The RIAA belittles Charles Nesson
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- RIAA spinster Cary Sherman describes the brutalisation of music fans by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s RIAA as ‘tough love”.
Another RIAA lawyer says it’s a “fascinating and challenging time” as the “record industry is swept up in a sea of change”.
Sitting on top of a pile of equine excreta, would be more like it.
Making the second statement was Steve Marks (right), who also claims the Big 4 extortion unit has “embraced” the change.
Would Jammie Thomas, and innocent mother who’ll soon have to endure a second round of RIAA attacks, or a student who seriously thought about killing herself because she couldn’t cope with Big 4 extortion demands, agree, one wonders?
Now, in a mealie-mouthed ‘OpEd’ published by Ars Technica, Marks belittles Harvard lawyer Charles Nesson who’s leading a team of university students in defence of Joel Tenenbaum, accused by the RIAA of being a heinous copyright infringer.
Marks was responding to an earlier Ars OpEd from Nesson.
In his waffling, “Yet even with this emerging legal landscape, the rights of artists, songwriters, and record labels deserve protection,” says Marks. “Unfortunately, there are those who seem to overlook that fact, including a Harvard law school professor, his class, and their client Joel Tenenbaum, a defendant in one of our illegal music downloading cases.”
The implication is the RIAA has successfully sued any number of alleged copyright infringers or, as the RIAA calls them, file sharing criminals and thieves.
However, of the 40,000 or so subpoenas fired at not merely innocent men and women, but also young children, not one case has resulted in a win for the RIAA and in fact, only a single case — Jammie Thomas’ — has actually made it to a civil court. And even that’s being reheard.
Some defendants, “including Mr. Tenenbaum, have, “essentially admitted to the illegal activity,” says Marks, going on, “Someone breaks the law, thumbs his nose at the person harmed, ignores settlement offers and then gets to walk away?”
With the Bush and Obama administrations behind them, he and other RIAA factotums routinely thumb their noses at the law, ignore due process and walk away.
“What kind of message does that send and how is that fair?” – Marks wonders.
Indeed, and the message is: Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) have carte blanche to do whatever they like.
In a criminal case, the defendant has the full weight of state and federal law as a guarantee s/he will have a fair and open trial.
However, RIAA victims must rely entirely upon themselves with absolutely no help from anyone. They’re tried and declared guilty not by a court, but by the mainstream media, who cite specious RIAA testimony and ‘facts’ as evidence.
Meanwhile, the Tenenbaum case is a, “crusade waged by a Harvard professor to gut the copyright laws that protect creators and his attempt to transform a courtroom into a ‘three-ring circus’,”says Marks.
As a principal RIAA ringmaster himself, he’ll know all about ‘circuses’.
“For a music community severely harmed by illegal music downloading, including thousands of working class folks out of jobs,” says Marks, parroting his colleague, Cara Duckworth.
“Even against a backdrop of an entire community suffering — hundreds of artists dropped from rosters, billions of dollars and thousands of jobs lost during the last ten years — we have strived [sic] to implement our legal campaign in a fair and reasonable manner,” says Marks with a straight face, adding:
“We’ve never once sought maximum damages in our court cases against individual downloaders. We let courts and juries decide the appropriate dollar amount for any case that reaches that far stage.”
What courts? What juries? Only one case has been heard from start to finish, and even that was declared a mistrial.
But, “this program has never been about the dollars,” he concludes in the first of the only two accurate statements in the entire piece.
Because the lawsuits aren’t about money, and never were. They centre solely on gaining complete and total control of online music distribution.
“Ultimately, this case, despite the legal theatrics, is just like any other: a means to an end,” he adds, in the other.
What end? The Big 4 music cartel’s.
No need to stay tuned.
brutalisation of music fans – RIAA lawsuits are ‘tough love’, October 18, 2007
RIAA attacks – Jammie Thomas has a new lawyer! May 19, 2009
killing herself – Student threatens suicide over RIAA lawsuit, February 16, 2009
Ars Technica - RIAA responds: Nesson more like P.T. Barnum than David, May 31, 2009
Joel Tenenbaum – Bar FSF brief in Tenenbaum, demands RIAA, May 14, 2009
Ars OpEd – Nesson speaks: Inside P2P’s “David v. Goliath” story, May 15, 2009
parroting his colleague – Dear RIAA: My name is Brittany Kruger, February 6, 2oo9
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June 1st, 2009 at 12:12 pm
“Yes, we ‘get it.’”
No, you “don’t.”
The second anyone refers to file-sharing as “stealing” or makes references to the amount of jobs lost based on the false premise that every song downloaded is a sale lost, that is the moment that I immediately put on my rubber boots and prepare of the flood of excrement.
There is no “legal alternative” to the desire for the elimination of the RIAA. It’s a decade too late for forgiveness.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:24 pm
What’s the point? This guy is just a hired gun who is going to say whatever his paymaster tells him. You can’t compare him with people who work purely due to personal conviction and principle, such as Charles Nesson.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 am
A puppet vs. a law professor…. who to belive, the one that gets paid to say what he says or the one who has the law as his passion? I would go for the law guy because I have a feeling he might be a BIT more objective in his view.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:45 am
When they say “The artists’ rights need protecting” they mean “The publishers’ privileges (monopolies) need protecting”.
As I’ve pointed out a few times before, language has changed in the last few centuries. The term ‘privilege’ was soon described as a ‘legal right’ and then shortened to simply ‘right’. Meanwhile the original term, ‘natural right’ that ‘right’ used to describe without needing qualification, has now to be qualified as ‘natural right’ to distinguish it from ‘legal right’.
Consequently, the labels are always very happy to say ‘our rights must be protected’, because as we all know, rights are good. Er no, only natural rights are good. Legal rights (aka privileges) are, as Thomas Paine would say, an injustice.
Liberty = right (natural right) to copy and build upon one’s own possessions (even if originally produced by someone else)
Copyright = privilege (’legal right’) to suspend the aforementioned, excluding others from making or distributing copies/derivatives of what they have.
So, Houston, we have a problem: the record labels and the people both want their rights protected.
Plainly one of these ‘rights’ to be protected can’t actually be a natural right, but must be a privilege. This is because privileges reserve a right from the many to the one. That’s why the privilege of copyright is in direct opposition to the right to copy.
Which do you think is the natural right? The one mankind’s had since he copied his fellows to learn the art of making baskets and painting on cave walls, or the one created in the 18th century for printers?
The right to copy, or the privilege of excluding others from making copies?
You can see why the privileged would like to call their privilege a right can’t you? They don’t want you to notice that it isn’t actually a right in the natural sense of the word.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Man
Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges:
It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . They . . . consequently are instruments of injustice.