Andrew Orlowski shows why Charlie Nesson might as well have been custom-created by the RIAA:
Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that’s to allow the US recording industry’s lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.
Nice work, Charlie.
Nesson failed in his avowed mission “to put the record industry on trial”. He failed to show why disproportionate statutory damages are harmful, which could have had a lasting constitutional effect. He failed to paint the defendent as sympathetic, or “one of us”. He failed to demonstrate why copyright holders make lousy cops. He even had a Judge noted for her antipathy to the big record labels. In short, he ceded the moral high ground completely and utterly to the plaintiffs, the four major record labels. The labels’ five year campaign against end users is finally at a close, but Nesson’s performance leaves it looking (undeservedly) quite fragrant.
It’s hard to imagine a worse result for anyone except the RIAA . . . they won big, and it’s hard to fault the jury for deciding the way they did . . . Nesson pretty much handed the case to the RIAA on platter:
Nesson could have pointed to the billions of royalties that haven’t been collected by the major labels failure to monetize P2P file sharing. He could have added that the Big Four don’t speak for other parts of the music business in putting Enforcement first. He missed the opportunity to gain the moral and intellectual high ground. Now I’ve no doubt Nesson is sincere in his beliefs that he’s doing everyone a favour, but then again, there’s a bloke on my bus who thinks he’s Napoleon.
Nesson’s case was a misanthropic bundle of intellectual prejudices, a worker’s paradise in which everyone has rights, except creative people. In his Kumbaya world, we’d all be better off, except the people who actually do the art. But once the jury had heard from Tenenbaum — a deeply unpleasant defendant — the die was cast.
The final word, of course, should go to “Weird Al” Yankovic, with his heart-felt, moving “Don’t Download This Song”.
