t have the money to hire an attorney.
Judgments in similar cases have run at least $5,000, with some as high as $15,000. The RIAA has asked the court for a default judgment against her of $5,250 plus court costs because she didn’t respond to the lawsuit in time.
“It’s very stressful because I’m not a bad person,” she said. “I’m not making excuses because I know what I did was wrong.”
But even that’s open to question.
‘Stressful to say the least’
The labels largely base their lawsuits on the claimthat files share equal sales lost, using highly questionable reports from the likes of the IPI (Institute for Policy Innovation) as “proof”.
However, a number of credible academic and other studies say this just isnt true, that in fact file sharing may be an invaluable, and free, means of viral advertising.
Moreover, “It is a basic principle of economics that as price increases, demand decreases,” decided federal judge James P. Jones recently.
“Customers who download music and movies for free would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product,” he said.
The Wisconsin State Journal also writes about Kimberly Wilke, 20, a junior from Cudahy, who “found herself in the same spot” as Celeste.
“The RIAA sued Wilke in October, though she wasn’t served with the lawsuit until Dec. 11 â the night before an important final exam,” it says.
It was “stressful to say the least,” Wilke said.
The RIAA should drop the lawsuit against her and others like her because, Kimberly says in the story, “it doesn’t work as a deterrent. Even friends who know she was sued continue to do it, and computer-savvy people can easily figure out ways to skirt detection”.
But students aren’t the only people being victimised by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG.Ask Mavis Roy.
She’s accused of distributing 218 music files online in a case also involving students, although this time, they’re on the the end of the lawsuit.
Student attorneys at the Consumer and Commercial Law Clinic of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord are acting for her as the RIAA tries to make out to be a hardcore, file sharing thief.
Meanwhile, “I think they’re wasting their time,” Kimberly says.
“It’s been proven that it doesn’t work. They’re wasting their time, their lawyer’s time, and they’re wasting my time. I’ve got better things to think about rather than whether I’m going to owe them thousands and thousands of dollars for the rest of my life.”
Also, she said, the lawsuit is a lousy “thank-you for all the CDs I’ve bought over the years.”
Stay tuned
Jon Newton – p2pnet
February , 2009
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February 3rd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
ya know id be using ANY quotes by these morons in court.
See your honor , how can you believe them when they lie?