Posted on 03/23/2009 6:02:54 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes
"The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
LOL suckers.
fyi
Precedent and common sense have no place in the new Obama dictatorship. Get used to it. Eric Holder is Obama’s hitman on the Constitution.
These people stealing intellectual property, whether kids or not, whether culturally correct or not, should be tried on criminal charges and if convicted, imprisoned.
Ping for tech/drm related
...Guess that means I have to erase all those tapes I made off of the so called “Public” airwaves: Uppp, what is it today? Public or Private???
heh—here we are again....
Yup :(
I’m on the fence here. First, I have no doubt Obama’s administration will follow the orders of the copyright cartel for any issues involving copyright. That’s pretty much a given.
But I am for high potential statutory damages because they serve two valid purposes.
The first is for copyright holders when they don’t know how many copies of their works have been distributed without permission. What do you do if a work is worth $1, and someone has distributed some unknown amount between 1 and 200,000 copies? You can’t put actual damages on that. So the court system gets to decide how much of the statutory damages to award up to an amount that may provide fair compensation.
Second is for developers of free software. Your software has a sale price of $0. So when Big Company starts distributing it without complying with your favorite free software license, what are you to do? Ask for damages? What damages? You would have recieved $0 for sales anyway. Statutory damages give the developer more leverage against Big Company infringing on his copyrights.
First, there's no such thing as stealing "intellectual property" unless you, for example, lift a CD from Best Buy for fraudulently get a copyright registered to you. What many in P2P are doing is infringing on the exclusive, but not exhaustive, distribution right of the copyright holder. It is a civil issue between the person whose rights have been violated and the person who violated his rights. That's how the issue of rights violation normally works.
whether kids or not, whether culturally correct or not, should be tried on criminal charges and if convicted, imprisoned
You have your wish thanks to the copyright cartel's buying of Congress, especially Democrats. It is so bad that one Democrat was often referred to as "Howard Berman (D-Disney)" and "the representative from Hollywood."
way to go college studeint ROOKIES!
suckers.
Ha, ha. All the libs who said that the RIAA only got away with their shenanigans because they were in bed with the Bush administration just got pwnd.
Thank you. I couldn’t agree more.
Unfortunately, conservatism tends to leave the room when it comes to RIAA threads. I always thought conservatives were supposed to respect private property rights - in this case the rights of the artists and record companies - not trample them. Conservatives also like to portray themselves as defenders of the Constitution. The founders believed that copyright was so important that they specifically provided for it in the Constitution. Unfortunately, conservatives are just as capable of hypocrisy as our "friends" on the left.
A real property owner has to be content with shooing the kids off his lawn. Imaginary property owners, on the other hand, can fine kids their life savings for a first offense, thereby making themselves exceedingly rich. They get to arbitrarily make their lawns 100x larger every few years without having to buy any more property from anyone. They can make all lawn mower owners pay taxes to them, even for mowing their own lawns. They can even force lawn mowers to be designed to only operate in one city at a time. Don't you wish you, as a real estate owner, had powers like that?
They did provide Congress some limited power in that regard. Given, however, that the Founders were certainly aware of reproducible forms of expression other than the written word (lithographs, e.g.), I would think they would have mentioned artists along with authors and inventors if they thought copyright protection of non-written artistic works was important. That isn't to imply that the copyright power might not extend to some non-textual media, but nothing in I.8 would suggest that it was a priority.
Certainly I see nothing in I.8 that would justify copyright provisions which substantially interfere with technological development, or which serve to extend people's "exclusive use" periods indefinitely. The lack of authority doesn't deter Congress, however.
Specious argument, at best.
These tools we use to access the internet...computers, switches, routers, Fiber-optic repeaters, likely the software you're using to access...all of it is protected by Intellectual Property rights. Most music and published writing, automobile design, aircraft design...nearly every invention created by mankind in the last 100 years is the result of the economic incentive provided by intellectual property rights.
I won't even mention the 1000's of artists so protected in addition to the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Boccelli, The New York Metropolitan Opera and Clint Eastwood.
The very foundation of Western Civilization rests, in addition to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, on Intellectual Property.
You would undermine this foundation so you don't have to pay for the latest Metallica record? Have you no respect for the artist you're stealing from?
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