Obama / Biden: tools of the RIAA?
p2pnet news view RIAA | Freedom | P2P:- The Free Software Foundation has requested permission to file an amicus curiae brief in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v Tenenbaum, defending the defendant’s Due Process defense to the RIAA’s claim for statutory damages, p2pnet posted yesterday, adding:
“This may represent the first test on whether the shiny new Barack Obama administration, with RIAA lawyers now comfortably ensconced in top positions at the Department of Justice, is for the people (as Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music continue to call their own customers criminals and thieves), or against them.”
Says Ray Beckerman in Recording Industry vs The People »»»
Any day now we will be finding out whether the Obama Administration, which pledged to work for the people, and to keep officials from working on matters affecting the industries they represented in private life, will be intervening to help the RIAA defend its position that it’s okay to assess statutory damages of from $750 to $150,000 for infringement of a single mp3 file.
This will be the litmus test of whether, as many fear, the Obama/Biden administration will be tools of the ‘Big 4′ Record Companies.
The Obama Department of Justice has former RIAA lawyers in its 2nd and 3rd highest positions. Under the rules, they, and any of their compatriots whom they may have brought with them, should be precluded from having anything to do with the Justice Department’s decisions as to (a) whether or not to intervene and (b) if they do intervene, what position they will take.
In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud in Pennsylvania, and SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum
In Tenenbaum the Free Software Foundation filed its amicus curiae brief yesterday, reminding the Court of the authorities which say that statutory damages are subject to the same Due Process test as punitive damages.
If the Justice Department lawyers have the temerity to say to the Court that statutory damages of from 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages sustained pass constitutional muster, we can pretty well count the Obama Justice Department out as anything other than a lackey for the RIAA in this struggle. in Massachusetts, we will probably find out any day now.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
Definitely stay tuned.
March, 2009
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March 22nd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
look whose smiling in th epicture
hes done nohtign but schil it for the riaa .
WHY he choose biden is beyond me unless it was all a sham…..
March 22nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
@above the picture is obviously a parody.
Apparently Biden had his choice.
“Biden shushes wife after secretary of state slip on Oprah Winfrey show”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28736468/
The majority of the shill accusations towards vice president Biden appear unfounded since he took office. The past may be a different story. Follow the money and you’ll find that the lobbies you hate so much have probably donated/bribed more or less to both parties equally.
March 22nd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Of course Obummer and Biden the bozo ARE puppets of the RIAA and the Mpaa.
Come to think about it so are all the other 535 members of the US Congress……….
Both major parties take ( the Democraps and the Rethuglicans ) kickbacks and bribes from the entertainment cartels.
It’s called political contributions…….
I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE HOW REALLY NAIVE SOME OF YOU PEOPLE REALLY ARE. MORONS……….
IT’S NEVER GOING TO CHANGE. ALL POLITICIANS ARE CORRUPT,TALK OUT BOTH SIDES OF THEIR MOUTHS AND ARE IN EVERYBODY’S POCKET.
GOOD GRIEF………….
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Don’t believe. Don’t be afraid. Don’t ask.
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:56 pm
don’t breathe , don’t …fart
ok really don’t do the last one
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:59 pm
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/22/184221
YUP HES A TOOL ALRIGHT
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:33 am
“IT’S NEVER GOING TO CHANGE.”
As far as the entairtainement criminals are concerned It is changing right now since the RIAAA and MPAA parasites are litteraly dying.
Not thanks to OBAMA! thanks to us and Internet.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:06 am
Obama Biden (Laden)
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:28 am
Ofcourse Obama and Biden are puppets of the RIAA I don’t know why anybody would think diffrent. I mean look at the AIG mess. Obama expressed outrage over the exc bonuses but yet it was clearly in the stimulis package that just had to be rammed thru or the world was going to end. What a joke. And now I ask do you feel stimulated?
March 26th, 2009 at 7:09 am
“RIAA defend its position that it’s okay to assess statutory damages of from $750 to $150,000 for infringement of a single mp3 file”
Let me copy what was posted elsewhere, adding that nothing damages the commercial value of a song than confusion as to who owns the music. No one will record or sing in public or broadcast a song with multiple ownership, while no such damage occurs when the song is copied for private listening. Rather than damaging a song’s value, copying for personal uses and sharing, which are really unstoppable anyway, actually increases the commercial value. The posting, which is related to the Guillermo Venegas cases says:
The damages award system is far worse than it looks when we only consider the stupidity of statutory damages as applied to essentially Innocent and non commercial copying or sharing of song files.
I can only illustrate my point using a case I was involved. I have described the case before but it is worth explaining if it may help accused kids and others who have innocently shared or copied music because they like music and because copyright laws are beyond their (or anyone else, including lawyers and judges) grasp as I have been saying and repeating to deaf ears for a long time. On 2001 we filed a market damage lawsuit in a US federal court against a music publisher that destroyed the market of the over 500 songs we owned as copyright holders, by claiming ownership of the over 500 songs. During the lawsuit this fact was not denied by anyone, it was rather obvious. We only received a single “copyright infringement” award of $16,363.47 along with a lawyer bill of $76,932. Our lawyer filed the legal cost claim too late (said the judge as if he had no responsibility in the late filing of an inexperienced lawyer) so all we ended with was a huge loss of about $60,000. The filed lawsuit did not claim any copyright infringement at all, just market damage, but the judge apparently did not read the lawsuit and transformed it into a single song copyright infringement one in a 2004 trial. As a result my family has had to file a new lawsuit (in 2007) the thieving publisher in the local courts.
The point is, federal court judges are insane (if my case is an examples) when it comes to awarding damages, thus judges should not be given statutory atomic bomb of $150,000 to compensate a copyright holder for the (alleged) loss of 99 cents in a sale that may have been at best, improbable.
We have a saying, “may God catch them confessed”. Them are the lawmakers and the judges.