October 9th, 2007
RIAA willing to take its lumps in filesharing fight
News.com’s Greg Sandoval took a look at the filesharing case against Jammie Thomas from the perspective of the RIAA. Sandoval points out that nothing makes a huge dinosaur industry look worse than slapping a Native American woman making $36,000 with a $200,000 fine for making 24 songs available online, quite possibly inadvertantly.
“It’s usually inadvisable to turn someone into a martyr,” said Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management, a Los Angeles-based public relations firm. “I would think they could have pursued someone that drew a little less empathy. What they risk is creating a long-lasting image. On the Internet, it’s simple to create martyrdom (all over the world) and this is particularly damaging thing to do. It can be very harmful to a company’s reputation.”
The line from the record companies and their associated companies: We have no choice. One RIAA spokesman went so far as to call the prosecution of Thomas “a form of tough love.” (!)
“Look at the extensiveness of the coverage on Friday. Every single newspaper and TV station carried the story that a jury of Thomas’ peers found her guilty of copyright violations. This sends a very clear message that if you steal music online there can be real consequences. There is a lot of deterrent value to that message becoming public.”
But the other message getting out there is that record companies are heartless brutes. A site called FreeJammie.com has already sprung up and raised $2,500 — a long way to go to reach $222,000 but a start.
Thomas said she didn’t want to be a martyr but, “at this point, I really don’t think I have much of a choice,” Thomas said. “As soon as this case went public, it was no longer my fight. It became everyone’s fight. Just because it’s my name on the case, doesn’t mean I’m alone. There are so many other people who have taken up the case with me.”
Even US senators are happy to paint the record executives as the modern equivalent of Snidely Whiplash. For instance, when the RIAA pursued Brianna LaHara, a then 12-year-old honors student from New York, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) asked: “Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?”
The image of a sweet-faced LaHara appeared in scores of media outlets with many publications asking how the RIAA, with its seemingly bottomless war chest and army of attorneys, could really be threatened by the likes of LaHara. The RIAA moved fast to settle the case with LaHara’s mother agreeing to pay the RIAA $2,000.
But record company lawyers say the industry must stand up for its rights.
“The copyright office has virtually no enforcement powers,” lawyer Chris Castle said. “That’s left up to the Department of Justice and they haven’t done much about this problem. If the RIAA didn’t do anything about piracy, then nothing would get done.”
More to the point, failure to prosecute violators could be a breach of fiduciary duty and open the record companies to lawsuits from artists.
“They have to do everything they can to prevent piracy,” said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, a company that monitors traffic to entertainment sites. “Or else how long will it be before the estate of Cole Porter or The Beatles file suit against you. The RIAA acts as agents for hundreds of thousands of artists and for millions of songs. They have to demonstrate to the artists and also to Wall Street that they are doing everything that they can to fight piracy. You can’t just say we gave up protecting their work. I don’t think they have the option to do that.”
