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Will Obama's DOJ Intervene To Help RIAA?
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud, a Pennsylvania case in which the RIAA's statutory damages theory — seeking from 2,200 to 450,000 times the amount of actual damages — is being tested, the US Department of Justice has just filed papers indicating that it is considering intervening in the case to defend the constitutionality of such awards, and requesting an extension of time (PDF) in which to decide whether such intervention 'is appropriate.' This is an early test of whether President Obama will make good on his promises (a) not to allow industry insiders to participate in cases affecting the industry they represented (the 2nd and 3rd highest DOJ officials are RIAA lawyers) and (b) to look out for ordinary citizens rather than big corporations."
No, the Obama Administration's DOJ is considering filing an amicus brief supporting statutory damages even when they greatly exceed demonstrable actual damages. While that theory being struck down in the instant case might be bad for the RIAA and no one else immediately, if such a precedent were established, it would greatly limit the use of statutory damages in most of the places where they are used, which are often in places where the easily quantifiable portion of direct harms is very small, but the diffuse impact may be very large. This does not benefit only, or even primarily, big corporations, its very common in laws that principally benefit individuals against big corporations (like many consumer protection laws) and other powerful interests (civil actions under many civil rights laws).
Amicus briefs are often filed by parties whose interest in legal precedent that could be set is largely tangential to the interests of the parties in the case; if parties have a direct interest in the case, they probably ought to be intervenors, not amici.
Yes I know they worked for the RIAA before. But do they still do so?
If they don't also still work for the RIAA are we sure these lawyers actually even give a damn about the RIAA? Unless they have stocks and shares or whatever in the RIAA companies then what's in it for them if they no longer work for them?
It is possible that these lawyers were just doing it for the money and don't actually give a damn about the company they were working for.
Does anything have anything more damning than that they used to work for the RIAA? do they still? are they receiving money or incentives still from the RIAA?
Have you not noticed or already blanked-out the fact that it was Obama's new administration that placed these RIAA lawyers in the DOJ in the first place? A Slashdot reminder of that fact was linked right in the article above.
You call it "optimism", but I call it "delusion".
look out for ordinary citizens rather than big corporations
Just because Party A is an "ordinary citizen" and Party B is a "big corporation" doesn't mean that Party A should be able to harm Party B with impunity.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, for all the good work he is doing, seems to include verbiage like this in almost every post that makes it to the front page. Over and over... the industry is suing "ordinary folks"... they should stop suing "ordinary folks"... evil big corporation vs. noble, innocent ordinary folks...
I happen to be in the camp that the historical reasons for copyright are no longer extant and that massive reform should be done. But this verbiage disturbs me.
Our legal system should provide facilities for party A to address grievances with party B, whether B is big and A is small, or vice versa. It shouldn't be the goal (as the verbiage seems to suggest) that the legal system should be rigged to favor the smaller party in a dispute.
The problem isn't the two-party system. That is a symptom. We as a nation have allowed the federal government to assume more and more of our states' powers in return for pledges to "fix" various societal ills. We have all forgotten the intention of the founders/framers to protect us from an overreaching federal bureaucracy, either through laziness or lack of education.
I would much rather have my state and federal taxes reversed, i.e., pay thousands to my state but only hundreds to the fed, that way my money would work for me and those near me, rather than to help subsidize loads crap 3000 miles away. It would also take some of the power out of the US Congress and make state senators and representatives more important.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
He's made some very good pledges about openness and anti-corruption measures, so now's the time for him to live up to them.
It may or may not be a token gesture, but it certainly makes me smile to read the White House's new Copyright Policy:
Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
ACK! ACK ACK ACK!
Living in Clearwater (and having the St. Pete Times as my newspaper), I assure you that they are NOT neutral in any sense of the word.
In addition to their editorial page being constantly slanted left, they regularly spin their new stories in the same way.
I have been following the politifact.com site since I found it weeks ago. In fact, I subscribe to the RSS feed here: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/feeds/updates/
My main problem with this site in particular is that they count broken promises as "in progress" or "compromise", and they add new promises all the time. This doesn't just track promises made during the campaign: if he says (as president) he'll do something next week, and then he does it, it counts as a "Promise Kept". This ensures that their numbers always skew to the "Promise Kept" side.
That said, I find the site entertaining, if irritating. I just hate the idea that anyone things it's "Fair" or "Neutral".
While I am sure that it did not hurt Halliburton to have Cheney as Vice President, your argument is defective because Halliburton has been getting no-bid contracts for a very long time, including plenty of lucrative no-bid contracts under the Clinton administration. If Halliburton's contracting largesse is the result of malfeasance, then you will have to paint both Democrats and Republicans with that brush, as they both freely participated in that behavior in their respective administrations.
In fairness to Halliburton, one of the reasons they get these types of no-bid contracts from dozens of governments around the world is that there are very, very few companies that actually do what they are doing for these governments on the scale they do it, and Halliburton has specialized in filling that particular demand. Realistically, for some of the contracts that Halliburton gets there are no legitimate competitors and everyone knows it, making a bidding process a bit of waste, particularly if the matter is urgent. On the upside, there are now a couple different other companies trying to move in on Halliburton's business.
I have never understood the obsession with painting Halliburton as the ultimate Republican evil instead of a much more accurate shade of gray that both Democrat and Republican administrations shovel money to that sometimes gets these contracts because there really is no reasonable alternative under the constraints. We can't fix the world if we are in denial about the reality of it, and Halliburton is just another big government contractor like numerous others that was well positioned for the kind of contracting work that resulted from the nominal War on Terror.
Anyone think that's it's a bit too coincidental that this was announced on the same day the stimulus bill was signed and troops were ordered to Afghanistan? Pretty much guaranteed to not get a single lick of major press.
Moderation is not supposed to be used as an indicator of agreement.