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Teen Accuses Record Companies of Collusion
evilned1 writes "A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy, accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats."
The kid had nothing to do with the legal arguments -- the reporting is just following the convention that your lawyer speaks with your voice and your authority. Its probably the same set of lawyers who worked when his mother was sued and, inexplicably, were not called in when his sister got issued a default judgement for $20k. (Yikes! People, when the process server gives you papers, READ and ACT ON THEM. Default judgements are 64,000 flavors of nothing good!)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Since he's under 18, can he even enter into a contract? Can he effectively use the court system by himself? If he can't, it's all in the hands of whatever attorney will help him (I'm assumig he's not an idle rich kid, and that he basicly has paper-route money).
This is intriguing though. For adults like myself, who have little time to spare and much to lose, quick settlements and/or rapid capitulation to affordable terms are usually the only way out. In other words, if the *AA extorted 10 percent of my wealth, it might be enough to make them go away, and it would be more expedient for me to let them do that then spend half my wealth fighting them.
OTOH, if I'm a 16-year old and I can legally ride my bicycle to the court house and file claims all summer as an "interesting lesson", then what could I lose? That has a certain appeal to it; but I doubt it will fly. They'll probably drag it out until he's 18, and can be subject to things that will bother an adult.
Still though, the idea of a smart kid sitting there in the library putting up his time and zero money, pitted against corporate lawywers who charge their clients 100s of dollars an hour, is intriguing. Even if he loses, he wins, unless they force him to pay court costs--then he's screwed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think Tower Records suffered from the big boxes like Walmart and Best Buy flexing their corporate muscle more than online piracy. When selling physical media + accessories is your only game you aren't left with the resources to fight a company like Best Buy in a pricewar when they decide to sell CDs $3 or $4 cheaper than you can and make up the difference by selling you a shiny plasma TV. I would maybe buy piracy as an excuse if suddenly Best Buy or Target or whomever suddenly decided CDs were no longer worth selling, but that hasn't seemed to happen.
I'm not an idealistic type...at least not often. I do think sometimes the right thing to do has to be done in the wrong way. Sort of the Robin Hood thing. Sure he was stealing, which was illegal, but he was stealing from manipulative people who perpetuated wrong at every turn. And the end result of his theft was to help far more people.
This kid, in my own opinion, isn't trying to "fight the machine". I believe this kid is simply trying to weasel his way out of getting in serious trouble, and the best way he knows how is to challenge the companies that forged the law rather than challenging the law as it pertains to his case. It's a rare defense, mostly because it doesn't work very often. The difference here from all of the other times this has been tried is that there are some unique elements. First, 5 of the largest companies in the country are targeting a single 16yo boy, which stinks of bullying tactics. Second, the kid is using a counter-offensive that actually speaks to millions of people because it's what everybody is already thinking.
Sure, the kid broke the law. Yeah, he did get caught and he's going to get sued for it, and probably lose. But, and this is a great time for a 'but'...This needs to happen, and it needs to happen now. If it wasn't this kid, it's going to be somebody else who isn't going to capture public attention as well as a minor will. A judge and jury will be far more willing to side with the kid than an adult that could reasonably afford the music.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
And when were the prisoners in question validly tried and convicted? Looks like you should go back to the OP's point "accusation is not conviction". I'm all for punishing terrorism, but it's statistically likely that there are a few genuinely innocent people in Guantanamo, and some good ol' all-American trials would separate them from the people that should go away for a long time.
"think Tower Records suffered from the big boxes like Walmart and Best Buy flexing their corporate muscle more than online piracy."
Not to mention Sony/BMG selling music direct to consumers through their club for $6-7/CD. I'll bet Tower paid more than that wholesale for their CD's.
So the choice is free (illegal), discount (direct), discount (online), discount (walmart), full price (retail/tower).
Is it any wonder that fewer people choose to pay full price at Tower? It's the worst possible choice.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
..is if you steal a $15 cd from a store, you have a right to a trial by jury, but if you're accused of stealing $30,000 of music online, it's only a civil case, so there's no right to jury. Certainly, if these copyright infringement cases were tried by jury, almost no one would be prosecuted...
Besides, what 16 year old has $30,000? That's more than most 16 year olds make in two years of working - why not throw him in jail for two years? The average bank robbery nets $5,000 or so - has he really done the equivalent of 6 bank robberies?
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Quoted from the ACLU's website, because I think it is a very good, valid point:
"If indeed the Second Amendment provides an absolute, constitutional protection for the right to bear arms in order to preserve the power of the people to resist government tyranny, then it must allow individuals to possess bazookas, torpedoes, SCUD missiles and even nuclear warheads, for they, like handguns, rifles and M-16s, are arms. Moreover, it is hard to imagine any serious resistance to the military without such arms. Yet few, if any, would argue that the Second Amendment gives individuals the unlimited right to own any weapons they please. But as soon as we allow governmental regulation of any weapons, we have broken the dam of Constitutional protection. Once that dam is broken, we are not talking about whether the government can constitutionally restrict arms, but rather what constitutes a reasonable restriction. "
I would hardly call that a cop-out answer. The second amendment is there to provide a right to state militias to hold arms to protect themselves against the federal government should they need to, which is somewhat loosely what the National Guard is, though I don't think anyone would really know what to do. Interpreting it as a right for individuals to bear arms, you lose the point of the amendment. Technology has simply evolved beyond muskets and cannons. In order for the populace to defend them from a tyranny of the federal government, I believe the ACLU is right, you would have to give people access to tanks, missiles, etc AND provide them with a reasonable means of obtaining said weapons, otherwise one could make the argument that the government is not giving people the means to exercise their rights.
Would you really trust individuals with a tank? How would the police even stop that? The dangerous escalation that would come from an individualistic interpretation of the second amendment would be fatal, simply because the second amendment is outdated.