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RIAA Hearing Next Week Will Be Televised
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "One commentator labels it 'another fly in the RIAA's ointment.' In SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the Boston, Massachusetts, RIAA case in which the defendant is represented by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson and a group of his students, the Judge has ruled that the hearing scheduled for January 22nd will be televised over the Internet. The hearing will relate to Mr. Tenenbaum's counterclaims against the record companies and against the RIAA. In her 11-page opinion (PDF), District Judge Nancy Gertner labeled as 'curious' the record companies' opposition to televising the proceedings, since their professed reason for bringing the cases is deterrence, 'a strategy [which] effectively relies on the publicity arising from this litigation'."
One million for 7 songs?! How does something like that even get in to court? Can you imagine if I stole $6.93 (.99 x 7) worth of beef jerky from 7-11? Do you think the court would even hear a case where they wanted a million for my crime?
This is the new business model of the recording industry, which is exactly like the old model. Overcharge your customers and when that doesn't work, overcharge and extort from your customers to make up for shortfalls you generated because you have a crappy product.
There's only so much "drug money", oops CD purchases, the listening public will bestow on ungrateful addicts, oops recording artists...
(Yes I'm bitter this morning; still need my meth, oops coffee.)
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
I was wondering if someone could send me a recorded copy of the stream since I won't be able to watch it live.
Televised means remote vision: that can happen over the internet as well as a TV. Actually the article uses televised in a general sense and uses the term narrowcast when going into details. which works for me.
Television (from Merriam-Webster) - an electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound (emphasis mine)
televised over the internet - means that the television is going out over the Internet to computer endpoints. That the television SET is often abbreviated as television is simply laziness and a bastardization of the language, not that the usage in the summary is incorrect.
Of course the RIAA wants the public to hear about this case to deter anyone downloading their stuff.
But they want people to hear it from them. Not directly from the court proceedings. Any idiot knows that your statements are only half as powerful if the other side can retort. And few people are interested in hearling both sides of the story, unless it is hassle free do hear it, they're perfectly happy when they just hear one side telling them "the truth". Do you have an idea how incredibly harder it gets to spin something when the other side can call you bluff and show that you're lying through your teeth?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I once heard that vampires don't show up on camera. Now we'll know one way or another!
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
Not theft, unauthorized copying. There's a difference; the cost to the owner is by decreased scarcity or potentially lost revenue, not by the loss of possession of an item with value. You can't steal thoughts and ideas, you can only copy them.
Having read the order, I get the sense that the Judge really really understands what is going on and is not going to let them weasel out of their own lies.
The Judge is going to take their claims perfectly literally with no prejudice. They say that they want public knowledge of the suits, thus, she finds it "curious" that they don't want it televised. So, she takes them at their word (wanting public knowledge of the law suits) and "helps" them do what they say they claim to want to do.
Unlike judges before her, she knows they are lying. They know they are lying. Nesson knows they are lying. The case is a blackmail scam and everyone involved knows it, this time, even the judge.
They are stuck because these are counter claims, and while I'm not a lawyer, even if BMG/Sony drop the suit, I believe the counter claims live on. So, they can't drop it. They have to fight a Harvard Law Professor and his students, and it will all be public for display.
I'm going to buy some popcorn and watch.
"Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this hearing without the express written consent of the Recording Industry Association of America is prohibited and will be subjected to a fine of no less than $1 million per infraction."
They've got a plan to sell it on DVD?
At the bottom of the
No. Stealing the product of their labour would involve nicking the master copy they made, or possibly shoplifting a CD (although then you're stealing from the shop rather than the artist). An infringing copy removes nothing from their possession except the money that you might or might not have spent on a legal copy.
Both are illegal, but they aren't the same thing, and really the only reason to persist in not splitting that hair is if you have some motive for "copyright infringement" to be considered exactly equal to "theft". The most obvious motive being that theft sounds more serious and so people are less likely to choose to do it if they think of it in those terms.
Thankfully we are not undergoing a transition to Newspeak, so there is no need to eliminate terms from our vocabulary. There is a distinction between the 2 things and no reason to lump them together under one word, so please stop trying to do so.