NewYorkCountryLawyer Debates RIAA VP

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "At Fordham Law School's annual IP Law Conference this year, Slashdot member NewYorkCountryLawyer had a chance to square off with Kenneth Doroshow, a Senior Vice President of the RIAA, over the subject of copyright statutory damages. Doroshow thought the Jammie Thomas verdict of $222,000 was okay, he said, since Ms. Thomas might have distributed 10 million unauthorized copies. NYCL, on the other hand, who has previously derided the $9,250-per-song file verdict as 'one of the most irrational things [he has] ever seen in [his] life in the law', stated at the Fordham conference that the verdict had made the United States 'a laughingstock throughout the world.' An Australian professor on the panel said, 'The comment has been made a few times that America is out of whack and you are a laughingstock in the rest of the world. As the only non-American on the panel, that's true. We do see the cases like Thomas in our newspapers, and we think: "Wow, those crazy Americans, what are they up to now?" This whole notion of statutory damages is not something that we have within our Copyright Act. You actually have to be able to prove damage for you to be able to be compensated for that.' NYCL also got to debate the 'making available' issue, saying that there was no 'making available' right in US copyright law, despite the insistence of the program's moderator, the 'keynote' speaker, and a 'majority vote' of the audience that there was such a right. The next day, two decisions came down, and a month later yet another decision came down, all rejecting the 'making available' theory."

Comments

Re:Bad link

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

The first link is, I believe, wrong. The debate with Doroshow on statutory damages is here: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/05/transcript-of-march-28th-fordham-law_02.html How is it that no-one seems to have noticed there was no debate with Doroshow in the linked article? Reply to This You are quite right. Sorry about that. First link should have been to statutory damages transcript or to post listing all 3 transcripts.

Re:There is no 'I told you so' more poignent

[rawr1]

Actually the RIAA may be trying to forge "evidence" and committing fraud by artificially spamming take down notices in order to trigger legal clauses calling for penalties on academic funding and requiring the purchase and installation of their proprietary "deep packet inspection" spyware software programs. They've been pushing legislation that equates "take down notices" or subpoenas with evidence of copyright infringement requiring legislative action triggers. This is an attack on taxpayers, an attack on education, and an attack on Constitutional civil law.