EPISODE IV A NEW HOPE, or rather a sneaky Pirate Bay

Summary

Joel Tenenbaum was charged with downloading 30 songs, they wanted to charge him 4.5 million dollars, but instead setteled on $675,000.

The Pirate Bay (which will henceforth be referred to as TPB in this thread/post) decided to do something sneaky; on their main page, they have a link to the 30 songs that Joel Tenenbaum downloaded, with a message "Hugs to RIAA".

I can't provide a link to TPB, however you can imagine how it looks, or if you know about it, you can look.

Long Version

Joel Tenenbaum was charged in the "Capital Records, Inc. et al v. Joel Tannenbaum
"http://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/case.asp?n=1:03-cv-11661-NG&s=&d=40802"
(remove quotations after copying link)

Date: 08-01-2009 Case Style: Capital Records, Inc. et al v. Joel Tannenbaum Case Number: 1:03-cv-11661-NG Judge: Nancy Gertner Court: United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Suffolk County Plaintiff's Attorney: Eve Burton, Holme Roberts & Owen LLP, Denver, Colorado and Daniel Cloherty, Dwyer & Collora LLP, Boston, Massachusetts Defendant's Attorney: Charles Nesson, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School , Cambridge, Massachustts Description: Answerthink, Inc., Arista Records, Inc., BMG Music, Capital Records, Inc., Capitol Records, Inc., Elektra Entertainment Group Inc., Fonovisa, Inc., Motown Record Company, L.P., Recording Industry Association of America, Sony Music Entertainment Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Inc., UMG Recordings, Inc., Virgin Records America, Inc., Atlantic Recording Corporation sued Joel Tanenbaum for violating the Copyright Act by downloading 30 songs with permission to do so. The RIAA has issued about 30,000 lawsuits during its nearly 6-year-old litigation campaign against file sharers. Most have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. Plaintiffs sought $150,000 per track in damages but offered to settle for in 2005 for $3,000. Defendant sought to assert the fair-use doctrine as a defense but was barred from doing so by the Court on Plaintiffs' motion to strike the defense. Outcome: Plaintiffs' verdict for $675,000. Plaintiff's Experts: Defendant's Experts: Comments: Editor's Note: The RIAA can win battles like this but it is losing the war. It has been reported that the recording industry has filed 30,000 cases like this which it typically settles for around $3,000. The cases cost much more than $3,000 to file and administer. The goal, of course, is to try to convince people that they should not illegally download copyright protected music. It is unlikely, in my opinion, that litigation will ever significantly reduce illegal file sharing of music or stop the loss of revenues being experienced by the music industry as a result of the technological changes that make it possible to share music files. ________________________________________ Ktheryn Coggan is most definitely an attorney for the plaintiff record companies, in fact she may have taken the place of Richard Gabriel in heading this effort Also the law firm, Holme Roberts & Owen and perhaps the RIAA are making plenty of money settling these case – a small fraction get filed in court with boilerplate pleadings and a still smaller fraction get to a default judgment. What’s not clear is how the individual record label are benefiting. As for the artists I don’t think anyone thinks they benefit. Ted Fletcher

Putting the search into google, you can see a plethora of related articles concerning his potential fate:
"http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&ei=_KKFStnVOoKysgODp6SeBw&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=joel+tenenbaum+wired&spell=1&fp=7e6f8db6d1d62ff2"
(remove quotations after copying link)

Essentially, they were going to charge him $150,000 per song, and then it was deemed that the potential losses would have only been $22,500; how they came up with that arbitrary number I don't know. but now there are 1,000s or 10s of 1,000s of people who have downloaded that playlist in it's entirety;

Using some basic statistics, there is a 10:1 seeder to Leecher ratio, which means that at least 10 times that many people have downloaded it, as most torrents have the reverse ratio; so there must be at least 10,000 people who have downloaded "DJ Joel Tenenbaum" playlist; some people went so far as to provide a link to spotify with the playlist pre-configured as Joel had it.

The lawyer involved in Joel's defense seems to want to pursue a class action lawsuit against the RIAA; which could prove interesting seeing as they have filed 30,000+ lawsuits with an average settlement of around $3,000; just imagine the amount of time and money (30k * 3k = $90 Million dollars of money out of US citizens, not counting time lost from work / school / family)

I forsee the war with the RIAA reaching a new level, with Guerilla attacks from places like TPB which aren't technically centralized, they only provide a place to put the seed files to connect to other peers to move the torrents along.

How is the RIAA going to respond to this? It will be in the news soon i'd imagine.

anyways, discuss!

reply to post by Davood


Free art! Freedom of speech!

If you want to make money from music, go on tour like all the old bands did and still do!

agreed... just like the slow death of the newspaper to the weblog and internet news sites specializing in special materials, the ancient cd needs to go, and we need more services like i-tunes