Shining a light on p2p lawsuits
After suing some 35,000 individuals since 2003, ranging from a pre-teen living in New York public housing to a 71 year old grandfather from texas, the music industry finally announced on December 19, 2008, that they were discontinuing the controversial practice, which had become nothing short of a new multi-million dollar revenue stream for the industry. Well, kinda/sorta. While they have stopped initiating new suits, they are plowing ahead with those already in progress, even though that seems to fly in the face of the logic of their recent decision.
One of the cases that seems to be going to trial is RIAA vs. Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year-old doctoral student in physics at Boston University, who stands accused of downloading seven songs illegally from a peer-to-peer network when he was 17. For this, he faces potential damages of more than $1 million. But Tenenbaum’s case has an interesting twist. His lawyer, Charles Nesson, a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, petitioned District Court Judge Nancy Gertner to allow the trial to be streamed over the internet, and Gertner agreed. If approved, the ruling could shed considerable light on the tactics the music industry has been using to convince thousands of file sharers to fork over around $3,500 each on average to avoid being sued. Unfortunately, a three member panel of the US Court of Appeals has slapped Gertner down saying that she had made an “unprecedented” and “palpably incorrect” interpretation of the applicable rules. The irony here is that the Appeals Court then posted the oral arguments in the case on their own website.
Meanwhile, this fight is far from over. Nesson has vowed to take the motion all the way to the US Supreme Court if he can, and his students have joined the fray launching an advocacy website at joelfightsback.com. Stay tuned.
Tags: copyright, downloading, filesharing, linkedin, P2P, peer-to-peer, piracy
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