Saturday, February 21, 2009

Call to action: Urge Pres Obama not to intervene for RIAA! Email, tweet, & retweet this message!

The RIAA's damages theory, which seeks from $750 to $150,000 per MP3 song file -- or from 2,200 to 450,000 the actual damages -- is flagrantly unconstitutional.

As many of you know, in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud, a Pennsylvania case in which the RIAA's outlandish statutory damages theory is being contested by a sole practitioner battling several of the RIAA's law firms, the United States Department of Justice has filed papers indicating that it is considering intervening in the case on the side of the RIAA:

United States Motion for Extension of Time in Which to Determine if Intervention is Appropriate

I urge all of my readers to:

1. write to Pres. Obama and urge him NOT to intervene; and

2. rebroadcast this message by any means available to you, including emails, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or any network or social network of any kind of which you are a member.

This is an important test of whether President Obama will allow his Department of Justice to be controlled by the dictates of the large record companies.

This moment will also provide an early test of whether President Obama was sincere in promising that he would be standing up for the working people, rather than for the big corporations who are making war against them.

We must be especially vigilant now, since the architect of the RIAA's mass litigation campaign now occupies the second highest position in the new administration's Department of Justice, the lawyer who traveled to Duluth, Minnesota, to try to defend the $220,000 verdict the RIAA had obtained against Jammie Thomas now occupies the third highest position in the new DOJ, and both of them were partners of Matthew Oppenheim, who has identified himself to the Courts as "the client" and as "the principal" of the record companies and as the "sole person who has settlement authority" in these cases, and who is the puppetmaster of the RIAA's vicious campaign against individuals.

It is time for this madness -- this war against kids and other helpless people -- to end.

Please pass this post along to your friends.

Thank you.

-R.B.

Commentary & discussion:

p2pnet.net
Afternoons with the Mad Rocket Scientist
Heise Online (German)





Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

8 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

Ray, you need to write a twitter post with the hashtag "#spectrial" in the content if you want to have it shown on sites like twitterfall or the twitter own search site.
not just a post to the user "spectrial"

HTH

--
A_F

raybeckerman said...

I don't understand what you mean.

Stephanie said...

This is my letter, in part (already sent):

"In your campaign, you repeatedly said that a single person can make a difference. in a case where he or she sees injustice This single person is trying to make a difference and having Ms Cloud battle not only the RIAA (a powerful lobby group) but her own government at the same time would fly in the face of your own beliefs.

"We try to change and clarify laws, working within the system, one person at a time. Please let the law decide this case without government intervention. Please keep your promise to fight for people, not corporations and lobbies."

Alter_Fritz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Alter_Fritz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
raybeckerman said...

I continue to have no clue what you are talking about, A_F, but I appreciate your effort and concern in trying to educate me.

Alter_Fritz said...

you'r welcome, Ray.

Matt Fitzpatrick said...

Light at the end of the tunnel: Wikipedia says Obama's nominee to the office of Solicitor General is Elena Kagan, the current dean of Harvard Law School.