RIAA escalation - a post for mettle

oh, golly... i can just hear him now... "I TOLD YOU SO...!"

[I]n an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

RIAA's hard-line position seems clear. Its Web site says: "If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you're stealing. You're breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages."

here's mettle, commenting on the relatively recent good ol' days when all we had to worry about was the heinous crime of File-Sharing...

The scary specter of Terrorism alone, no longer seems to provide Big Brother enough pretext and cover to smash the heel of the Jackboots down onto most everybody in order to grind the People into so much mash in the earth.

-- mettle

i am in complete agreement... this isn't simply about protecting the music industry... it's absolutely about expanding the controls of an increasingly fascist society...

you realize where this will start hitting immediately, don't you...? for those of us who travel outside the u.s. frequently, this will give just one more pretext for the warrantless search and seizure of laptops and mp3 players at u.s. customs inspection points, and the immediate detention of those who are found in violation... mark my words...

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the US Government Totalitarians

It becomes pretty clear that the US Government and its private partnerships with major US corporations have been involved in the wholesale spying on US citizens all along.

The Government/Corporate eavesdroppers have long ago concluded that they will have immunity for their crimes no matter what. Normally, the standard meme which has been pushed, (and which has been readily generally accepted with little thought or circumspection), was that, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from surveillance and/or searches."

Of course the Information Haves enjoy a complete advantage over everyone else by maintaining and growing a total (insider) knowledge of the Global Information Grid.

Now comes an example of how things really work:

"House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites"

The Senate version is S.519.

It is likely that they expect the operation of the law to go down like this: "Someone has reported an illegal image. Someone is therefore offended, they have personally found that image obscene and have accordingly reported it and you. Therefore we have no choice but to act on the offended party's complaint."

And most likely, even that won't be enough. Parties will be obliged to comb through every bit and byte, through every virtual nook and cranny looking for anything in everything at all, to possibly get offended about. We will have wholesale packet-sniffing enough to satisfy even the most delicate of all sensibilities.

Gee, it seems like it wasn't all that long ago when we all took umbrage at merely this.

How many times have we heard that lawmakers have simply signed onto or voted for a bill because they never read it? That is like saying that they fired a gun in a crowded direction without looking and that explanation should somehow absolve them. Yet what is worse is that they more often do know, and the excuse that they didn't is a lie.

The so-called "SAFE Act" that was rushed through the House yesterday by a vote of 409 to 2, obliges vast numbers of parties to now become "snitches". No longer are court orders obliged, but rather many parties (the list will grow, it always does) are obliged by the bill to snitch and turn over records and data; but now compliance is mandated to snitch on Internet users, based upon broad undefined subjective interpretations of such nebulous concepts as art and drawings.

Explanations exist for why censorship was ever started in this country to begin with: that it was "to protect the children from starting to masturbate". The Irony is, that for that same reason, (and there is little doubt in this writer's mind), that coupled with the fact of the State having its own sexual appetites, totalitarians will eventually one day work government cameras into the bedrooms of both parents and children alike.

A quick check of the decoy sites last night showed that some of the sites had abruptly switched over to foisting hard core fare over their usual mere soft imagery, to unsuspecting down-loaders. Another deception they have also suddenly begun, is mislabeling downloads as uploads, presumably to misinform grand juries.

This totalitarian scheme will surely scale up to and be applied to music and video and file-sharing very soon as well, as the clearly (to us anyway) unconstitutional expedited "SAFE Act" serves as proof-of-concept for wholesale application to vast other areas of liberal arts and humanities as well.

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smell those red herrings

Here's a little more information shedding light on that recent contrivance, the National Intelligence Estimate:

from Pravda: "Russia and USA sign secret defense memorandum"

Deputy Defense Minister of the Russian Federation, General Yury Baluyevsky and his counterpart, U.S. Admiral Michael Mullen, signed a memorandum on defense cooperation in Washington.

The memorandum specifies the plan of defense cooperation and the compatibility of the armed forces of the two countries in 2008. It was a very fruitful, productive discussion that both parties benefited from, and the chairman desires to keep the content of those discussions between him and his counterpart,” Navy Captain John Kirby, a spokesman for Mullen, said."

It was former world chess champion Garry Kasparov that disclosed on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher that:

[Russian President Vladimir] Putin makes an open friendship with Iranian President Amadenijad because Putin has but one item in his geo-political agenda: He needs high oil prices and tensions in the Middle East help him to keep oil prices at an all time high. So that's why he sells nuclear technology to Iran, he sells missiles to to Hezbollah and Hamas via Syria, because it helps Putin to stay in power. If the oil price goes down, the Putin regime goes down."

And from Garry Kasparov's WSJ op ed:

Opposition activists--or just those who happen to be in the way of the [Putin] administration--are harassed and arrested on false charges of drug possession, extremism, or the latest trend, for owning illegal software."

It is clear the 5th Estate has every intention of foisting the Telcom Immunity down our throats. It was clear that the PATRIOT Act was similarly concocted long before 911. It is clear that file-sharing is to be the next big bugaboo, like the drug laws against marijuana or the First Amendment abridgments against child pornography.

Striking a deal with Russia to target file-sharing as equivalent to Terrorism, would account for why the US Intelligence Community is willing to issue an NIE now admitting that Iran is of no imminent nuclear threat to the US. Such a secret deal is not beyond consideration. Yet the timing also reeks of a red herring to distract us from the Telcom Immunity shenanigans the 5th Estate is currently up to, including Sen. Arlen Specter's S. 2402, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Substitution Act.

Government and corporations have clearly already been invading privacy to snoop for private concerns such as the likes of RIAA and MPAA. The specter of making file sharing a giant bugaboo like government creates out of whole cloth in so many other areas, shows us well, what they are already likely up to.

Enough information has already been leaked to create a reasonable belief that virtually all electronic communications are already being intercepted, diverted and mined at some point for myriad purposes - most of which probably have little to do with preventing acts of terrorism, but rather intend to work all manner of machinations to serve ever-increasing political control by those who are already Haves.

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Minnesota woman fined $222K for sharing 24 songs online

well, i hope the riaa (recording industry association of america) and our government are happy... they've managed to place another citizen in debt for the rest of her life... after all, if we aren't in debt, we're a lot harder to control...

The recording industry on Thursday won the largest judgment so far against consumers who illegally download music over the Internet when a federal jury ordered a 30-year-old Minnesota woman to pay $222,000 for copyright infringement.

The victory could embolden the industry in its four-year legal campaign against piracy at a time when illegal sharing of music online is exploding and dramatically reducing music sales.

The decision by the jury in a federal district court in Duluth, Minn., against Jammie Thomas, an Indian reservation employee, is the first case of its type to come to trial. The verdict could convince others accused of pirating music to settle their cases.

see if the riaa's tactics remind you of anything...

Tanya J. Andersen, a disabled single mom from Beaverton, Oregon, is turning the tables on the RIAA and suing the organization for illegally spying on her. The suit claims that Andersen, one of 21,000 people who have been sued by the RIAA since 2003 for illegally downloading music, is a victim of abusive legal tactics, threats and, yes, spying. Her filing says the RIAA refused to drop its case against her even after the recording industry’s own expert concluded she was innocent, and after Andersen discovered that the RIAA was attributing an Internet name to her that actually belonged to a young man living in Washington.

Andersen also claims that RIAA representatives threatened to interrogate her 10-year-old daughter, Kylee, if Andersen didn’t pay thousands of dollars in fines, alleging that a woman claiming to be the girl’s grandmother call Kylee’s school to inquire about her attendance.

ya know, the riaa and our government really do have a lot in common... but, just remember, the business of america is business...

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