When you need to consistently sue your customers to survive, you already know you're fucked. I can't even tell you how much I enjoy watching the RIAA slowly die. I hope they enjoy their skirmish wins because the war is already over.
I really try not to curse much, but I'm using it here for emphasis. It's the kind of emphasis that cursing can't even do justice to because I just want to scream at the top of my lungs:
To be fair, after reading the article, I'm not surprised at the verdict. Tenenbaum admitted that he lied about several key points, which is enough to piss any jury off, regardless of how skilled your counsel is.
Exaggerate, diminish, omit, or forget things in court -- never, ever lie.
That should not affect the damages awarded. Until recently, damages were supposed to be compensatory in nature, not punitive. In the latest revision of copyright law, the "not punitive" part was removed, and it's hard to claim that tens of thousands of dollars per song is anything but punitive.
I had some hope that Rick Rubin would be able to slap some people around in an effort to stop the insanity, but apparently he was overwhelmed by the minutiae of absurdest corporate bureaucracy and he's basically given up.
Really? Care to provide anything in the way of evidence or justification for this emotively-charged comment? Or does it simply reflect your own wishful thinking?
For every pg and Pirate Bay fanboy screaming at the top of their lungs about how this is going to backfire and how they'll now fileshare just to "stick it to the man", there are 100 casual filesharers who think: "You know what? Maybe I'll just switch over to iTunes. Or Spotify. Or YouTube..."
Tenenbaum said he was "not displeased with the jury considering how the trial went."
This is probably the first reasonable thing anyone involved with this trial (save the Judge, I suppose) has said to date. The RIAA really lucked out by suing someone even douchier than themselves, and then got an exponential boon when the plaintiff's counsel (Charlie Nesson) turned out to me even more of an asshat by orders of magnitude.
The plaintiff in the first case was a fuckup too, to a lesser degree. I guess you have to be a major idiot to still be using a Fasttrack client in 2008 at all, much less after getting infringement letters.
Why is everyone involved in the 'copyfight' so incompetent? Even Lessig has epically lost every single IP case he's ever litigated!
I think the Lessig case was essentially a miscarriage of justice. Until that case I was on the fence wrt to the MPAA having too much influence in hollywood.
Even the mickey mouse copyright extension when taken in the literal legal sense (and that is all the fashion, go for the letter, not the intention of the law) was understandable in a warped sense.
Ever since that lawsuit I've been fighting back in my own warped way, it was my main motivator in launching http://mxchg.com/ , a media player with a friend-to-friend network built in.
When will the recording industry even move to the future? They know iTunes store, myspace music, they know how pervasive internet is and how internet is disrupting the traditional distribution of music, and yet they don't get it.
Another win for copyright! The writing is on the wall after hundreds of similar verdicts through out the last decade, which have killed many music start-ups, along the way. Copyright will continue to win and the public education will continue in their favor!
Hey it's not popular to say the above, but just look at the last decade and the court cases won in their favor, no matter the country. I was just stating fact!
Gladly they have been forced to change their model and now we have free sites like pandora, spotify, vid on youtube and etc...
Though in the courts even amongst a panel of peers (jury) they have always come out victorious. Again just stating the facts!
> Hey it's not popular to say the above, but just look at the last decade and the court cases won in their favor, no matter the country. I was just stating fact!
But it's not a win for copyright, it's a win for onerous laws and senselessly punitive decisions.
It also motivates some people to further skirt copyright laws because they appear so weighted in favor of huge corporations with powerful legal teams.
