The Recording Industry Association of America is the entity that will sue you if you illegally download music.  Now it’s on the verge of having a direct impact on people’s lives and resolving questions concerning the Bush Administration’s advocacy of torture.

Over the past five years the RIAA has sued over 35,000 people who download or shared music.  And despite agency’s announcement just over a month ago that it would stop suing individual people, cases are still in court, people are still being served with lawsuits, and students are still receiving threats in the form of “warnings” from the RIAA concerning downloads.

The litigation tactics of the RIAA have been questionable. One of the over 35,000 people that have been sued by the RIAA was Ciara Sauro, a 19-year-old Pennsylvania woman who is hospitalized weekly while waiting for a transplant for pancreatitis. The RIAA claimed that she illegally downloaded ten songs and convinced a judge that Sauro had to pay $8,000 in fines.  Since Sauro is disabled and unable to work and her mother makes only $8.25 an hour, the RIAA’s actions are a financial death sentence.  The RIAA turns lives of wage-slavery into a debtor prisons.

In the last 3 years, the RIAA has sued dead people, students and disabled people for thousands of dollars, most of which it is unlikely to ever recover. There’s only one reason a body like the RIAA spends more money on lawyers than it is ever going to make from the lawsuits themselves – it’s a business decision. It’s calculated – not to get that $8,000 from a disabled person like Ciara Sauro – but to scare everyone else into submission though a display of unscrupulous moral conduct and intimidation. Moreover, the evidence the RIAA relies on to file these lawsuits has been identified as questionable at best. The RIAA finds the IP address where the downloads are going, then they sue, they look to see if there was any evidence of what was in the downloads, hoping to nail someone who grabbed a few Mariah Carey songs from a P2P network.

It’s not surprising to find the RIAA behaving this way if you know who works there. Take a look at the RIAA’s CEO, Mitch Bainwol – the former chief of staff to Tennessee Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist. In some circles, Frist is most widely remembered as the Senator who, while in medical school  lost his supply of cat cadavers, which he was supposed to dissect. In order to make up for the loss, Frist several times obtained kittens from animal shelters by suggesting that the was personally adopting them. Frist was anti-choice, anti-embryonic stem cell research, anti-gay marriage, pro-teaching creationism in schools. While Frist was at a maximum fairly ambiguous about his feelings regarding torture, his co-sponsorship of The Military Commissions Act of 2006 -which allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” arbitrarily deemed to be an enemy of the state, regardless of American citizenship – make it pretty clear how antagonistic he is towards civil rights.

It’s fair to say that, based on his longstanding history of donations to Republican candidates and causes which promote these views, Bainwol’s strategy of suing poor people and students to redistribute wealth to the massive RIAA is hardly surprising.

Bainwol and Frist are at the center of two issues which the incoming administration will face.  First, the problems caused by the ease of access to file sharing though the internet (which never really appeared to be that well thought out by either the Republican Bush administration or the RIAA itself).  Second, allegations that the Bush administration approved the use of torture on “terror” suspects  - which Frist could be said to have enabled through his creation of the MCA of 2006.  It’s worth noting here that, despite the obvious need for the RIAA to deal with a technologically savvy administration, Bainwol endorsed John McCain for president – a candidate who reportedly did not know how to send an email. 

President Obama has been placed in a truly difficult position with respect to these issues. Torture, apparently endorsed by the Bush Administration almost openly, must be investigated and its proponents held accountable.  Likewise, the lawsuits and the RIAA intellectual property issues must be addressed in a meaningful way over the next four years.

President Obama’s plan to increase the availability of broadband internet access nationwide pushes the RIAA’s agenda to the forefront. Welcome Obama’s nominee to become the deputy attorney general of the United States, Tom Perrelli.

Obama’s nominee Tom Perrelli is known as the RIAA’s “favorite lawyer”. This nomination comes conveniently at a time when some people in the government are pushing to have illegal file sharing prosecuted by the government itself.  Perrelli himself represented the RIAA in lawsuits against individual file sharers including students.  When Perrelli is confirmed by the Senate, he becomes the person in the United States Government responsible for overseeing the civil division, the anti-trust division and the civil rights division for the Department of Justice.

There’s no question that part of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” included an expansion of interrogation techniques which, at a minimum, tortured the very definition of the word “torture”.  They decided that the Geneva Convention limitations did not apply. They decided that military protocols concerning interrogation did not apply. The orders which authorized and directed torture were signed by Donald Rumsfeld himself. These orders violated the law. Doing nothing to punish blatant advocates of torture is the same as being complicit in the torture itself.

It’s undoubtedly a tough decision to make in weighing what causes should form the foundation of your life’s work. It’s a privilege to be in a position to make that decision. Our country now relies on an attorney, Tom Perrelli to investigate and prosecute the Bush Administration advocating torture. Tom Perrelli, who’s major moral concern for the past five years has been to prosecute people who enjoy music.

This summer, my favorite record of  2008 – The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive  (which should really be on every 2008 list for Album of the Year!) was released early electronically because of internet leaks of some of the songs.  I bought it on iTunes the first day it was available, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t look to see if I could hear it before it was officially released. The band obliged by pre-releasing the entire LP on their myspace page.  This is a bold forward-thinking marketing technique that matched the content of the record itself. 

Stay Positive is proof that Generation X is approaching its 40s.  It is ambitious, looking forward with lyrics that beg interpretation, but also looking backward with references to Joe Strummer literally and Bruce Springsteen musically -  all while internally maintaining a fairly ambivalent view towards its own marketability by fighting accessibility. Parenthetically, one review posited the question as to whether 30-something arena-rock fans are an underserved demographic. Generation X might be the oldest one that knows how to find music on MySpace, but the band and label certainly hit their mark in outmaneuvering the so-called “pirates” by satisfying the curious themselves. 

It’s an outdated worldview that can and very well may permit the government to look the other way, at the previous administration’s criminal activity regarding torture.  This is where the public needs accountability. This is where an example must be made to deter future criminal activity. The notion that the government would look the other way and ignore torture bears an ugly similarity to the pro-RIAA perspective: that the consumer is guilty until proven innocent, and subjected to inspection, investigation and interrogation where no real evidence exists that they’ve done anything wrong. 

These are outdated views. People like Tom Perrelli, who can advocate for those views, are themselves relics. They an anachronism left behind from a time period which has been emphatically voted out of office. Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about this ideology is that it is so severely outdated that the marketplace is already learning ways to adapt, in ways which makes both the ideology and its advocates completely obsolete.  

–

Jack Sanders, Esq.
Certified as a Civil Trial Attorney by the Supreme Court of New Jersey
Piro, Zinna, Cifelli, Paris and Genitempo
Nutley, NJ
973.661.0710

Tags: riaa