$670,000 Fine for Illegal Downloading

No country can possibly survive with a “justice” system this lopsided.  I guess it goes hand in hand with CEOs paying a lower tax rate than janitors.

Joel Tenenbaum, a former Boston University student, was fined $670,000 for the heinous crime of downloading and sharing thirty songs.  Off with his head!  And the Corporate Arm of the Republican Party — formerly known as the Supreme Court — has refused to even review this case.  Who’s this Tenenbaum fellow think he is, anyway — a corporation?

It’s not what you ripped off, it’s WHO you ripped off.  Now if this college punk had stolen billions of dollars from shareholders and bank depositors, he’d be getting a promotion and a larger bonus next year.

Stealing about $45 worth of songs from the all-powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on the other hand, is a much more serious crime.

There are too many examples of America’s huge sentencing disparity.  Here are just a few:

Set a fatal booby trap along a popular hiking trail — which by a roll of the dice didn’t ensnare anybody — and you get charged with misdemeanor Reckless Endangerment.

This column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. has some incredible — as in “you can’t make this shit up” — reports of absurd crime sentences.  Thirty years to life for stealing a VCR.  A woman shoots a gun into the air in order to scare off her enraged husband who had been strangling her — twenty years.  (The husband wasn’t charged with a crime.)  Another woman finally shot and killed her husband after he had been beating and kicking her for three days straight — fifty years.  What happened to that “Stand Your Ground” meme that conservatives have been spewing out en masse?

In the case of Joel Tenenbaum’s $670,000 fine, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Supreme Court isn’t interested.  A lowly individual versus the RIAA — in mean, come on.  Not that the Supreme Court has a pro-corporate bias or anything like that.  Just because Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto, and Scalia’s son is a Wall Street lawyer fighting on behalf of bank CEOs…

Recording Industry Association of America: “Squeeze More Blood Out of That Turnip”

Between 1999 and 2007, Joel Tenenbaum committed some of the most heinous bloodthirsty crimes in American history. Are you sitting down? He illegally downloaded and shared thirty songs online.

He originally received a $675,000 fine. Let’s see now, I’m no math whiz but I think that’s over $20,000 per song. Take that, you Brute! Poor little record companies.

And now Judge Nancy Gertner has reduced his verdict from $675,000 to $67,500. She said the reduced fine:

“Not only adequately compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards. There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh.”

However, it wasn’t harsh or severe enough for the RIAA, who threw a hissyfit and announced that they would appeal this decision. In an official statement, the RIAA whined: “With this decision, the court has substituted its judgment for that of 10 jurors as well as Congress.”

Or maybe, unlike Congress, Judge Nancy Gertner isn’t owned and operated by the deep-pocketed RIAA.

Gertner said her decision was consistent with recent court decisions that have reduced excessive jury awards:

“For many years, businesses complained that punitive damages imposed by juries were out of control, were unpredictable, and imposed crippling financial costs on companies. In a number of cases, the federal courts have sided with these businesses, ruling that excessive punitive damages awards violated the companies' right to due process of law. These decisions have underscored the fact that the constitution protects not only criminal defendants from the imposition of 'cruel and unusual punishments,' but also civil defendants facing arbitrarily high punitive awards.”

The RIAA is sort of a reverse image of Exxon, BP and the tobacco industry. Those companies will keep on appealing and appealing and appealing their verdicts, until a multi-million dollar fine gets reduced to pocket change. Either that, or the plaintiffs have finally all died of old age.

In the RIAA’s version, they turn their trillion-dollar guns on one individual, with the determination to totally ruin this person come Hell or High Water. Even if they never collect the amount they wanted, their victim will spend his life savings (and that of his great-grandchildren) on legal costs.

Boycott those cocksuckers.

We Don’t Need No Steenkeeng Record Companies

First Radiohead; now Nine Inch Nails. This makes two popular bands whose latest CDs were released online. They’ve completely bypassed the recording industry. There's nowhere else for this trend to go but UP.

Another dinosaur is slooowly losing its grip. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of douchebags. The world is full of meanspirited amoral industries, but when it comes to taking a shit on the general public, the Recording Industry Association of America stands head and shoulders above the rest.

As you know, the RIAA has sued thousands of individuals. For the heinous crime of downloading music for free, they're often sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. OK, so it’s wrong. But a $200,000 fine?

On top of that, the RIAA has virtually strangled Internet radio. Sky-high royalty fees — for which the RIAA is responsible — have forced a lot of webcasters to close down. Their new fees (retroactive to 2006) are proportionally much higher than those paid by large commercial broadcasters. It was nice while it lasted.

Record companies have also been catching it from Big Box retailers. Because CD sales have gone way down lately, Target and WalMart (among others) are setting aside less shelf space for CDs. And as fewer CDs are available in stores, the public will buy fewer CDs, stores will set aside even less space for CDs, and the cycle continues…

Personally, I probably won't make use of these online CDs. I've never downloaded anything (but I listen to music on YouTube a lot). I’m one of those Luddites who has to have a solid physical record reel-to-reel tape eight-track cassette CD right in front of me, with a label that says “Name of Song” by “Performer.” (But I still tape music off the radio, which supposedly brought the recording industry to its knees in the 1970s.)

But as people buy fewer CDs and get more music online, the RIAA will ultimately go the way of the covered wagon repairman. It can't happen soon enough.

cross-posted at Bring It On!

Recording Industry Throws Another Tantrum (Again)

Just when you think the Recording Industry of America couldn’t possibly get any more anal retentive, they do. One of capitalism’s oldest traditions is the free offer, the giveaway. Whether it’s altruistic or just a gimmick for future sales, it’s as American as, well, pick your cliché.

But tell that to the corporate douchebags who rake off 99% of the revenue from every CD you buy (just guessing at the numbers). Prince will be giving away copies of his newest CD, “Planet Earth.” Whether that’s out of generosity or just shrewdness — hey, cool, a free CD from one of the world’s most popular recording artists of the past 25 years. Everybody wins, right?

Ah, but the rules have changed. Free enterprise, under-pricing your competitors, building a better mousetrap — that’s soooo 1900s. Inheritance, cronyism, kissass-ism — that’s how most music industry executives got to where they are. Zero work for trillions of dollars. These fuckin’ leeches make Paris Hilton look productive.

And now Prince has brought the “struggling” recording industry to its knees by giving away his newest CD. The reason the recording industry is “struggling” in the first place is that nobody wants to patronize those assholes. In the 1970s the recording industry was “almost” decimated by those communist anti-American wretches who had the nerve to tape songs off the radio instead of going out and buying the record. After that, used CDs were the culprit that would destroy the music industry as we know it. When that didn’t happen, the blame went to those wicked freeloaders who downloaded free music off the Internet.

Things change, but the one constant is that the recording industry will always blame their own failures — caused by greed and ineptitude — on some fringe group whose “freeloading” is just about to bring them to their knees.

The co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association said: “The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores." Well guess what, Shitbreath — long after the Entertainment Retailers Association has been dead and forgotten, Prince will still be well-known and revered. How’s that workin’ for ya?

If the recording industry wants to charge $19 for a new CD, and tries to put the thumbscrews on any store that sells used CDs, that’s free enterprise. But it’s also part of that same free enterprise system when a huge recording star gives away copies of his newest CD. Is this complicated??

Here are the results of a web search for “Prince new album RIAA.” Interesting reading.

Say Goodbye to Internet Radio

Have you been enjoying some of the thousands of radio stations available on the Internet? Well, listen while you can. Their days are numbered.

The Copyright Royalty Board has increased — drastically, brutally increased — the royalty fees that Internet radio stations will have to pay. The Board’s decision was the result of intense arm-twisting by those anal retentive douchebags at the Recording Industry Association of America.

The entire royalty structure has been changed. In addition to the fee itself going way up, radio stations will have to pay this fee per performance (each song played), and this fee will be multiplied by the estimated number of listeners. If a station averages 500 listeners, this station will be paying more than $50 for every song played (the performance fee of eleven cents multiplied by 500). And this fee is going to keep going up and up and up every year.

How many of these hole-in-the-wall operations can afford this? It’s been fun.

What happened to that vast unlimited frontier that the Internet was supposed to be? When the FCC was allowing radio stations to merge and merge and merge, part of their argument was that the Internet provided so many choices. It didn’t matter if every broadcast radio station was owned by the same company and kept playing the same four songs day in and day out. You have Satellite Radio; you’ve got the Internet; you have millions of choices out there.

And now…

Now the two main satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius, are about to merge. And Viacom has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Conservatives are always blubbering about “too many lawsuits,” “too much litigation,” “too many lawyers.” But when a multi-billion dollar corporation sues a smaller rival, these same conservatives just clam right up and slither into the woodwork. (If only they'd stay there.)

Just like print media and our "public" airwaves, the Internet is turning into the personal fiefdom of a few corporate leeches.

UPDATE: Please sign these two online petitions, here and here, to save Internet Radio.