Orwell’s 1984 conjured up a dystopian future where the masses were manipulated and controlled to preserve the power of the elite. Kind of brings the tactics of the RIAA and the MPAA to mind doesn’t it? And now there’s something called the “Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy” who are mounting a campaign called “the Campaign to Protect America.” Who is involved in this coalition? You will be horrified and disgusted.
Orwell’s novel 1984 has a number of major themes. There is the continuous “war,” which is used to justify the actions and policies of the government. There is doublethink and newspeak; the former the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously and believe both to be true while the latter is the linguistic representation of the doublethink. And there is the pervasive, highly structured repression of the populace.
Lest you think that Orwell’s vision was fanciful just consider the following assertion: “Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned . . . If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year . . . This is not about addressing problems in a particular sector. This is a major issue of public policy that affects our entire economy.” What utter crap.
This gem of doublethink and newspeak came from the lips of Rick Cotton, NBC/Universal general counsel, who also is the chairman of the newly formed Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, which I note has as its acronym CACP — you’d think media types would have come up with something more catchy like Coalition Regarding Active Piracy . . . or maybe something else.
Anyway, to continue the newspeak CACP is mounting a campaign called “the Campaign to Protect America.” Remember 1984’s war? Here we have against “the pirates” the forces of right, to whit, the MPAA, the RIAA and – this is where these bastards are getting really clever – they are in partnership with the National Association of Manufacturers and the pharmaceuticals industry. What they have done is to conflate their campaign against piracy with a campaign against counterfeiting (hence the support of Big Pharma). And as if that wasn’t enough the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is supporting the “war”!
In case you think that this unwholesome brigade is unlikely to affect you just remember that the RIAA has been actively looking for people downloading pirated content so that it can either extract thousands of dollars from them or take them to court. The problem with this campaign has been that the RIAA is, to put it mildly, sloppy and casual in its forensics.
These tactics have resulted in the RIAA going after people such as Tanya Andersen, a disabled single mother in Oregon. On the basis of nothing more than an IP address – let me stress that there was no other evidence, just the IP address — the RIAA in the guise of Atlantic Records (oh, how far they have fallen) sued Andersen in 2005 for piracy.
This is where things got really ridiculous: She was accused of using Kazaa to download gangsta rap. She vehemently denied the charges and filed a counterclaim that alleged the record labels indulged in fraud, racketeering and deceptive business practices.
The good news is that early in June the case against Andersen was dismissed with prejudice and Andersen’s counterclaim looks good because she also has evidence that RIAA representatives attempted among other things to contact her 8-year-old daughter!
The case against Andersen is one of two cases where the RIAA’s outrageous and shameful bullying tactics were defeated. Hopefully this will open the door for more people accused of piracy to not only prove themselves innocent but lay the groundwork for the RIAA strong-arm mob’s extortion racket to be exposed and stopped.
However the whole CACP ploy could be very bad news for us all because its goal will be to extend the reach of the law into all sorts of areas where we really don’t want it. Next week, we’ll look at what it might be able to do.
Until then let me tell you how bad it could get: There’s a character in 1984, O’Brien, a member of the elite who runs the country and describes what he thinks the future will look like: “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.” Somehow I could imagine Cotton saying that, couldn’t you?
