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.

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!

LET THE FLAMES BEGIN!

The Internet