Big Music’s Britanny blunder?
p2p news / p2pnet: p2pnet editor Jon Newton contributes to TechNewsWorld.
Here’s his latest >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
New Year, Same Old Story
By Jon Newton – TechNewsWorld
The Recording Industry Association of America and a member of its legal team may have committed a serious blunder in its efforts to use the American legal system to pillory another customer, Britanny Chan, a 14-year-old Michigan schoolgirl.
It’s 2006 — a brand new year and the entertainment cartels are already crying doom and gloom. As usual, rather than acknowledging they’re the authors of their own misfortunes, they’re blaming the most important people in their worlds — their customers. Worse, they’re continuing with their bizarre attempts to try to sue consumers into toeing corporate bottom lines.
Patti Santangelo, the New York mother who’s flatly refusing to be cowed by Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI terror tactics, is becoming a household name. Surfers are getting behind her as she gets ready to take on the Big Four Organized Music cartel in a coming court battle.
As I write this at 4:25 am Pacific time on Tuesday, the Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign has reached US$4,417.13.
Show Me the Proof
Santangelo isn’t alone. The Recording Industry Association of America Latest News about Recording Industry Association of America and a member of its legal team may have committed a serious blunder in its efforts to use the American legal system to pillory another customer, Britanny Chan, a 14-year-old Michigan schoolgirl.
Only one of the RIAA’s founding members, Warner Music, is actually American. The other three are Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), Vivendi Universal (France), and EMI (Britain). The RIAA is still trying to convince the world that the multi-billion-dollar Big Four labels are being “devastated” by people who use the P2P networks to share music with each other online, that its artists are being neglected and that numerous support workers are experiencing extreme financial hardship as a direct result.
It claims file-sharers are causing huge losses in sales, the convoluted reasoning apparently being that someone on the receiving end in a file-sharing action would have paid $1 or more to buy the song from an online corporate music site supported and supplied by the cartel, or from an offline retail outfit, had she or he not downloaded it from a site not supplied by the Big Four.
Case Killer
It’s a patently ridiculous assertion and neither the labels nor anyone else has ever been able to explain how it works in practice, let alone prove it. However, the mainstream media consistently report it as factual.
Meanwhile, the RIAA failed to get at Britanny through her mother, so now they’re trying to open a new window of opportunity.
Britanny is a minor, which means they can’t haul her before a judge by herself, so they’re trying to have a guardian ad litem, someone named to look out for the best interests of a child in legal proceedings, appointed.
The RIAA initiated a January 5 hearing centering on this demand and, says Recording Industry vs. The People, the hearing dealt with such questions as these:
* If a guardian ad litem were to be appointed, who’d pay his or her fees?
* Who’ll pay the fees of the guardian’s attorney?
* Was it a violation of the court rules for the RIAA lawyer to use the minor’s name in the caption?
The last item is the possible killer.
Britanny is a minor — and when someone sues a minor, the case is supposed to be against “Anonymous.”
However, she’s clearly been named.
What’s the Payoff?
Lawyer Matthew Krichbaum was working for the RIAA when, it’s alleged, he tried to get a 15-year-old witness to “say something that wasn’t true” in Motown vs. Nelson. He’s now involved in the case against Chan.
“There was an interesting exchange between the judge and Matthew Krichbaum, the local counsel,” John Hermann, the lawyer who’s working with the Chans, told me. “The judge basically said, OK, I’ll appoint a guardian, but who’s going to pay for the guardian and the minor’s attorney? Not surprisingly, local counsel suggested Chan should pay the fees. The judge interjected that normally, the requesting party (the RIAA) is responsible and indicated that he was inclined to force them to pay.”
If a copyright-infringement case such as this “were fully litigated, in the manner in which the RIAA litigates cases, I’d expect the guardian ad litem’s fees to be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and the fees of his or her counsel and expert witnesses to possibly reach or even exceed $100,000,” says Ray Beckeman, the lawyer working with Santangelo.
“Since the likely recovery in the case is zero, it being unlikely that the teenaged defendant has any nonexempt assets with which to satisfy a judgment, it’s not clear why the RIAA is proceeding to ask for appointment of a guardian ad litem.”
Meanwhile, the case is under submission. A written decision will be issued “in due course.” Stay tuned.
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As I said at the begining of this, Patti Santangelo is leading the way, but she’s not going to get there without help – a lot of help, hence the Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign.
And if you’re thinking, I’m in the UK, or Sweden or Dubai or wherever So it doesn’t affect me, think again. The RIAA is only one of a raft of similar outfits strategically positioned around the world, and they’re components in a carefully orchestrated, long-term international plan: to use the pretext of copyright infringement to gain control of how, and by whom, digital music files are distributed online.
If and when Patti wins, her success will reverberate loudly throughout the world. So it doesn’t matter where you are, post a button and/or make a donation through the button below. A snail-mail addie is being organized. Sorry it’s taking so long.
Below is the current (as of 9:20 am Pacific on January 11) list of sites:
- http://p2pnet.net $1231.19
- http://jasonrohrer.n3.net $1185.78
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- http://www.downhillbattle.org $310.12
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- http://www.bl0g.co.uk/ $47.75
- http://www.yourmercifulgod.co.uk/ $28.23
- http://psg.com/ $19.12
- http://www.p2pjihad.org/ $19.12
- http://www.boycott-riaa.com $19.12
- http://www.pod2peer.blogspot.com/ $18.92
- http://blog.andrlik.org $14.26
- http://http://www.myspace.com/brizmo $9.41
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- http://www.azoz.com $4.55
- http://www.soundnet.co.uk/ $4.50
If you’d like to host a button on your own site, go here for the code.
To see Jason Rohrer’s amount and site tracker, go here.
Cheers! And thanks. And all the best …
January 12th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Presumably payments by snail mail are preferred in US dollars?
January 12th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
After reading this article it seems pretty obvious why they are doing this to Brittany Chan.
1. They can’t afford to let a case actually go to a jury.
It will hurt them badly.
2. They can’t afford to just drop the case ( it would encourage
others to fight ).
3. Since their only leverage is their cash base, If they can
convince a judge to make Chan’s camp pay for the “ad Lietum”
it will force the Chan side to, once again, settle or go bankrupt.
Using money to manipulate law.
Hey Troll, isn’t that criminal ?
Also Mr Troll, read the article
“Malum Prohibitum, Malum In Se”
Speaking of Malum Prohibitum ….
Aren’t they working on making Trolling … a crime ??
January 12th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
“I think mercedes over charge for their whole range of cars, Idoes that mean that i break into a show room and steal a C class to ‘make amends’?. No, firstly because I am not a criminal and secondly because the idea itself is stupid and flawed.”
That is precisely what Bush did. He thought Iraq, or Saddam was bad and he went into the country and took it. Now that is real stealing, on a huge scale, an entire country.
Yes, taking a Mercedes is stupid because without an owner’s license you cannot drive the car. Secondly is stealing because the owner of the Mercedes can no longer use or sell the Mercedes, while the thief can.
Really, the comparisons are nonsense. As to copying being stealing, that is pure nonsense too. If copiers are thiefs, surely almost every policeman, judge, lawyer, governor, etc., is a criminal, since that is what everyone (or their children) did with blanks cassettes or cds.
Surely, if cars could be made or copied at zero cost, we all would have many cars which were not paid for. If that meant the loss of profits for the automakers or loss of jobs for the autoworkers, wouldn’t that be great. Then the financial and labor resources would become available for other uses.
I dont’t pay for using records in my parties or for singing songs in the shower or to my friends. If anybody says I’m steling, the person saying it is an intellectual moron. If the law were to say that what I do is criminal, then those who passed the law are the intellectual morons.
As to “P2P filestealing is obviously responsible for hurting many musicians”, that to is pure nonsense too. What has hurt musicians the most is that the art of music has been hijacked by the copyright cartels and turned into something that is grotesque, a tool for lawsuits against kids and their mothers, the cartel’s customers.
BTW, my father was a musician/songwriter. What really hut him the most was that the music cartels (the ones you are evidently protecting) robbed and used his music and hardly ever paid him and when they paid him it was for a small fraction of what was due.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
January 12th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Well said Rafael.
January 12th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
“Isn’t it funny the world some people live in. P2P filestealing is obviously responsible for hurting many musicians lives but the thieves and thier defendants blame the Record companies. ”
Yes it is funny.
As I enjoy pointing out to industry shills ….
The record industry, every year, enjoys RECORD PROFITS.
Obviously, money is going from the customers hands to the
Corporation’s pockets.
The INDUSTRY is responsible for getting that money to the artists.
If the musicians are going broke, and the industry is still getting
rich, who then, is really hurting the artists ?
Denial is amazing, isn’t it ?
Using examples of physical property theft to describe infringement
is, in fact, stupid and flawed. I guess you are half right, or is that
half witted ?
Stop this ridiculous defence of extortion and fraud because thats
what the industry does everyday as a regular practice. The only people of intelligence that defend the industry do so because they are PAID to do so.
What’s in YOUR wallet ?
January 12th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Your argument is flawed, filesharing is making a copy of the file and not taking the file off the computer. What the RIAA and all there lackies are crying about it the thought of the theory of lost sales. They say a song is a song and it doesn’t matter if the format its in is poor quality. And before you get on your high horse of sh** agian I don’t share stuff on them except for bittorent anime fansubs that are not licensed in the states yet, usally buying them after they come out on DVD. but I don’t like DRM and as recently found out for good reason. I also don’t like weak attacks like all these where defending yourself would bankrupt you if you tried.
January 12th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Just so we know a little more about the big picture and put more things in perspective…….Just how much does an artist make off of an average $15.00 US CD……And if anybody knows the breakdown of the rest of the $15.00 , that would be interesting to know also.
January 13th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Here are a few articles on pricing on cds, why I wont buy cds anymore and dvd v.s. cd priceing
http://downlode.org/etext/negativland_shiny.html
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum9/9522.htm
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/03/dynamic_pricing.html