Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post 766
The Recording Industry of America's favorite courtroom lawyer, Tom Perrelli, who has sued individual file swappers in multiple federal courts, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the third in line at the Justice Department. CNet's Declan McCullagh explores the background of the man who won the RIAA's lucrative business for his DC law firm: "An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board — and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo," not to mention Pandora and Radio Paradise. NewYorkCountryLawyer adds, "Certainly this does not bode well for CowboyNeal's being appointed Copyright Czar."
One character makes all the difference (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot headline:
Obama Picks RIAA's Favorite Lawyer For Top DoJ Post
Original headline:
Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
Quibbling over a single letter might seem pedantic - and /.'s headline is misleading rather than incorrect - but in this case, that's one very important letter. *sigh* The news lately is like a game of blogger's telephone.
Re:Not Surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Make no mistake, I am not trying to support Obama's decision. Especially considering that his second pick was Ogden who, according to TFA, "...was responsible for organizing the defense of the Child Online Protection Act..." and "...successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the U.S. Supreme Court."
I did a bit of research using Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia has some light information on Tom Perrelli. It seems he is most well-known for his copyright litigation, but did do work for the United States Department of Justice [wikipedia.org], including tobacco industry litigation. Also he was "... defending the constitutionality of federal statutes, defending federal agency action and regulations, representing the diplomatic and national security interests of the United States in courts of law, and conducting significant Title VII, personnel and social security litigation." That's a pretty sanitized summary, and its hard to find out if he was doing good work or bad, but the bit about defending federal agency actions, regulations, and statues against constitutional question leaves me with a bad feeling in my gut. There's a lot of unjust and unconstitutional laws out there, so I'd place my bets on him defending bad laws rather than good ones.
I couldn't find much on David Ogden, other than his firm's bio page, [wilmerhale.com] and fluff pieces. [upi.com] Apparently he was already involved with Obama's transition team and worked for Clinton's administration. He also has experience at the federal level. There's a lot of juicy stuff in the firm's bio page, but he seems to be pretty cozy with media and big corporations. Without a lot of detail, a casual reading suggests that he tends to represent the big corps over the little guys. The only two bright spots seem to be "Obtaining summary judgment and affirmance ... rejecting the claims of a major tobacco company seeking to shut down the .. nationwide counter-marketing campaign to discourage young people from smoking", and "Representing a US media company with respect to the detention and threatened prosecution by US Forces and the Iraq government of the company's Iraqi employee."
Overall, not much to be happy about. It looks like he picked two big-business, media-friendly lawyers. They have a lot of federal-level experience, but not the kind I would have wanted.
Re:There is a Silver Lining (Score:3, Informative)
He's unworthy (Score:5, Informative)
So far the only questionable selection that concerns me.
The RIAA have been misusing the DMCA for the longest period of time. The person that drafted the law even admits that the RIAA is abusing the law.
Now we have a lawyer, however intellectual, that has acted utterly un-smart, being appointed from "a lobbying organization"; which are supposed to be an antithesis to the Obama adminstration.
I mean, really, listen to those videos that made it to the net from those lawyers that were part of the RIAA; those that lobbied to convince law enforcement that copying music is contributory to money laundering. And now you have Obama appointing one of those crazies to an important position.
Re:So is Obama a Politian after all? (Score:4, Informative)
I still respect the guy for being a POW, no amount of partisanship can take that away from him.
McCain was a traitor and a coward more than he was a P.O.W. You should dive deeper into his personal story and then you find out:
* He was a crappy soldier who didn't follow orders
* He crashed 3 airplanes - anyone else would have been drummed out long before him
* His family's power and influence kept him in the military
* When he was shot down, he wasn't following the rules which led to his crash
* The injuries he suffered that many claim was the result of "torture" was not torture but injuries from the crash
* He lasted TWO DAYS.... TWO DAYS IN CAPTIVITY before he coughed up the fact that his father was the commander of the Pacific Naval Fleet
* He then became a traitor to America and recorded VC propaganda messages that were broadcast to his own troops in Vietnam
He claims torture doesn't work, but then he claims he was tortured and "broken", then he claimed torture does work and supported Bush's torture of Guantanamo detanees. In addition to being a liar, by his own admission he committed treason. He's a traitor and calling him a "hero" is an insult to virtually every other Vietnam vet who served more honorably and didn't sell out their country.
Re:And so it begins (Score:3, Informative)
First chink?
Holy f**k, Obama is considering ex Time Warner CEO as sec. of commerce!!!!! [time.com]
If that happens, Mr. Fox, here's the keys to the Internet chicken coop!!! Buh Buy to net neutrality!
Re:Not Surprising (Score:2, Informative)
Not even close. Slashdot as usual fixed on one fact and didn't bother to do any further investigation before publishing a derogatory story. Slashdot should be totally embarrassed by this stupid one sided story.
Perrelli has prior public service in the Clinton Justice Department, and has been named one of the top 40 young lawyers in the US. This includes leading the DoJ tobacco litigation team against major cigarette manufacturers, as well as acting as an advocate for important privacy regulation including HIPAA.
Like Mr. Obama he is also a former managing editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Perrelli is likely to have a tough time in confirmation hearings because he was one of the lawyers who represented Michael Schiavo in the infamous Terry Schiavo case - in my opinion one of the most odious efforts by the Federal Government to intrude on a person's right to life their life in privacy in the history of this nation.
Re:I guess (Score:5, Informative)
Can we pay back the trial lawyers by hiring one of their biggest hacks who sued teenagers for sharing songs on their iPods? YES WE CAN!!!
Please don't equate the RIAA with "trial lawyers". Who do you think have been fighting these vermin? Answer: trial lawyers.
Re:Hey, Libertarians! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quick! (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, it was an interesting situation
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html?pagewanted=print [nytimes.com]
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
So Bush's advisers clearly thought Blanco was incompetent and discussed using the Insurrection Act to send Federal troops and decided against it. This was in 2005. In 2006 they modified the Insurrection Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act#Differences_between_old_and_new_wording [wikipedia.org]
Differences between old and new wording
The original wording of the Act required the conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, to be met as the result of
insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy
The new wording of the Act, as amended, still requires the same conditions as worded in Paragraph (2), above, but those conditions could, after the changes, also be a result of
natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition
and only if
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.
Re:Hey, Libertarians! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'd like to say that I'm surprised here, but... (Score:4, Informative)
That was an inflammatory article. The study set the dividing line between "small donors" and "big donors" at $200. I know plenty of regular people who donated more then $200.
If you change the cutoff to $999, you get a percentage for Obama of 53%, compared to Bush's 38%. At least, so one commenter alleges on your linked article.
Re:Right, because the former chairman of Pepsi (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and Cheney: 1) Have job that pays millions 2) Give it up to earn $200K as VP, be vilified as Darth Vader 3) Profit???
Actually, quite a bit of profit.
Cheney continues to receive deferred compensation from Halliburton as well as having stock options which have mysteriously risen in value by 3,281% in just one of the past years.
[rawstory.com]
Re:Quick! (Score:2, Informative)
You are correct. I worked for the FAA and half the people sat-around doing nothing all day except surfing the web. Another quarter worked half the day and surfed the net the other half the day. Only around 25% actually worked all day long without goofing off.
Therefore you could easily lay off 75% of the FAA's "surf the web" workforce, same as a corporation operates during tight times, and not notice a significant falloff in productivity.
Re:Quick! (Score:4, Informative)
In courts of law there is guilt by association, and it is
clear through some of the tactics of the RIAA they have
broke the law.
Some ppl were innocent and brought to financial ruin,
and others were bullied and terrorized into accepting
plea agreements even thou they were innocent simply
because they could not afford a lengthy and expensive
blizzard of paperwork that would ruin them even if they
were found innocent.
Those who participated and assisted in their circumvention
of the law can be held guilty as accessories to the crime,
if the court can find the evidence.
Unfortunately the government is largely paid off by lobbyists
and we are well and goodly screwed.
THAT is why some ppl abhor this appointment amigo.
Re:Here we go again... *sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
Detestable? What evidence do you have that this man *set* RIAA policy, rather than carrying it out? Last I checked, Copyright is still a cherished law of the land outside of Slashdot, and the RIAA had the right to sue people for infringement. Now, it was a stubbornly stupid move (step 1, kill your customers, step 2, ???, step 3, profit!), but why would specific attorneys be painted with the brush for enacting the policy? As an example, David Boies [wikipedia.org] was lauded for defending Napster, representing the DOJ vs. Microsoft on Antitrust, yet was retained by the SCO group in recent years. Does that make him detestable?
You miss the whole point of my involvement in these cases. I have no problem with recording companies enforcing their sound recording copyright laws. It is the way in which their lawyers have gone about it that I find detestable:
-rushing to commence unnecessary litigations
-signing pleadings unsupported by insufficient evidence
-making false statements of fact
-making false representations about the law
-using financial might to crush innocent people
-attempting to conduct McCarthyistic witch hunts
-deliberately pursuing children and the disabled.
Any lawyer who signs on for this type of brutality is not a lawyer in my book.
Any lawyer who led this type of brutality is bad news... because he has no conscience.
Re:Quick! (Score:2, Informative)
The clear difference between Mississippi and Louisiana was that one place heeded the warnings and didn't wait for the government to hand-hold them
What a load of right-wing claptrap!
There was no difference between rural/smalltown Louisiana and rural/smalltown Mississippi. Both were totally devestated, and both had similar levels of death and breakdown in government services.
The difference between New Orleans and Mississippi is probably what you are thinking of. Do you not recognize at least a wee difference in scale here? New Orleans was a major city with over a million people in the metro area. More than half of those were packed densely into a very small area which is almost entirely below sea level, and is only connected to the outside world by 3 causeways/bridges. Most of those people are quite poor, and unlike the rural poor, have no personal transport at all. Even other large costal cities tend to have good access to the hinterland for evacuations, but New Orleans is south of a big lake with only one very long causeway crossing it.
There is frankly no way the city could have hoped to cope off its own resources. You can say the state should have stepped in, but really the state doesn't have much more to draw on than the city did. Natural disasters (and unnatural ones) hitting major cities like this are one of the main things we need a federal government for.
Oh, and by the way, the rural areas of Mississippi were completely devastated, and have not yet recovered. The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that the numbers are smaller. George Bush doesn't care about poor white people either.
Re:Quick! (Score:3, Informative)
I voted for obama too, but....
Really, what the fuck did you expect?
In a campaign financed with big money from actors, musicians, movie studios, producers, and so on, nobody has any RIGHT to think anything but this would happen. THE MAN HAD BIG NAME MUSICIANS ON STAGE PERFORMING BEFORE HIS SPEECHES. They weren't doing it solely out of the kindness of their hearts. And if you think they were, PLEASE STOP VOTING BECAUSE YOU ARE AN IDIOT.
Seriously. Anybody who expected an "information wants to be free" pro-copyright-reform president is way out of their fucking skull and shouldn't be voting.
He's got to do this, and copyright enforcement is going to be a very big priority for the incoming administration, just like anti-porn enforcement is for the outgoing administration. They have to pay off their constituencies. That's how the game is played. The game didn't change, no matter what the slogan was.
So why'd I vote for him? Same reason I ever vote, lesser of two evils. They would have done the exact same things economically (none of which will work) and spent the exact same amounts of money causing the exact same amounts of debt, pulled us out of our foreign expeditions at the exact same time. McCain would have put pro-life creationists on the Supreme Court, and Obama won't. That's the only difference worth voting on.
Re:Add the info to his WIkipedia article (Score:3, Informative)
And it will again about 2 minutes after someone adds any embarrassing information to the article, whether it's supported by citations or not. You can bet any high-profile attorney or politician who has a Wikipedia article about them probably has at least one staffer whose job it is to police information about their boss on Wikipedia, and sanitize it if necessary. It's just another PR function these days.
Re:Figures (Score:2, Informative)
The President is not FEMA. On top of that, the President attempted to send them in when shit was about to hit the fan, did you know the Louisiana gov. told him to piss off? Because if you were watching the news you didn't, as that would actually place the blame where it belonged, rather than on our countries professional red herring, rather than this "OMG BUSH CREATED KATRINA! ITS HIS FAULT NOONE LEFT"
Mississippi listened to the suggestions of the presidency a WEEK before and evacuated.
Lousiana didn't. This is not FEMA's fault. New Orleans Mayor was saying NOT to leave, that they would be fine. He failed his city.
Also, the DEA is a government agency, why are there still drugs in the country?
The FCC is a federal agency, why is there porn on tv?
Again, please focus on the correct source of the problem
Re:Quick! (Score:4, Informative)
Obama is probably picking a strong attorney who knows how to win in court.
Yeah. Mostly against children, students, grandparents, stroke victims, the homeless, the deceased, welfare mothers, people on Social Security Disability, home health aides, etc. His track record against parties who can afford lawyers is nothing to write home about.