Perhaps some people are looking over the fact that he wasn’t doing what the MPAA said he was, yet he still got hammered. The movie he was supposed to be making available didn’t even exsist yet, but the multi-billion dollar industry was still able to sue him into the ground. Were the judges deaf? Drunk? Mentally retarded?

Like a previous poster said, Rossi is challenging a law, which by it’s very nature, should be un-constitutional. It’s not about his reputation, it’s a principal that’s being fought for, and a right that Amaricans are entitled to enjoy.

The entertainment media’s practices are not unlike the controversial gill nets used by fisherman – the huge dragnets which often cause widespread injury and death to a great many animals which are not the actual target of the nets, often causing immense environmental destruction for the small benefit of catching a few fish.

Similarly, the MPAA’s scorched-earth campaign that ensnares a lot of innocent people is simply brushed off as the necessary evil of enforcing copyright, a type of ‘collateral damage’ – a common offensive euphemism mouthed by military leaders when they recklessly slaughter huge numbers of civilians in their pursuit of a small military target.

immunity and impunity

The DMCA specifically gives copyright holders blanket immunity from any and all damages caused by their own recklessness or negligence, no matter how extreme or blatant. This flies in the face of every principle of personal responsibility and common law.

For a drunk driver to have a “good faith belief” that his driving ability was not impaired after downing a sixpack, and another “good faith belief” that the traffic light was green when plowing through a busy intersection – a rather rational argument, indeed – does not absolve him of responsibility for his own reckless actions.

Yet this is exactly the same sort of situation in which the record and movie industries are able to execute with impunity – after all, they practically wrote their own loopholes into the DMCA law, giving themselves blanket immunity.

-tm

Rick

TT

He charged people six bucks per month for becoming a member – only to show them basically worthless stuff about how they could get movies on P2P networks in the member section. The articles themselves – called “special reports” are much worse that what you would get on countless free P2P websites – e.g. they recommend using Earthstation 5.

This is completely the same thing as Kazaagold and all those other scammer sites. The only difference: Rossi apparently fooled the wrong guys. Even the MPAA thought he’d sell movie downloads. They sued him out of existence. Big deal.

Worse if the operator of such a site refuses, opting to fight such a claim, then the ISP is held also responcible even though the ISP had nothing to do with it. So either way the site is such down, even without probable cause to be necessary to be proven. Just such a scenerio could shut this site down merely by the claim of “we suspect”. All of us here know that there isn’t an infringing file to be found here. Bots don’t distinglish, this is part of the problem. By mentioning a copyrighted name in commentary, even though legal for the purposes of discourse you could be set up as a host for an infringement and the invoking of the DMCA. While you are innocent of such charges the legal battle will break most cases into submission by the simply outspending beyond the capabilities of most citizens.

So where does this leave average Joe when it comes to being upheld by the law? Out in the cold is where it leaves him…