p2p news / p2pnet: The Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign is now approaching $11,000, which is pretty impressive. It’s by the people, for the people, and to paraphrase Pogo Possum, the people is us, represented by a 42-year-old new York mother who’s decided she’s not going to be blackmailed by the Big Four record labels, Warner Music, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal and EMI (all of whom have repeatedly been found guilty of numerous wrongs) for something she didn’t do.

But one question apparently hasn’t been satisfactorily answered: Is the money going into some already super-rich law firm’s coffers?

In a word, No. In my last post, under the italicised quote on ‘Discovery,’ I wrote, “Putting this material together invariably costs a huge amount, which is where the bulk of the money being raised in the Fight Goloiath campaign will go — NOT on lawyers’ fees”. But at least one person – a lawyer, as it happens – read this to mean I was saying none of the money was going to lawyers, which wasn’t, the case.

So no one else would make the same mistake, I deleted ” NOT on lawyers’ fees”.

The RIAA’s sick sue ‘em all campaign.
The entire Big Four legal strategy hinges largely on the fact victims are just ordinary people with ordinary resources who don’t have a hope in hell of matching the virtually limitless amounts of cash the labels lash out for high-priced, expert legal teams, and associated costs such as researchers and professional investigators.

If every one of the victims had opted to do what Patti is doing – take it to the max – in all likelihood, none of this would be happening and the labels would have been forced to accept p2p as their future, not their enemy.

They’ll have to do that eventually but not, it seems, until they’re ruined the lives of thousands of people around the world.

Meanwhile, ironically, you’re the one that’s paying for the RIAA’s sick, and unimaginably expensive, sue ‘em all campaign, which relies wholly on victimizing people such as Patti Santangelo and, now, her children.

The multi-billion-dollar Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG’s RIAA have the money to spend because you’re still buying their over-priced, cookie-cutter CDs and downloading through the likes of iTunes ——— while they coldly use people like Patti to try to fighten you into buying more.

Meanwhile, as p2pnet’s Alex H puts it here:

“Retaining a lawyer is not the extent of the total legal fees that can be racked up fighting a civil lawsuit. Need to file a document with the court? Pay up. Need to subpoena a RIAA “piracy investigator”? Pay up. Need a one-off conversation with an expert in a particular legal or technical field? Pay up. It’s not a ‘Lawyer costs $100/hour x 35 hours = $3,500 in legal fees’ kind of situation.”

A one-man business
What I meant by the sentence quoted earlier was: most of the money you’re contributing is being spent on the materials and other expenses which are absolutely essential so Jordan Glass, Patti’s lawyer, can defend her during the upcoming civil, not criminal, jury trial, slated for May.

And I apologise if I inadvertently misled anyone into thinking none of this would go on lawyers’ fees. But I promise you: the donations are being used solely for Patti’s legal defense and now she and one lawyer a (note: ‘lawyer’ – not legal team) are by themselves standing up to the multi-national corporate music industry from a small office they’re renting to work from.

Why did Glass, who in effect runs a one-man business, take Santangelo vs Big Music on? “I think that what’s happening is a social wrong,” he told me. And I believe he means that.

“I told Patti that a proper defense would cost $240,000,” he said. “Clearly, that’s not going to happen. But if she can at least get past discovery, she has a fighting chance and, as you know, we are fighting, and it’s making a difference.

“We need to know if we can pursue discovery by March 5. That’s the deadline that was already here when I signed on, and it can’t be change.

“And remember, the court has placed this on a fast track, so discovery must be completed by May 5. Whatever we have by that date is all we’re allowed to go to trial with, and since everything has a 45 to 60 day turnaround, between the time to respond and the allowable objections, obtaining transcripts and supplying information to opposing counsel, this game is almost over: March 5 is around the corner, and it’s just about 60 days from there to May 5th.

“If this doesn’t get done now, it doesn’t get done in this case. Ever.”

‘While I can control my own fees, I can’t demand the same of others’
Glass and I have come close to trading words, a couple of times, because I’ve been pressing him on our behalf: after all, I donated money to the campaign just like everyone else; and on top of that, I have more reason than most for harbouring a deep and lasting distrust of lawyers.

But I have no doubts the money is being properly used. It’s in an escrow account, controlled by Patti, and it’s being spent on genuine expenses which are coming from all directions, expected and not, large and small, including, “a very small petty cash fund to buy lunch and dinner when work continues in the office and so far, that totals $6.00,” says Glass.

Alex H referred to lawyer’s fees at $100.00 per hour, he goes on, but, “First year associates in New York are billed out at over $200.00 per hour. Paralegals are billed out at between $50.00 and $125.00 per hour.

“While I can control my own fees, I can’t demand the same of others. We’ll need technical experts (even if I knew enough about that level of the technology, I couldn’t testify), who’ll be entitled to a disclosed appearance fee, and additional legal help at trial.”

“Perhaps it’s easiest to write, ‘no economic profit’,” he says. “Nothing to pay for my own food or home expenses, nothing to go into a retirement fund or cover taxes or social security payments or anything else that might be stretched as meaning ‘to make a living,’ no vacation, no cars, no back-door ways of claiming money isn’t really money.”

The bottom line
By far the vast majority of the people accused of sharing music with each other didn’t know they were doing it, as the RIAA itself admits. They thought they were simply downloading songs for their own use and NOT for re-sale, as the Big Four keep trying to imply.

And as the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Fred von Lohmann recently emphasised, the RIAA itself condones burning CDs for personal use, even though it was 100% responsible for driving 321 Studios, a company which made software to allow CD owners to do exactly that, into ruin.

Don Verrilli said to the Supreme Court last year, “The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.”

And while the RIAA is targetting Santangelo and people like her, the RIAA openly admits most p2p users don’t even know their files are in a shared folder.

“As an initial matter, P2P software may, upon installation, automatically search a user’s entire hard drive for content,” states P2P File-Sharing Workshop – Comment, P034517 – Comments of The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), November 15, 2004, going on:

“Files that users have no intention of sharing may end up being offered to the entire P2P network. Continued sharing of personal information is hard to avoid and is facilitated by confusing and complicated instructions for designating shared items. A study by Nathaniel S. Good and Aaron Krekelberg at HP Laboratories showed that “the majority of the users…were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive.”

File sharers are not crooks or criminals. Nothing was stolen and no one was deprived of something he or she formerly owned. At the absolute worst, most of them have innocently and unknowingly infringed someone’s copyright.

Not one of the more than 18,000 victims stood to gain a single penny from their file-sharing ventures. No money changed hands and no illicit profits were made.

The Big Four are not, as they claim, being devastated by people who download music. They are, however, falling prey to the reality that they’re trying to do 20th century business in the 21st century.

File sharers are not causing unbelievable hardship to artists under contract to the labels.

The victimization of Patti Santangelo and others like her is not driving people away from the p2p networks to the Big Four backed and supported corporate download sites. To the contrary.

None of the 18,000 and more men, women and children being pilloried have been found guilty of file sharing not only because no such offense exists, but also because none of them have yet appeared in a civil court before a judge and jury.

Patti Santengelo will be the first.

Stay tuned and while you do, add to the Fight Goliath fund through the button below, or via the snail-mail address under it.

Patti Santangelo
C/O PO Box 274
Hartsdale
New York 10530-0274

Cheers! And thanks …

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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