Rag Hand

In case you wonder who owns the Whitehouse this should clear things up.

Start with the folks Obama put in the DOJ.
From Copyfight.
First off, there’s the #3 man at Justice, Thomas Perrelli, accurately described by CNET as “beloved by the RIAA”.
Then there’s Neil MacBride, who used to be the Business Software Alliance’s general counsel.
Then there’s the #2 man, currently slated to be David Ogden. If that name only rings a faint bell it’s because you have to cast your mind back to Eldred v Ashcroft, the argument on whether retroactive copyright term extensions were legal.

The Register, UK:
Barack Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has sided with the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) in its lawsuit against a Massachusetts man accused of illegally downloading seven songs.

Here we go again.

The previous occupant of the White House also sided with the RIAA, in a similar case that ended in a mistrial – but only after a jury first found the defendant liable for a $222,000 (£152,000) fine for 24 songs she had made available for download by Kazaa.

The defendant in the Massachusetts case, Joel Tannenbaum, could be liable for over $1m (£0.7m) if the Bush Obama DOJ gets its way.

The crux of Tannenbaum’s case is not whether he illegally downloaded those seven tunes. Neither is it about whether copyright law is a good thing. On the contrary, the law students defending Tannenbaum say that “We are not arguing against copyright law. As lawyers and law students, we support the legal infrastructure and reasonable enforcement that our legal system permits.”

What they are arguing against is what they call unconstitutionally heavy-handed damages allowed by the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, which allows up to $150,000 (£103,000) in damages to be assessed for each “willful” violation of copyright.

–$150k per incident is rational? I guess they couldn’t get the death penalty.

It should be noted, by the way, that Vice President Joe Biden has long been a staunch RIAA supporter and that the DOJ has on its staff a raft of RIAA fans.

It would appear that the RIAA/MPAA finally got the government to be their personal leg breakers in what is legally a civil matter. without the inconvenience of having to get laws changed.

Big business vs little people: Bet on business. –Little people can’t afford to hang out in rich folks country long enough to make friends with politicians much less raise the cash required to buy them outright.

A friend of mine made the mistake of trusting his agent when she recommended he change from Progressive to Travelers. It went well enough until he took a car off his policy.

He says that an error message popped up about something not being applied, but she said everything was fine. They had a short conversation about how this wasn’t uncommon and that when it happened tech support needed to be contacted and in a couple of days everything would invariably be fixed until the next time.

That was on a Wednesday and on Friday the online payment system still demanded $889 for 6 months with no possibility of partial payments because it lists the $889 as a partial payment.

He called his agent who told him to wait until Monday or Tuesday on Tuesday he was still faced with the same bill and his agent told him to wait until Wednesday or Thursday. If it wasn’t fixed by then he should send her a check and she’d “upload” it. A check for how much? The -so far- mythical figure she’s quoted him or the amount the website is demanding?

It’s now Thursday and I’ll give you three guesses what hasn’t changed.

He says that, because the car is financed and the DMV has already sent him one letter saying that they couldn’t find a record of insurance, if it nothing has changed by tomorrow -it won’t be- he’ll go ahead and pay the insurance company their blood money and then figure out how to fix it. This way he only has one set of paper shufflers to contend with instead of three.

Having just gone through something similar, his approach makes as much sense as any.

From experience, I can tell you that complaining to the state insurance commissioner requires that first you get them to care, and second that you are willing to wait practically forever to get something resolved.

The whole problem is that the insurance companies have all gotten so big that they no longer have live people to talk to when something goes wrong. Instead you have to go through your agent, who probably doesn’t have a live person to talk to either, and if your agent has a problem with the company’s website or decides to protect their commission instead of the client, you’re still at their mercy because there is no other way of dealing with the problem. –Not that this matters.

The insurance companies care only about their bottom line, and if they had customer service departments the hold time would be measured in days instead of minutes. Then you would get one of those people you get when you call tech support. They have an accent even their mother can’t understand, they read only what is on the screen in front of them dutifully ignoring any pertinent data or questions and in the end lack both the authority and the training to actually help you.

After killing an hour or so waiting on hold and then answering a nearly endless list of stupid questions, getting to someone who can help invariably entails your spending the rest of your afternoon on hold while the person you just spoke to tries to transfer you to somebody who has just left the building.

Welcome to the internet superhighway where you can be ignored at the speed of light.

This was on the BBC:

US insurance giant AIG paid out a total of $218m (£150m) in bonuses after accepting bail-out cash, according to a senior US official.

Papers obtained by subpoena showed 73 people got more than $1m each while five received more than $4m.

This I read on Yahoo:

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans are drawing out a flap that has made the Obama administration squirm, applying the brakes to Democratic attempts to quickly tax away most of the bonuses at troubled insurance giant AIG and other bailed-out companies.

Sen. Jon Kyl, the Republicans’ vote counter, blocked Democratic efforts Thursday evening to bring up the Senate version of the tax bill to recoup most of the $165 million paid out by AIG last weekend and other bonuses in 2009. The House had swiftly approved its version of the bill earlier in the day.

By rushing, Kyl said, Democrats were letting populist outrage trump informed decision-making in the Senate, which is supposed to be insulated from the pressures of public passion.

“I don’t believe that Congress should rush to pass yet another piece of hastily crafted legislation in this very toxic atmosphere, at least without understanding the facts and the potential unintended consequences,” Kyl said on the Senate floor. “Frankly, I think that’s how we got into the current mess.”

I see the Republicans are continuing to protect their rich friends.

The bottom line is that AIG was contractually bound to pay most if not all of those bonuses.

To my mind the primary problem is not these particular bonuses, but that the bankers are pulling every string and calling in every political debt to make sure that the bonus structure and system under which they do business remains unchanged and unregulated. –This is the same system that rewards people for losing the company billions.

If these guys at AIG’s Financial Products division are an example of the “best and the brightest,” might I suggest they hire the merely competent. The profits would be smaller, but the rest of us, who actually work for a living, wouldn’t have to give up even more of what little we have to save the rich and powerful.

I guess the banks, the hedge fund managers, the mortgage brokers and the insurance giants think that the world wide collapse of the economy was caused by evil spirits and not bad business practices caused by their encouragement of short term greed and their rewarding of general incompetence.

Not to mention investing in or insuring investment in “derivatives,” which are mostly imaginary instruments that rely on the ability of under-qualified or unqualified mortgage holders to either sell their homes in an ever expanding housing market or to make house payments that doubled or even tripled when the 0 interest part of the contract expired. —The best and the brightest you say. So tell me, what’s the weather like on your planet?

From the AP via Yahoo:

WASHINGTON – American International Group is giving its executives tens of millions of dollars in new bonuses even though it received a taxpayer bailout of more than $170 billion dollars.

AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments.

The Treasury Department determined that the government did not have the legal authority to block the current payments by the company. AIG declared earlier this month that it had suffered a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has asked that the company scale back future bonus payments where legally possible, an administration official said Saturday.

In a letter to Geithner dated Saturday, Liddy informed Treasury that outside lawyers had informed the company that AIG had contractual obligations to make the bonus payments and could face lawsuits if it did not do so.

Liddy said in his letter that “quite frankly, AIG’s hands are tied” although he said that in light of the company’s current situation he found it “distasteful and difficult” to recommend going forward with the payments.

Liddy says that these payments are unavoidable and that he personally finds recommending them “distasteful and difficult.”

Interesting, given the statement at the end of the article:

In his letter, Liddy told Geithner, “We believe there will be considerably greater flexibility to reduce contractual payments in respect of 2009 and AIG intends to use its best efforts to do so.”

But he also told Geithner that he felt it could be harmful to the company if the government continued to press for reductions in executive compensation.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff the AIG businesses, which are now being operated principally on behalf of the American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” Liddy said.

AIG lost $61.7 Billion -that’s with a “B”- in a single quarter. They then got bailed out to the tune of $170 Billion and yet they claim they need to pay bonuses to “attract and retain” the people who destroyed our economy because they are “the best and brightest talent.”

In other words it’s going to be business as usual. And the rest of us can kiss their overpaid, greedy, asses, because there is not now, nor will there ever be, any real penalty for what they did, and any new regulations limiting that greed are guaranteed to be smoke and mirrors. —The company needs to make money to repay all this debt, and we mustn’t interfere with the established process…… I’d be willing to wager that in the next year or two this “debt” will, oh so quietly, be forgiven, either in part or in whole. Or perhaps it will simply be extended in perpetuity. –It’s for the good of the country don’t you know.

On top of everything else, if they get into more trouble the president and the congress have already said that more bailout money may be required.

The RIAA are often compared to the Mafia. This is unfair. In spite of their chosen profession I still maintain a certain amount of respect for the Mafia.

This is from Richard Koman of ZDnet Government.

Brittany Kruger may be a scared young lady but she has also proven to be a brave advocate for victims, like herself, of RIAA Mafia shake-downs, arm-twisting and assorted rough stuff. According to Ray Beckerman Brittany and her father’s willingness to expose the fact that MediaSentry violated Michigan law by not having an investigator’s license has had amazing ramifications:

Here’s the story on P2Pnet news.

This is the open letter written by Brittany Kruger to thugs at the RIAA:

My name is Brittany Kruger. I’m not a criminal. I’m not a tough person. I cry almost every night these days, and I’m scared to death of what is going to happen to me in the future. Most of all I’m not a pirate, I don’t have a peg leg or a hook for a hand, and I don’t raid ships on the high seas looking for booty.I was a regular kid (I may be 22 years old now, but I still rely on my parents for almost everything!). I’ve no real knowledge of the world at this point in life other than how hard it is to establish credit or get a loan.

Today, February 3rd, I had a lovely conversation with one Morgan Schwartzlander [the ‘lead’ at the RIAA settlement extortion centre], and let me just tell you, it was outstanding, so great in fact I got off the phone in tears. My suggested settlement of $2,000 was “ridiculous” compared to their (”not negotiable”) $8,100 settlement.

Morgan will tell you that she is “not legal counsel” but she’ll tell you what she would do if she were in your situation, she’ll give you some statistics about how motions to quash are almost never granted, and then she’ll tell you that whoever suggested your motion to quash is an idiot (I don’t think she knew that was my dad).

I make about $4,500 in a YEAR working at Dairy Queen, and they want a lump sum of $8,000+? I don’t know how that’s going to work. When I buy a song from iTunes, it only cost $.99. Not every college student can have mommy and daddy pay for all their problems to go away.

I was looking through my journal to refresh my bad memory of how everything happened, then I decided that I didn’t want to bore you with dates. So I’m going to tell what I’ve learned about myself these past 2 years.

Today I realized that I cry a lot! Over and over I question myself “am I a bad person?” I’ve never killed anyone, I’m a very sympathetic and forgiving person, I volunteer, and I go to church.

But these people at the RIAA still have a way of making me question myself. Are some people just programmed to be bad no matter how hard they try to be good? That’s exactly how it seems to go for me, one step forward two steps back (or that seems to be how it is for my one person pity party).

Then my mom assures me that it’s not me. The jobs (I call them jobs because I would assume that a career is something that makes you feel good about what you do) these people hold are there to make people feel bad because they don’t have the monetary funds to make all their problems just go away. They are bullies!

I wonder how people like Ms Schwartzlander or Mr Kelso sleep at night, I wonder if they go to church every Sunday and think “I’m a good person”.

[Note: Kelso is Donald J, a Holmes Roberts & Owen attack lawyer acting for the Big 4’s RIAA as it extorts American students such as Brittany.]

I think all the time about how something that I love so much could get me into so much trouble?

I never sold copyrighted music for profit; I used it [P2P] to find new music or to figure out if I liked a band enough to buy their CD (because I hate buying a CD for just one song)! I didn’t think I was hurting the bands that I love by finding more of their music, listening to it, and then buying their CD. That makes no sense.

I didn’t even know what copyright was until got called to the Dean’s Office.

I don’t know how everyone else spends their college life, but for me a large portion consists of printing off endless amounts of documents that use language I don’t understand, making pleasant phone calls to settlement agencies, and racing papers to the local court house.

That’s precious time I could be using (studying or hanging out with friends) that’s wasted because of money.

I wonder how many college students have had to go to the police station to file a complaint about a “private investigator” invading my privacy, and have had the police look at them as if they were totally incompetent?

How many students have had their university hand them over like a piece of meat to hungry billion dollar corporate wolves?

I know that the University of Michigan didn’t do that, and Harvard University didn’t do that.

I feel bad for my roommates and friends too, because I know they get pulled into a lot of the problems that I have. They get caught answering the phone when it’s a settlement agency and have no idea what to do or say.

How are they supposed to comfort me when I’m having a bad day? I know that hundreds of kids at NMU, at one point or another, downloaded music, but they didn’t get their computers hacked into, and get accused like me of being a pirate like me, and they’re lucky for that. I think they know that.

I’m not a regular college student. I’m an example for everyone to stop and look at, with a giant stamp on my forehead that says, “Don’t be like me, because I made one mistake as a teenager that will ruin the rest of my life”.

You might not see my face or name plastered everywhere, but I can guarantee you that I’m in every statistic, you see a poster on the wall warning you against “illegal downloading”.

I’m the person they’re talking about. I might even be one of the “stupid” ones fighting the RIAA.

I’m Doe # 5, but I prefer to be called Brittany, because that’s who I am.

I’m a person, not an IP address or a case number.

I’m a person and no one will ever change that about me. I’m me and no one else will ever tell me different. I need to believe in that. Everyone makes mistakes, and the people who are doing this to me are no different.

I’m scared, and now I worry all the time about what is going to happen to me.

I don’t know if it has made me a stronger person or a weaker person. I have problems sleeping, my hair is falling out in ungodly amounts, I’m having a hard time concentrating in class, but most of all I hate the fact that I’ve pulled my entire family into this.

My dad helps me all the time figuring out what I should do, my mom listens to me when I’m having a bad day and need someone to cry to, my brothers and sister, I’m sure get jipped on the time my parents spend with them, and there’s always that perpetual question “hey isn’t your sister being sued or something for downloading music?”.

Right now it doesn’t seem like this is ever going to end, I’m just now entering the tunnel and the light is miles away.

I know it will end. I just don’t know how long it will take to get there.

I guess Murder by Death was right when they said “Sometimes the line walks you”.