[LINK] RIAA and Obama

[Jan Whitaker]

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?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/22/184221&from=rss



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the 
world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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