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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.
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.