Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"

Comments

Re:If you didn't vote libertarian, you ASKED FOR T

[Sun.Jedi]

There will never be a point in voting Libertarian.

1) The candidate won't win.
2) You'll only peel votes from a Republican.
3) Some of them are scarier than the devils we know.

Re:Was this the change we were promised?

[DigiShaman]

The Rush Limbaughs and Shawn Hannitys warned everyone that would listen that Obama is an epic failure. But it doesn't matter. Your fellow citizen's though electing the first black president was more important than is voting record

In fact Obama isn't the real problem, but rather the symptom of how fucking stupid your average American is. We *will* all fall togeather just like Rome did.

Re:If you didn't vote libertarian, you ASKED FOR T

[Hordeking]

There will never be a point in voting Libertarian.

1) The candidate won't win. 2) You'll only peel votes from a Republican. 3) Some of them are scarier than the devils we know.

Show me a libertarian who has a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and I'll vote for him. I didn't like all of Ron Paul's stuff, but I liked a lot of it. Damn the major parties, full speed ahead.

Re:Was this the change we were promised?

[Dan667]

Your worried about judgment calls from an Oxycontin Addict? Really?

Libertarian = anarchist with a trust fund

[Hognoxious]

Libertarians are against laws, except ones that personally suit them.

Re:It's government corruption.

[couchslug]

"The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt."

But Tan Kennedy was supposed to make it All Better, not turn into Clinton 2.0 Fidelity Version!

Only one thing to say......

[Indy1]

FUCK OBAMA.

Goddamn marxist shit stain.

Re:It's government corruption.

[servognome]

Hell...the founding fathers knew this. They had problems with corruption right at the start. That's why the constitution has so many limits on the power of government. Limits that are just blatantly ignored today. The constitution has been under non-stop assault for decades now as the jackals in DC chip away at the protections in it.

Hope you realize that the Constitution itself was designed in part by corruption. Importation of slaves & three-fifths rule for southern plantation owners, electoral college and senate for the wealthy aristocracy, and the Bill of Rights really only applied to white males.
Corruption is the file-sharing of politics; doesn't matter how hard you try, you can't stop it.