It’s a shame US District Colleen McMahon (right) isn’t in Boston. She might have had a thing or two to say about two students, there, who’ve been coerced by the members of the Big Four record label cartel into effectively discounting the maxim, ‘Innocent until proven guilty’.
Moreover, they have, to all intents and purposes, been ‘fined’ almost $4,000 by EMI (UK), UMG (France), Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) and WMG (US) without ever having been near a court or a judge.
Every time the Big Four use their RIAA to launch a Pay Us Or Else missile at someone as part of their blackly cynical sue ‘em all marketing campaign, victims are told to get further instructions from the Settlement Support Center LLC in Seattle.
Targets, always ordinary mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, as well as students, are then told by an ‘official’ at the centre that they’ll have to pay a ruinous amount of money to avoid being further persecuted by teams of RIAA lawyers during a civil court proceeding.
The minimum penalty for copyright infringement under the USA Copyright Act is $700 for each song, the maximum amount being $150,000 each. So even for, say, half-a-dozen songs, the minimum amount an RIAA victim might be facing if found ‘guilty’ would be $4,200 or almost $1 million at the top end.
A million dollars is a terrifying sum, but no one has ever had to pay it because not one of the victims has ever appeared in court, which doesn’t stop the cartel from using the mainstream media to suggest it’s successfully sued many thousands of people, around 14,000, at last count.
And this, in turn, further bolsters the idea that it’s impossible to resist the cartel.
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