Wednesday, January 25, 2012 / 2:15 pm
AAARHR! Attorney/Bassist Joe Escalante Explains the Big Media Lawyers Are the Real Pirates
Perhaps you didn’t know nor care too much about SOPA/PIPA. But you ought to.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: SOPA/PIPA | online piracy | Joe Escalante
Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know nor care too much about SOPA/PIPA (Stop the Online Piracy Act, and the other one), but believed your friends on the left when they hyperventilated that it would be the end of the Internet, and thus the world. (And like me you noticed their keening wails when every one of the Republican candidates stood onstage in South Carolina and was better on the issue than our own beloved President O). But believing them wasn’t the same thing as caring.
Leave it to Joe Escalante, who managed to make a lunchtime radio show about copyright and intellectual property law fascinating, to explain the problem both concisely and harrowingly!
Writing in the Huffington Post, Escalante (who’s both a lawyer and the bassist for the OG punk band The Vandals) explains the suit he and his bandmates have been fighting since 2004.
So why were the Vandals getting sued so long? One of their albums had a parody cover treating their name like the Variety logo. They had a Myspace page. From that Myspace page, they linked to Myspace’s online mp3 store, where the album is sold.
If the fear is that under SOPA, the media companies will take advantage of a legal anomaly that will permit them to shut down entire web sites, with the burden of proving innocence placed on the defendant, based on trumped up claims and theories, I can tell you, it's not paranoia. It is a real world certainty.
My conservative nature resisted the notion these apparent threats to the First Amendment outweighed the need to punish I.P. thieves. However, my epiphany occurred while sharing with my audience an outrageous comment made to me during a deposition in the Variety case. Variety's lawyer from the 900 member firm of Fulbright and Jaworsky accused me of having an image of the Vandals album depicting the notorious “infringing parody” of Variety's logo on the Vandals' Myspace page.
When it was pointed out to him that it was part of News Corp's mp3 retail store and outside the control of the Vandals he signaled the theory he will present at trial to squash us. “If you had no control over the image in the retail store, why didn't you shut down your entire Myspace Page immediately so that no one could see the infringing parody?”
Yup. The attorneys for Variety have been suing the Vandals over a link from their Myspace page to an online mp3 store since 2004. The nuttiest part may be that it’s one of the few online stores I know of where people actually pay for their music instead of just ripping it outright.
Meanwhile, Leon Panetta and the boys killed some real pirates last night. “Leon! Good job tonight!” Obama told him at the State of the Union, perking up Wolf Blitzer’s ears. “Good job.” Then he went on to pander about piracy to Hollywood, even if only for a line. The rest of the speech was either an outrageously bloodthirsty call to Communism or kind of a meh laundry list, depending on whether you are Mitt Romney and The Wall Street Journal, or me.
rebecca@fourstory.org
Comments
Be the first ...
