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RIAA Case May Be Televised On Internet
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Boston case in which the defendant is represented by Prof. Charles Nesson and his CyberLaw class at Harvard Law School, the defendant has requested that audio-visual coverage of the court proceedings be made available to the public via the internet. Taking the RIAA at its word — that the reason for its litigation program is to 'educate the public' — the defendant's motion (PDF) queries why the RIAA would oppose public access: 'Net access to this litigation will allow an interested and growingly sophisticated public to understand the RIAA's education campaign. Surely education is the purpose of the Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are challenging. How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone upon them.'"
NYCL, or other informed lawyers:
Why is there such a disdain and avoidance to audio/visual recording and dissemination about court cases? Being in this day and age, we could have multiple angles, multiple audio streams, and court transcript, along with evidence log attached to each "case document". Torrents could easily disseminate these large files, allowing for a complete log and documentation where our laws and case law come from.
This is not how they do things in the real world. The defendants are going to have to convince the judge that there is some legal reason to broadcast the proceedings, and that they are not just trying to turn the courtroom into a soapbox. Good luck.
Put it on truTV / court TV
This is a job for Streaming BitTorrent.
unfortunately, Courtroom View Network is a subscriber-based service (read John Shin's supporting declaration), so only the paying public who already knows about the case will be able to view it. Granted, many people never watch CourtTV either, but a case such as this with issues that interested much of the general public has the potential to gather LOTS of viewers, educating a large segment of the population (both on the RIAA's agenda, and on their actual tactics). I fear that the hurdles put up by making people subscribe to CVN's service will influence many to not bother "tuning-in", especially in a culture where people are accustomed to "surfing", and previewing TV channels and websites before committing to the entire thing.
I thank you for your input on that, Infoport. It would indeed be regrettable if the proceedings were not accessible from a practical standpoint. I'm going to bring your comment to the attention of the defendant's lawyers.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I would fear the "well they did me wrong, so everything they say is false" mentality would swamp the defense lawyers in bogus information.
To be fair a small subset of musicians became filthy rich with way of selling music.
Well, this was according to an article on slashdot about a week ago. News can be wrong from time to time, but they said they were going to focus on the ISPs instead.
we need to take up a collection and buy a court transcript from one of their trials, and publish that with our favorite bits highlighted
But sitting on the floor next to your record player, some drink in your right hand, big stack of singles on the left, playing them a little a louder than the neighbour liked, that was real fun. Don't think that that compares to a "playlist" of tracks downloaded from iTunes. I still have all my singles, I should have bought much more. And I still play them. Yes they were five times more expensive than today's downloaded tracks, but it was real fun. And what about the JukeBox? Of course paying a quarter for a single song was a rip-off. But again, it was fun!!
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
They didn't sell singles 15 years ago???
Yeah, well that was the era of grossly overpriced CD singles. They were sometimes UK £2 - £2.50 in the first week only for promotional reasons, but after that they were usually £4. 4 BLOODY QUID! And you can slap on an extra quid for today's money. £5 at modern conversion rates is over US $7 for a bloody single! I don't care how many bloody extra bonus tracks they slapped on to vainly justify the bloated cost. (*)
Cassette singles were cheaper, but not that cheap, and there was no good reason for the difference in price. Singles sucked in the 1990s.
(Cue cheap anti-nostalgia wavy video effect).
When I think back to the mid-90s, when the record business here had coalesced around the major chains like Virgin and HMV, but MP3 was still an obscure geek curio and major online retailers nonexistent... I remember how overpriced those f*****rs were. At their high-water mark, the cost of a typical full-price back-catalogue CD album was actually above the 15 quid ($22) mark. And they'd still be doing it if there was no competition.
Given the people who may well lose their jobs and- even more seriously- for what it says about our economy, I can't take any pleasure in the fall of Virgin (or Zavvi as the UK stores are now called). But they're the epitome of everything that was wrong with music retailing in the 1990s and early-2000s.
(*) Side note: What's the accepted method for showing a historical price in another currency in today's terms? Do I convert pounds to dollars at (e.g.) 1995 rates first *then* factor in dollar inflation. Or do I factor in pound inflation first then convert from pounds to dollars at modern-day rates?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
That argument may resonate with the trial judge. Anything that fosters a more informed outcome ought to be welcome.
I really *don't* have a problem with CVN acting as a commercial company; I just feel that this is so important as to warrant widespread distribution (without being illegally shown in total of course)
I don't want to commercialize justice more, but perhaps it could be available publicly shortly after subscribers have it, even with some sort of sponsorship if necessary.
There are many models for selling content which don't require the audience to directly pay, and something in that vein would help promote open, public justice (without making CVN or others "shine the light" on this case without money for the cameramen)
In any case, I am for the case being televised to as great an audience as possible.
I believe that has been done in the past...
Years ago, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain at the time, had some law passed which banned television and radio from broadcasting terrorists, including Sinn Fein, the political branch of the IRA terrorists.
The end result was perhaps more damaging to the Government's position - They started by doing 'reenactments' and later when they discovered that the ban only really covered the spoken word, they simply dubbed over by a newscaster.
Why was it detrimental for the Government? Quite simple really. Some Sinn Fein representatives, such as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, initially had such thick accents that most British people probably wouldn't have understood them anyways. By forcing the media to dub over the audio with a clearly spoken newscasters voice, it allowed the people to understand what they were talking about.
Joking aside, perhaps more relevant: Many high profile court cases have been 'reenacted' by the media for television in Britain, mostly because video, photo and audio recording equipment were not allowed ... so court transcripts were used, along with either artists sketches of the courtroom scene or even a few actors in a mock courtroom, to reenact events in court to make it accessible to the layman in the comfort of his own home.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
A similar thing happened in France with their revolution. Aristocracy? Don't you dare walk along with you nose in the air, or it just might get cut off- at the neck.
Now we have a new Inquisition, the RIAA. If you and your pal have a fall out, you better be careful or he may just pay a visit to the RIAA and you get sued for what amounts to a life sentence. $200 000 or thereabouts for a student means taking a loan (if you can get it these days) effectively pawning your assets for decades as you pay off interest. Kiss goodbye to your retirement fund.
If a record label owns copyright to a song, what exactly did they contribute to it's production? Generally, nothing. The artist is just not in a position to mass produce and market the song on his own, and therefore sells his copyright to the label for a fee. If he is lucky he may get royalties as a part of the deal. Talk about selling your soul to the devil! Pun intended.
What the RIAA is all about, is protecting the monopoly of the record label over the work of art. We can't have some upstart mass producing the same work at ostensibly lower cost than the record label and undercutting prices, or in the case of p2p, producing and distributing it at zero cost; that would put the record labels out of business, and destroy the artist's reason for producing works in the first place.
Now that sounds perfectly reasonable, does it not? The same perfectly sound reasoning applied to the protection of the institution of the church from devil worship and the protection of the newly formed French revolutionary government from competition.
Quite a quandry we have.