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Legal
Nesson plans to fight RIAA’s “unconstitutional abuse of law”
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 27 May 2009
The Harvard law professor who is helping one Joel Tenenbaum fight one of the Recording Industry Association Of America’s final individual file-sharing lawsuits has written an article about why he has taken the case on, accusing the record industry trade body of an “unconstitutional abuse of law”.
As previously reported, although the RIAA has now announced that it will stop suing individual music fans who access or upload unlicensed music on the internet, it is planning on seeing existing litigation through to completion. The highest profile lawsuit is the one against Tenenbaum, because he is defending himself against the copyright infringement lawsuit, and has enlisted the support of Harvard legal man Charles Nesson and his students to fight his case.
Writing for Ars Technica, Nesson positions the litigation as a David v Goliath battle, and argues the whole RIAA litigation campaign against individual file-sharers is ethically wrong, saying: “I believe that the RIAA litigation campaign against Joel and the millions of his generation like him is an unconstitutional abuse of law. Imagine a law which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine [the lower threshold for statutory damages] for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicised, and most drivers do not know they exist”.
He continues: “Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put into the hands of a private, self-interested police force that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim. Imagine that almost every single one of these fines goes uncontested, regardless of whether they have merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in a federal courtroom”.
Explaining why he is supporting Tenenbaum, Nesson continues: “Joel, who was a teenager at the time of the alleged file-sharing, is like the 35,000 other individuals who have been sued and cannot afford an attorney to defend themselves. Justice demands, however, that one man not be pilloried without the process due him as a civil right, without good counsel, and without the most rigorous proof that he has committed the wrongs alleged”.
You can read Nesson’s whole argument, and nod you head energetically in agreement, or tut loudly and mutter “you just don’t understand, what’s the use in having intellectual property rights if you can’t protect them?”, at this URL.
