Obama: marching to the RIAA band
p2pnet news view RIAA | Freedom | P2P:- When George W. Bush cheated his way into the US presidency, the Net was kinda cool – a Geeky kind of thing used by people on the outside fringes and not to be taken too seriously and back then, its influence on events and politics was minimal.
That, however was almost a decade a go and although it may have been true once, it certainly isn’t true any more. In fact, the Internet is now the primary means of communication for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
It’s how they get their news and pass it on to each other.
Barack Obama recognized that critical fact and one of the reasons he’s now president of the United States of America is because he’s used the Net to talk to the people, convincing ordinary folks across the land he’s one of them and would act in their best interests.
So it’s passing strange that now he’s running the country, he seems to have forgotten how he got there in the first place — at least as far as some 40,000 innocent men, women and even young children are concened.
They’ve all been on the wrong end of subpoenas issued by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music’s (US) Recording Industry Association of America.
They’re criminals, says the RIAA, massive online distributors of copyrighted music. Even 10-year-olds. And dead grandmothers. And home health workers who don’t know one end of the computer from the other.
They’re thieves, says the RAA. All of them. And there are millions more around the world like them, all bent on depriving the corporate music industry of their rightful earnings.
The RIAA was getting away with this fallacy under the Bush administration, but surely things would be better under Obama, was the hope, if not the expectation. Surely he’d put a stop to it.
Wouldn’t he?
But it doesn’t look like that’s in his plans.
To the contrary, he named hard-core RIAA henchmen to important, and very senior, positions in the US Department of Justice and in what may well go down as the first solid indication of his plans for the future, he seems to be marching down the road carefully, and at great expense, constructed by the corporate entertainment industries.
Says Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman »»»
In its first opportunity to demonstrate its position on the constitutionality of the Copyright Act’s statutory damages provisions as applied to mp3 files having a market value of 99 cents or less, the Obama Justice Department — staffed by RIAA lawyers in its 2nd and 3rd highest positions — has filed a motion for intervention and brief in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum which attempts to support the RIAA’s statutory damages theory.
The brief:
1. relied upon St. Louis, IS & M Ry Co v. Williams, 251 US 63 (1919) a 1919 United States Supreme Court decision which upheld, as against due process attack, a statute awarding statutory damages against a large railroad corporation which were 116 times the actual damages sustained, in cases involving the rail carrier’s overcharging of its customers, on the ground that under the circumstances the award was not so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable;
2. relied upon the decision of the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Zomba v. Panorama, 491 F.3d 574 (6th Cir. 2007), which held that until such time as the US Supreme Court applies the State Farm/Gore test, rather than the Williams test, to statutory damages, the less stringent Williams standard would be applied, and upheld a statutory damages award equal to 44 times the actual damages, in a case of wilful copyright infringement by a karaoke disc distributor, since 44 times actual damages was less onerous than the 116:1 multiple upheld by the Williams court;
3. conceded that statutory damages are subject to due process review for excessiveness, but argued that the less demanding Williams standard, rather than the higher State Farm/Gore standard, should be applied;
4. attempted to refute the arguments made by the defendant in his brief; and
5. ignored all of the authorities and all of the arguments cited by the Free Software Foundation in its amicus curiae brief.
Department of Justice Motion to Intervene
Department of Justice Memorandum of Law
1) Odd, don’t you think, that the Government ignored the authorities cited in FSF’s amicus curiae brief? Maybe they thought Judge Gertner wouldn’t be able to find them, so they’d be better off not mentioning them.
(2) Sad that the Obama administration, which purports to be for ‘the little guy’, supports statutory damages of from 2,100 to 425,000 the actual damages, imposed against ‘the little guy’, to be awarded to big corporations.
(3) Fortunately the courts will probably not be as cooperative, since the Government’s brief is noticeably weak and fails to stand up to scrutiny; if that’s the best argument, and those are the best authorities, the RIAA’s friends can come up with, they’re dead in the water on the Due Process issue.
Meanwhile, although Obama may have forgotten how he got to where he is, the Net hasn’t forgotten him and below, as listed in RIvTH, are just some of the sites carrying the story. And there’ll be more.
p2pnet.net
Slashdot
The Daily Swarm
Groklaw
Copyrights and Campaigns
Techmeme
The P.R.I.S.M.
Boston University Free Culture
The Big Bad Wolf
p2pnet.net
Tech Blog
Fark
TwentyFourBit
Reason.com
Digg
Twitter
Press Play Show
CNet News
TechDirt
The Inquisitr
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
March, 2009
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March 23rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Dear Mr. Obama: Everybody is still watching you. Please act accordingly. Thank you,
The Internet
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
If you listened to the press while he was running you would have thought Obama was the 2nd coming of Christ. Well, it you’re into p2p and not a fan of the RIAA Jesus just shit on you. And never fear about the RIAA going bankrupt and out of business, were that to happen Obama and the U.S. congress would probably bail them out too.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Why does this surprise anyone? I called it when the story was first reported that Biden was picked for a running mate. I got flamed and told that it would never happen. The **AA’s bought the election and now run the entire government of the USA through their puppet Obama. Now the economy is in the tank just like the **AA’s are in the tank. Because innovation and progressive ideas are anathema to to any of the parasitical b****ards running the joint. This is just one opinion so cannot be considered in error however………..
LET THE FLAMES BEGIN!
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Obama = Democrat Bush
March 24th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Punitive damages levied against a private citizen and awarded to a large commercial group or corporation are a total inversion/perversion of the rationale behind applying punitive damages in court decisions against a corporation. Corporate power, and responsibility to society (NOT its stockholders and executives) is proportional to its size, with those punitive damages way and above the actual damages being intended to enforce the position that this country will not stand for big-business-bullying and disdain for the rights and well-being of the individual citizen, or the “little man”, as each of us is regarded by many big organizations. The amount of money that an average citizen can afford to spend to sustain a legal battle with a corporation by no means compares with what their adversary can bring to bear on their own behalf, and in applying statutory damages of such magnitude, it is intended to harshly remind Big Business to “be nice” (as I used to admonish my chow-chow when he became defiant).
The whole stance taken by the “**AAs” Michael refers to has all the hallmarks of terrorism: authoritarian private groups, with no legal authority to act outside the court system, harass and persecute individuals, instilling fear by threatening “when we find you, we’ll break you, because you’re piratical criminals who are stealing what is ours! You won’t know how or when, but we’ll be comin’ to getcha!”. This arrogating of pseudo-legal authority to themselves, and trying to suck dry both the artists and the public, as oppressive middle-men, is the tactic of “La Cosa Nostra”: as the Media Mafioso, they have interposed themselves between the producer and buyer as “distributors” selling their brand of “protection” – but whose limited usefulness to society is swiftly coming to an end in today’s world of digitally-encoded media and the Web. (See my comments at http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/piratebaywednes.html?cid=150526357#comment-150526357 to get an expanded slant on this…)
This is nothing but “might makes right” aggressiveness, cloaked in self-righteous rhetoric and un-scientific fake statistics designed to support the sophistry that claims “file sharing is the same as material thievery”, “p2p is single-handedly responsible for declining CD and DVD revenues for media corporations” and “each file shared is a lost sale…period”. Here is a link http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/19/1440254 to a 146 p. Dutch report pointing to the contrary notion of economic benefit arising from p2 activity. This story http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-leads-to-less-crap-says-bittorrent-co-founder-081109/ speaks for itself ;D.
The way to victory for Americans (and the world at large, through our international influence) is to take the Lilliputian approach – refute the hogwash every way possible, tie the **AAs up in defending the underlying premises of their opposition to file-sharing, and side-step the questions of “legality” – copyright law has been distorted beyond recognition over the decades into something that stifles creativity and makes middlemen rich, instead of fostering creativity and feeding innovation by the producers of copyrighted materials. Laws can be changed, but true righteousness derives from spiritual principles that human law, at its most just, can only strive to mirror.
It’s time to start inundating your representatives and senators with correspondence that states your position on this matter. Make the American democracy work on behalf of society! Let freedom ring!
March 24th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
The line between news and entertainment has officially been blurred beyond all recognition. Its a soft tyranny. How badly accuracy will suffer remains to be seen.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
The damages award system is far worst 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 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.
March 29th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
I can see the headlines on cnn and fox news,obama feels in the best intrest of the tax payers dollars that the riaa needs your tax money to help send you to jail (i love the usa ) nothing like the rich getting rich’r. this is one of the reasons we the people need to take a stand and fight for a band on lobbying