If you're a Christian, December 22 is a mere three days before Christmas, the season of good will and good cheer. And even if you're not, it heralds a holiday, a time to kick back and give and receive presents and generally relax and have fun.

Unless you're Organized Music, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, EMI or Warner Music, the Hard-Core Big Four corporate record labels, that is. Because there's certainly no goodwill or good cheer there.

And unless you're Patricia Santangelo, the New York mother who epitomizes the 17,000 or so Americans who have so far been victimized by the Big Four, and all in the name of the bottom line.

On December 22, she'll be stand alone and unrepresented in a New York court for an "In Person" conference with judge Mark D. Fox in Elektra v Santangelo --------- or, more properly, Patti Santangelo versus the Elektra Entertainment Group, Virgin Record America, UMG Recordings, BMG Music and the disgraced Sony BMG Music Entertainment company.

This morning , "Patti is resolved, is she?" - my wife asked. "Yes," I said. "She knows exactly what she's letting herself in for. She knows about Cecilia Gonzalez." And she also knew about Brittany Chan, a 14-year-old scgoolgirl, and Tanya Andersen, a disabled mother living on a disability pension who've also been singled out by the cartel for special treatment.

"It's terrible, really, having to think of this just before Christmas," says Patti. "It's exhausting to have to be thinking and worry about this at any time of the year, but just before Christmas?"

But as she also told p2pnet today, "This isn't just for me. It's for all those other people as well."

Sony won't be under any stress, of course. It has legions of highly paid lawyers taking care of bidnes and the Sony bosses, such as Andy Lack (upper right), will be thinking of other things, including the official launch of the corporate Mashboxx 'p2p' application (for which Lack is a prime mover) beta.

But that's not the case for Santangelo. She'll all too soon be standing by herself in the first of the Organized Music extortion cases to actually come to trial.

"Laws were written to protect people, not to give huge, multi-billion dollar mega-corporations a way to terrorize them," we wrote recently. "Will the law work equally well for an ordinary person with no heavyweight legal team and no unimaginably vast financial resources behind her?

"Patricia Santangelo will find out …"

And she'll find out on behalf of the millions of people around the world who, totally disgusted by the labels' scurrilous treatment of them, and of the flagrant overcharging for low quality mp3 digital music tracks worth only a few cents, have made their disgust known by refusing to have anything to do with iTunes, RealNetworks, Sony Connect, Napster and the handful of other music download and rental sites backed, supported and supplied by the Big Four and the hundreds of labels they own.

Instead, online music fans have gone from being mindless, cash-cow 'consumers' to customers, again, people exercising free choice by turning in their hundreds of millions to the p2p networks and independent sites, a practice Organized Music is determined to crush by any and all means, including suing its own customers.

Santangelo flatly refused to give in to OM extortion. Judge Colleen McMahon turned down her appeal to have the RIAA case dismissed, the lawyers who'd been working with Santangelo up until then pulled out.

Now this mother of five children will face the international music industry by herself, and with no legal or financial resources to back her. And what happens to her will eventually reflect directly back on you if, one of these days, you too are selected for victimization.

The RIAA, used by the Big Four to attack victims, is short for Recording Industry Association of America. But if course, it's no more American than are the Organized Music members themselves - Sony BMG (Japan, Germany), Vivendi Universal (France), EMI (Britain) or Warner Music (US, but run by a Canadian).

The RIAA is a dedicated propaganda weapon designed to terrorize customers and influence the media, as are all the other pseudo-trade organizations such as the IFPI, ARIA, CRIA, BPI, and so on.

It's successful in planting vast quantities of disingenuous dis- and misinformation releases full of claims that people who share files are thieves; that it's losing untold amounts to file sharing; that its workers and support staff are being laid off in droves because of file sharers; that the artists its owners have under contract are also suffering.

It's nonsense. All of it.

Files are shared, not stolen. Nothing has been taken and no one has been deprived of anything.

The Big Four say their vicious, and bizarre, sue 'em all marketing campaign is driving people away from the p2p networks and independent sites which are springing up as the labels' first, and only, competitors.

Edgar Bronfman jr, the Canadian who runs Warner Music, claims the, "five-year legal fight against unauthorized downloading or sharing of songs is starting to pay off after thousands of music fans were sued and file-sharing companies such as Grokster Inc. were shut down"

In fact, at the least, 51 million people in America alone currently share music with each other via the p2p networks, and the number is going up, not down. In the US in November, 2004, on average, 5,445,275 people were simultaneously logged onto one or more of the p2p networks at any one time, says p2p research firm BigChampagne.

By November this year, the number had risen to 6,530,408.

But the sue 'em all campaign isn't confined to America. Music lovers around the world are also being persecuted by Big Four enforcement organizations identical to the RIAA and which, like the RIAA, claim their terror tactics are having a marked effect.

However, this, too, is a complete distortion of reality,

Globally, the number of people sharing at any given moment in November, 2003, was 4,392,816. By November, 2004, it had reached 7,452,184 and by this November, the figure was 9,168,812.

Patti is a working mother with five children to take care of. She doesn't even begin to have the kind of money or resources she'll need to take on the multi-billion-dollar labels on by herself.

From today and until Patti and a jury of her peers decide Organized Music has gone too far, our Sunday will be devoted solely to the Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign and stories centering on the Big Music sue 'em all scandal.

We'll be posting updates, together with details on how you can make donations directly to Patti, and other things you can do to help.

Because she's not alone. There are hundreds of millions of people behind her, all of whom can chose not to continue supporting the Organized Music sue 'em all campaign by not buying Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, EMI or Warner Music 'product,' as they correctly term the cookie cutter, lo-fi tracks they're trying to palm off for $1 and up each.

Sandro in Canada was the first volunteer. He provided the Fight Goliath domain name.

What can you, where ever in the world you are, do to help? Patti will need ongoing financial support and possibly some expert back-up in terms of how the RIAA puts its claims together and if they hold up technically. We'll try to find out what Patti will need the most.

So stay tuned and within the next few days, we'll tell you what you can do.

Jon Newton -

They depend on you, not the other way around. Don't buy their 'product'. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you're into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep's doorstep, making sure you've contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.