Obama Nominates RIAA Lawyer for Solicitor General
wired.com
wired.com
I understand that people want to give lawyers the benefit of the doubt and not judge them by who they represent, but honestly, I find that logic appalling. Would we really be saying that for a lawyer who defended the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal? No, b/c anyone with _any_ integrity would likely walk away from that...or anyone with any political smarts. Same in this case. It seems clear this man is not about ideals or principles but rather money and privilege. Is that who we want in arguably one of the most important non-supreme court law positions in the country?
Even if he _is_ about that, he hasn't proven it with his judgement by taking those cases. This should also count in the decision. I'm sorry, but I cannot find the silver lining in this nomination. Perhaps someone can educate me....
Has not the choice of )Obama to reward bankers who got us into the biggest financial collapse of the world not told you who is boss? There was a coup lately, the companies won we as individuals lost and the US constitution lost
Very poor example... The right for everyone to have a proper defense in criminal trials is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I'm really surprised anyone would argue against it.
That's it for Obama. Great, inspiring speeches, but too many poor decisions, and quite the hand for choosing the wrong people for important positions. Maybe he wants to appease everyone? Either way this is not what I expect from a leader. The RIAA is the exact opposite of "by the people, for the people".
I am officially out of the Obama camp. I suppose now it's off to see that the next Republican candidate is not an un-electable retard from the tea party camp. And BTW clearly anyone remotely associated with the tea party is an un-electable moron.
Check out Duverger's law for more insight on this:
Look at the ACTA talks. It was something of a tipoff that drafts of the agreement were shared with a panel of "big content" lawyers[1], but hidden from the general public, supposedly on grounds of national security. As to substance, leaked drafts required DMCA-type legislative provisions and strongly encouraged "three strikes and you're out" policies for kicking infringers off the net, (they weren't mandated, but were, IIRC, explicitly listed in one draft as a "best practice", with no stated alternatives). And while current drafts back off of that, and some of the other more draconian positions, that's largely due to push-back from other parties, particularly in Europe.
The problem with a two-party system is that whichever you pick, they're going to support something that you really don't like. For me, with the Democrats, this is one of the biggies: on these issues, the party positions have been largely dictated by Hollywood for a fairly long time. (Sonny Bono copyright act, anyone?) Then again, the Republicans haven't been all that great on this either; ACTA started under Bush....
[1] The list is here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/these-42-peo... The White House was, for a time, trying to keep even the names secret, again claiming "national security". (How does it compromise national security if people know these drafts are going to lawyers for eBay? I have no idea...)
i understand about defending the 'guilty' and all, everyone must have their lawful rights to freedom and compensation. But a for-profit scam, c'mon. You ought have some responsibility were you choose to make a living from.
it would be completely ethic if they were defending a murder-rapist in trial. but going after people without any kind of evidence, just in the hopes that you will get money for scaring some of them. that's just too unethical to be excusable in any imaginable way.
Now, if he fails to sever contact with the RIAA, or fails to be impartial to any case which may involve the RIAA or copyrights while being solicitor general, that's a different argument.
The desire to make money is fine. It's when it becomes a higher priority than basic morality/decency that it becomes something contemptible.
I don't like the positions he argued in those cases, either, but I don't think representing MGM versus Grokster, for example, was a breach of professional ethics or scammy. In fact it seems the position he argued was correct as a matter of law, according to a unanimous Supreme Court (the main problem is that Congress shouldn't have passed the law in question).
Morality be damned, it is the law.
Most cases settled because most people the RIAA went after were guilty, and knew it, and realized the the minimum damages they would owe if they lost in court were quite a bit higher than the RIAA's settlement offer.
proof?
>Most cases settled because most people the RIAA went after >were guilty, and knew it, and realized the the minimum >damages they would owe if they lost in court were quite a >bit higher than the RIAA's settlement offer.
That's exactly what they want you to believe. That's why they pursue these lawsuits. It's good old FUD. They can't sue everyone, but they are hoping to sue a handful and scare millions into obedience. It's pretty damn successful at that, too. I know many people who won't download anything for fear of a million Dollar lawsuit.
In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they catch me downloading. But somehow, somewhere, things went awry and people are getting sued for absurd amounts of money. That alone should be a tell tale sign that this is nothing but a big scam. Dressing it in fine legal language doesn't change that.
The RIAA is the enemy of the people, plain and simple. It's a corrupt organization which mainly benefits itself, and marginally benefits the artists it's claiming to represent. Because there is very little legitimacy to anything they do, they need to make lots of loud noise - that's the only way they can survive, after all.
Nothing good can come from electing what we must assume is a puppet for this organization into an important office in the US government.
I would like to preface this by saying that I don't like the RIAA. The damages they can sue for ARE disproportionate and copyright law is currently massively unbalanced (e.g. never-ending copyright since the 1920s).
BUT, have you actually thought about what suing for $20/film would mean? To recover any meaningful losses hundreds of thousands of people would have to be sued at once - unless civil law is radically changed this would not be economical, effectively making copyrights non-enforceable. Not to mention that "downloading" isn't actually covered by copyright law AFAIK and it's the uploading (distributing) part they are suing for.
Also, note that enforcement in cases of property theft isn't proportional either - it's not "pay for the thing you stole and you're free to go". There are often other consequences (community service/fines/light jailtime) attached.
Most cases settled because most people the RIAA
went after were guilty, and knew it, and realized
the the minimum damages they would owe if they
lost in court were quite a bit higher than the
RIAA's settlement offer.
That's exactly what they want you to believe.
That's why they pursue these lawsuits. It's
good old FUD. They can't sue everyone, but they
are hoping to sue a handful and scare millions
into obedience. It's pretty damn successful at
that, too. I know many people who won't download
anything for fear of a million Dollar lawsuit.
If the defendant choses to go to court, and loses, the minimum statutory damages are $750 per song, unless the court decides the defendant is an "innocent infringer" (basically someone who had no reason to believe that what they were doing was copyright infringement), in which case it can be lowered to $200 per song.
At $750/song, it only takes about 7 songs illegally downloaded and shared before taking the settlement is cheaper (just on the damages--I'm not even counting defendant's time and attorney fees) than going to court. At $200/song, the crossover is around 25 songs. This is far far under what most people who get caught were doing.
In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me
for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they
catch me downloading.
The damages one faces in court should be higher than that, for the simple reason that if the worst that happens in court is that you have to pay what you would have paid to not infringe in the first place then the risk of being sued is not a disincentive. You could just completely ignore copyright law, and when sued let the plaintiff win a default judgement and pay, putting you in the position you would have been in had you not infringed.
But somehow, somewhere, things went awry and people are getting
sued for absurd amounts of money. That alone should be a tell
tale sign that this is nothing but a big scam. Dressing it in fine
legal language doesn't change that.
"We think that you have wronged us, so pay us $4k or else be forced to defend yourself in court where if you win, you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees, and if you lose you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees in addition to whatever the damages awarded are."
That you're completely ignoring this possibility says to me that you feel everyone accused by the RIAA is guilty until proven innocent (in your eyes at least).
Do you think the right thing for the RIAA to do instead would have been to not offer to settle, but just open with a lawsuit and insist on a trial? Or are they supposed to just ignore people who they have very good evidence are massive infringers?
Not to mention that in most cases that evidence was obtained in an illegal manner (by people that were acting as if they were private investigators, but had no license to do so). Is that okay too? Should the RIAA not be responsible for it's own transgressions because they were just 'innocent mistakes' in the pursuit of a much higher goal (corporate profits)?
What about when the RIAA tries to sue people for sharing songs by artists that the RIAA has no legal standing to represent (I'd argue that moves like this are either made because: 1. the RIAA naively view itself as some entity that 'all of music' must pass through or 2. it's part of some targeted plan to make sure that the rest of the world thinks/believes that the RIAA controls all music)?
My car was stolen. It was then found at 10pm near some bus station.
Which lawyer would have the guts to go to court and order compensation damages for my car, for the nascar tournament I would have won with it had it not been stolen that day, for every single passanger that was at that bus station at 10pm?
Yes. It sound completely idiotic to people who know how cars and buses works. And that's how riaa scams sounds to most people here.
Just because a law is on the books does not mean that we have to litigate.
Being intelligent and capable is not sufficient, wisdom and courage are far more important at the levels of leadership he will operate at.
A measure of wisdom, is seeing how the pieces fit and a measure of courage is being able to take a moral stand and use your ability for the greater good.
A person who may become a member of the supreme court, should definitely have all 3.
If the RIAA/MPAA/old media (Donald also represented Viacom in its case against Google/Youtube) wrote its own laws the internet would be a sliver of what it is today. Many entities, for profit, not for profit, corporation, or association work to crush individual rights. Few do so to the degree that the RIAA has pursued.
Its sickening and disturbing that any representative, former or current, for such an organisation would be even nominated for such a powerful role in the United States government.
Clearly this guy has had a vested interest in crushing innovation and personal freedom in the United States. And you are irked that anyone cares.
The American portion of the internet would be a sliver of what it is today.
Keep in mind that the world is a bit larger than just the US and that whenever the US decides to shoot itself in the foot like this some other entity will take its place.
This will likely continue until the US wises up to that and starts to move with all the resources they've got directed at recovering the lost ground, which I'm sure they'll be able to do fairly rapidly.
Software patents, the situation around copyright, it's all the same thing, a temporary disturbance. On a human lifespan scale it looks like things are moving with glacial speed but since the web as we know it is not even two decades old you can bet that given the changes it has already brought about you won't be able to recognize the information landscape in another hundred years or so.
This is just a delaying action, in the long run it won't mean anything. Now if we could make it not mean anything in the short run is up for grabs, vested interests will always fight to the death to keep their gravy trains rolling.
When Gutenberg made the printing press it took another 100 years or so before the implications were really felt far and wide give it some time.
Incidentally it only took very little time after the printing press was invented for the first primitive copyright legislation to follow.
Laws the United States makes have a more wide reaching affect that you seem to realise. Your outlook of online freedom is quite optimistic. Smaller countries follow the lead of larger ones and for profit corporations generally do their best to follow (or write) the laws of the United States. What happens here influences the behaviour of many. After all, no CEO wants to be arrested on a layover in the United States because their company happened to break a US (this has happened.)
The reality is that organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting hard against our own government, the United States, since the early 1990s to keep the internet as free as possible. Had no one decided to take up that fight your internet would be under control of such gems as 1998's COPA, along with who knows what garbage the RIAA and MPAA would dream up.
The rising influence of authoritarian states such as China dim the prospect of an open and free world generations to come. While they may flaunt intellectual property law today, make no mistake when it is their own intellectual property being infringed upon they will happily add infringement to one of their 68 crimes punishable by death.
Make no mistake, what happens today will have a decisive impact on how free the world is 50 or 100 years from now.
Nominating Donald Verrilli Jr as the Solicitor General of the United States sends a clear message that the Obama administration seeks the same expertise in chilling internet freedoms as the RIAA and Viacom did when they hired him.