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Harvard professor snipes at song-swapping lawsuits

by on17 November 2008

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Constitutional assault


The Music
and Film industry’s long-running campaign against file sharing is about to get a high-profile kick in the nadgers from a Harvard Law School professor.

The RIAA has feared taking on Harvard and has largely left its students alone, while dragging other less famous schools to court.  However, it did decide to take a  Boston University graduate student, Joel Tenenbaum, to court. A local Judge asked Professor Charles Nesson from Harvard to intervene. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it. He is targeting the federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.

Nesson claims that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group, the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. Nesson adds that the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.

His goal, he says, is to turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency. Nesson has some history as being one of the top lawyers in the U.S.  He defended the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and consulted on the case against chemical companies that was depicted in the film, "A Civil Action."

In this case, Tenenbaum was accused of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, demanding $12,000. The problem was that if he didn’t pay up, then the RIAA threatened to chuck the book at him and demand that he pay $1 million.

More here.
Last modified on 17 November 2008
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