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RIAA's 'Misspeaking' May Have Affected Verdict
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "David Kravetz of Wired.com covered last year's Capitol v. Thomas trial gavel-to-gavel. It's worth noting, then, his article saying that the RIAA's recent statement — that Sony's top litigation lawyer 'misspoke' during the trial. She said that making a copy from one's own cd is 'stealing', which (in his words) may have caused a major miscarriage of justice. Wired further points out that later on in the trial, during the RIAA's examination of Ms. Thomas, 'On the hard drive she [turned] over were thousands of songs Thomas said she ripped from her CDs. The RIAA's Gabriel suggested to jurors that copying one's purchased music was a violation of the Copyright Act. Gabriel, for example, asked Thomas whether she had ever burned CDs, either for herself, or to give away to friends.' Gabriel, the RIAA's lead attorney, apparently misspoke too — prejudicing jurors along the way."
There's a great essay, "Against Intellectual Property," by Brian Martin at deoxy.org ( http://deoxy.org/aip.htm )
Martin attacks the very idea that intellectual products can be considered property at all: "The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to." He demolishes many of the standard rationales for IP and cites many abuses of it, such as: "The neem tree is used in India in the areas of medicine, toiletries, contraception, timber, fuel and agriculture. Its uses have been developed over many centuries but never patented. Since the mid 1980s, US and Japanese corporations have taken out over a dozen patents on neem-based materials. In this way, collective local knowleilge developed by Indian researchers and villagers has been expropriated by outsiders who have added very little to the process.5
Vandana Shiva and Radha Holla-Ehar, "Intellectual piracy and the neena tree," Ecologist, Vol. 23 No. 6, 1993, pp, 223-227."
I recommend this essay highly.
IANAL, but I asked this guy Google about it and he directed me to this site's page on the legal definition of perjury, and here are a whole lotta case files related to the issue. Some investigation might be merited.
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She also claimed this part of the story was not brought up at the trial. If so and if true, it seems to me that her defense attorney really dropped the ball here.