p2pnet RIAA Special, 9
I’m re-publishing a number of p2pnet stories highlighting RIAA depredations against Big 4 customers. And lest we forget: it’s easy to see these crimes against ordinary people, including young children, as being perpetrated by faceless corporations.
However, highly intelligent, highly educated men and women such as Jay Berman, Hilary Rosen, Cary Sherman, Amy Weiss, Jenny Engebretsen, Cara Duckworth and Jonathan Lamy, all of whom have been, or still are, dedicated RIAA troopers, have been knowingly and deliberately using the mainstream media to people they knew full well were innocent to public ridicule and embarrassment accusing them, without a shred of evidence, of being “massive online distributors of copyrighted music”.
I believe some 40,000 people were victimised in this way.
Only two ultimately reached the US civil court system, but the primary objective had been achieved:
* Create a climate of terror under which to operate a bizarre marketing campaign.
Remember: all of these atrocities — because that’s exactly what they are — were carried out in the names of artists the labels have under contract, and “rights holders”, ie, the major labels, or one of more of their scores of subsidiaries.
Thanks and Cheers!
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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p2pnet.net news view:- “I can barely walk,” RaeJ told me. “It’s rough and we’re living from paycheck to paycheck.”
RaeJ Schwartz (Ray-Jay) is a seriously ill New York mother who’s being persecuted by the Big Four Organized Music Cartel’s RIAA.
She has multiple sclerosis, but that doesn’t seem to trouble the RIAA, short for Recording Industry Association of America, owned by Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany).
It’s also almost implied that MS is something which can be lightly dismissed. But it isn’t. It’s an awful disease, and there’s no known cure.
“As a person with MS I think I get a little leeway in my coming in on this late,” says a slashdot poster, going on:
MS symptoms are elevated by emotional inputs like Stress. I’m sure that the case is putting her into undo stress and in turn making life VERY hard. When you know that something like this is hanging over your head even a ‘normal’ person would freak out. Imagine (if you can or even want to) trying to deal with this while being literally paralyzed by it. The longer this drags out the more she has to go through physical suffering as well as the emotional suffering of feeling wrongfully accused. She has my support and well wishes (and as much solumedrol as she needs to help)
Another slashdot post says:
My mother had Secondary Progressive MS [msif.org]. In addition to the exacerbation of physical symptoms the emotional effects of stress on someone who has already been robbed of her physical self reliance cannot be overemphasized.
After living with MS for forty of her sixty-two years my mother could no longer take it and killed herself.
Since she was physically incapable of any active suicide method (opening a pill bottle, holding a razor or even a fork) she had to starve herself to death.
Unless things have drastically changed since I was young, having MS is also very expensive. In 2005 constant dollars my mother’s 1974 medical care cost was about $166,000. Since healthcare costs have risen much faster than inflation over that period I can only believe that would be much higher today.
Impoverishing victims of expensive and debilitating diseases with frivolous lawsuits is reprehensible behavior to say the least.
Hell bent on suing the people they should be wooing
Mashboxx chairman Wayne Rosso is smitten with the people who run the RIAA. He says basically, they’re good guys, fun to be with and very supportive.
I don’t doubt Rosso believes that. But I have to ask myself why, if Mitch Bainwol and Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s two main men, and oft-quoted spokesmen and women such as Jenni Engebretsen and Jonathan Lamy are such fundamentally decent people, they haven’t quit the RIAA long ago?
They’re all highly intelligent, highly skilled, highly qualified people and one would think they’d have little trouble finding equally rewarding (in all senses) positions elsewhere.
Because as things stand, they and other RIAA employees are fashioning and directing what can only be described as bloody minded, vicious and ongoing attacks on helpless, not to say innocent, American men, women and children. And there’s no way these RIAA employees can be unaware of what’s happening.
Through emails and phone calls, I’ve come to know a few of the RAA victims and the lawyers who act for them and they’re all exactly what they seem to be – very ordinary, genuinely decent people. There’s not a thief among them and you’d think the huge, enormously powerful, Big Four record labels would be wooing them instead of suing them.
Not that Bainwol, et al, are alone. The sue ‘em all campaign is world-wide and RIAA clones and cohorts in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, are doing exactly the same thing.
A purely technical argument
In the US, among the victims are Patti Santangelo, who remains firm in her decision to fight Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG; RaeJ Schwartz, the woman who’s battling multiple sclerosis as well as the RIAA, and another disabled mother, Tanya Andersen, who’s taken the attack to the labels as she sues them under the RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.
But at this moment in time, the attention is on RaeJ because, as her lawyer, Ray Beckerman, points out in Recording Industry vs The People, “The RIAA has made a request for a premotion conference in Elektra v Schwartz, indicating that it intends to make a motion to dismiss Ms Schwartz’s counterclaim for attorneys fees, on the ground that a copyright defendant’s claim for attorneys fees cannot be expressed as a counterclaim.”
This is the RIAA using a purely technical argument to make life even more impossible for a woman who’s already under unbelievable stress because of a chronic, life-threatening illness.
She has multiple sclerosis and there’s no doubt in my mind the RIAA is making this terrible medical condition far worse.
Like so many Big Four victims, RaeJ had, and has, no idea how to share a music file, and the RIAA knows this full well. But it’s a way to get to her daughter, the real target of the RIAA’s owners, the Big Four Organized Music cartel members, all of whom have been caught red-handed at bribery and price fixing, and all of whom have for decades been robbing the customers and artists (who’ve made them so very, very rich) blind.
They say they’re being “devastated” because “criminals” and “thieves” such as RaeJ have been “massively” distributing copyrighted digital music files online. However, nothing has been stolen, no money has changed hands and its’ never been shown by the labels or anyone else that files shared equal sales lost.
As far as money is concerned, the revenues regularly and routinely pulled down by the Big Four would easily support several under-developed countries.
If they’re having sales problems, they’re wholly of the labels’ own making: bad product, bad business decisions, bad management, terrible pricing and their mindless refusal to see the people who’ve developed the p2p technologies they’re fighting as friends and potential collaborators; and consumers as responsible people, not hard core crooks.
‘A mere formality’
But back to Mrs Schwartz, for some obscure reason the RIAA is deathly afraid.
In Elektra v Schwartz, it’s desperately trying to shoot down RaeJ’s counterclaim for attorneys’ fees. Do the RIAA’s masters fear the financial consequences now and down the road? Or is it something else?
Although it would have you believe differently, the RIAA is by no mean on top of things and one of its more highly publicized defeats involved Paul Wilkes whose lawyer, Daliah Saper, said the labels were, “bound to mistakenly bring cases against innocent individuals with their drift net litigation tactics”.
And in the Schwartz counterclaim, an ACLU, EFF, Public Citizen brief exhibit, Capitol v Foster, also tags the RIAA’s “driftnet” tactics.
Ray Beckerman, RaeJ’s lawyer, had both asked the RIAA to drop the case because of her failing health, and offered to withdraw his client’s counterclaim if the RIAA lawyers could simply back up their claim that the counterclaim for attorneys fees wasn’t allowable.
“I wouldn’t want to get into motion practice over a mere formality,” said Beckerman. “We’ll let you know,” said the RIAA. And that was the end of that.
It’s almost as if the RIAA is saying, ‘OK, she has MS. But that does not let her off the heinous crime of sharing music.’
A crime in its own right
But RaeJ isn’t alone. Far from it. An estimated 20,000 or so men and women, and even very young children, are being victimized under the warped RIAA sue ‘em all marketing plan.
When the RIAA decided Patti Santangelo would probably make a good mark, they went for her with both barrels. But she wasn’t having any, so when they couldn’t cow her, they turned on two of her children.
Tanya Andersen, a mother whose sole income is from a medical disability pension, is also being harried from pillar to post by the RIAA. But like Patti, she’s refusing to give in and currently has a case under way against the labels under the RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.
One frequently reads about Class Actions, something the Big Four’s Sony BMG is only too familiar with, and wonders why the victims haven’t gotten together to launch an action against the RIAA, the people who work for it and their employers. And why aren’t other corporate parties involved in these cases also being singled out?
Tanya Andersen is pointing the way, as is David Greubel, a Texas father who says the the $115 million Sharman paid to join the corporate entertaimment fraternity constitutes recovery in full for “injuries allegedly caused by Defendant Greubel, among others”.
These days, class actions are technically difficult and very expensive to bring, I’m told. And the same applies to directly suing the likes of Sharman Networks which owns Kazaa, the p2p application which is named time after time in the RIAA cases, and whose Australian owner is now part of the corporate music scene.
But the times, they are a-changing. The RIAA, and others of its ilk, are losing the war, and in the process, building up a huge reservoir of ill-will against their masters that even the ever-faithful mainstream media can no longer ignore; creating non-stop PR for file sharing, the very thing the Big Four want to defeat; and, best of all, from the point of view of indie music, giving birth to a whole new class of consumer who’s doing everything he or she can to avoid buying anything which smacks even slightly of the Big Four labels.
….. and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 8 p2pnet RIAA poll: final results http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35045
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 7 RIAA vs Kylee hits the mainstream http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35043
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 6 Take a hike, students tell RIAA http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35040
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 5. Us, Them, p2p and file sharing http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35028
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 4. P2p file sharing contained: RIAA http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35024
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 3. Big Music university shill report http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35022
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 2. The ‘We’re Not Taking Any More’ club http://www.p2pnet.net/story/35016
- p2pnet RIAA Special, 1. File sharing, p2p criminals http://www.p2pnet.net/story/34990
February, 2010
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