How it feels to be sued for $4.5 million

Whatever you think about file sharing and piracy, what the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has done to poor Joel Tenebaum is just plain wrong.

And then in August 2007, I came home from work to find a stack of papers, maybe 50 pages thick, sitting at the door to my apartment. That's when I found out what it was like to have possibly the most talented copyright lawyers in the business, bankrolled by multibillion-dollar corporations, throwing everything they had at someone who wanted to share Come As You Are with other Nirvana fans.

I had assumed that as an equal in a court of law in the United States, my story would be told and a just outcome would result. I discovered the sheer magnitude of obstacles in your way to get your say in court. And even if you get to trial, (which only one other person, Jammie Thomas Rasset, has done) you're still far from equal with the machine controlling 85% of commercial music in the US.

But to even start fighting assumes you (a) know what you're even being sued for and (b) have a concept of what grounds to fight it on. Most of the time you know nothing except for the huge stack of paper written in legalese that says you owe several thousand dollars and it will probably cost you more than that just to hire a lawyer. If you can find one.

Read the whole sorry saga in The Guardian.

Mos Def releases album as T-Shirt

From the Beneath the Brand blog:

Rapper Mos Def is putting out his latest album, The Ecstatic, as a t-shirt. The shirt has the cover art on the front, the track list on the back and a code to download the songs on the shirt’s hang tag.

Sounds like a great idea - click the link above to read an excellent summary of why.

Essential (free) reading: Free by Chris Anderson

Here's an extract of Free published in this month's Wired, by Chris Anderson the magazine's editor and author of The Long Tail. As a side note, he has been critisized for plagiarising Wikipedia, a charge he admits, and why not?

Obviously, the book is also available for free in digital form as an audiobook, on Google Books and everywhere else, which, ironically, has put the hard copy ($26.99 on Amazon) near the top of the New York Times bestseller list. See, this free stuff really works!

Check out Chris's blog to get Free for free. Or just read it here (fullscreen only available in the US, but you can zoom in here and get a decent look):

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson (Read in Fullscreen)

Is it any wonder record companies are unpopular?

It used to be only musicians (and rappers in particular), who hated their record companies, but following the victimisation of individual pirates in America, a broader backlash can't be far away. Check this article out in USA Today:

A federal jury ruled Thursday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song.

She is a mother of four and clearly not file-sharing for personal profit. If ever there was a case where the punishment didn't fit the crime (OK, so she had shared 1,700 files on Kazaa, but the prosecution only tried to prove 24).

This is the worst kind of corporate bullying and will not help the record companies in the long run, piracy will go on. Nor will it have any effect on the quality and volume of good music available, the argument that "home taping is killing music" holds no water. The game has changed, the record companies have not, it's as simple as that.

The question is, will other industries learn from the mistakes of the music industry? Note the example of film distributors, which are counteracting piracy by offering new products, such as Blu-Ray, to ensure customers keep parting with cash. Hell, even independent film-makers are thriving thanks to on-demand TV.

Web pirates outmanoeuvre media giants

Whether you agree with the freeloading file sharers or the Hollywood rip-off merchants is sure to be one of the great debates of the next decade. Copyright, copyleft or copywrong? But putting that to one side, it is a pleasure to watch the fall-out of The Pirate Bay trial, where the operators of the site have painted themselves as martyrs for the noble cause of spreading free culture across the high seas of the Internet. Just check out this widely reported quote from their online press conference:

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay… even if I had money I would rather burn everything I owned and not even give them the final dust from the burning.”

A masterful soundbite.

Although it has been reported that the Swedes behind The Pirate Bay made a lot of money from the site, they have been highly successful through online guerilla tactics to create the impression that they are innocents being hassled by giant media corporations in the US. In other words, sticking it to the man.

Although TPB are not the innocents they would have us believe, the media are bigger crooks for ignoring the advance of technology and continuing to peddle overpriced DVDs - and the farce that is BlueRay. And now they are getting double comeupance from the media, who are lapping up The Pirate Bay quotes. You have to say, it serves them right.

Read more here, or buy a pirated Pirate Bay T-Shirt.