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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?"
The only place where people will gleefully ignore the fact that we torture innocent people in secret prisons without a trial, but froth at the mouth at the idea that you can be sued for copyright infringement.
Yes, clearly, THIS is the biggest issue of the year. Forget the economy, and health care, and two wars, and terrorism, and a weak government in the nuclear-armed Pakistan, and global warming, and the torture of people who never even received a trial. This issue, right here, is what matters. Obama was elected because "big media" bought the election, and now he's gonna come down hard on all us poor innocents.
I think it may be time to invest in Reynold's Wrap.
Obama: "Gotta protect Big Business, because Big Business IS the economy! If Big Business can't make tons of money off the backs of the clueless, the economy would cease to exist, the world as we (my buddies and I) know it would come to an end, the universe would implode, and the Rapture will begin!"
The Obama campaign was helped (and made "hip") by Hollywood & Co.
What did you expect? You didn't get a new kind of leader, you just got your average Chicago politician in the White House, that's all.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Wow, what an argument. Is this what typically gets modded up around here?
That being said, Obama is going to regret this next time he needs to get out the vote.
Or what, you're going to vote to be ass raped by the evil guy on the right? Why do you think people on the right didn't vote for Gore or Kerry? In 2000, we voted for Bush hoping he wouldn't give us the anal raping that we knew Gore would and in 2004, we voted to take what we were already getting rather than the likelihood of getting it worse from Kerry.
This last election, I voted third party... until we start voting for what we believe in rather than voting to keep the other guy out of office, we're going to continue to get raped.
Stop Koolaid Politics
Brought on by the very people he hired to "solve" it.
Oh, give it up. Wall St. collapsed in September. The people Obama hired were not in charge of things then. Stop helping Limbaugh and Hannity rewrite recent history.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
a contract that you get X dollars at the end of the year, with no strings attached.
Have you got any evidence that this is the case?
I'm pretty sure bonuses have strings attached.
You can't take the sky from me...