Patti Santangelo now has a team. Its members are Patti herself, her new lawyer, Jordan Glass and you.
And you guys are taking on Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, the desperate Big Four Organized Music Goliaths.
They don't stand a chance.
Glass who, bottom line, quite literally wouldn't be beside Patti without help from p2pnet readers, was officially accepted into the New York court system last week and, he told me, he guarantees he'll stay on the case to the end.
"I have to thank all of the p2pnet readers who've contributed to the Fight Goliath Campaign," Patti said today. "Their donations so far have enabled me to hire a new attorney, Jordan D. Glass.
"I wanted very much to continue this fight on my own but when I sat down with the pile of paperwork, I realized that without an attorney who understood the discovery process, I'd surely lose."
Glass is a one-man band in a private practice firm. We'll tell you more about him shortly and we'll also give you details of how the money you're donating is being spent, together with estimates of up-coming outlays.
In two other important developments, we now have a private New York PO Box address for snail-mail contributions, and all donations are going into an escrow account administered by Patti herself.
And while the RIAA is targetting Santangelo and people like her, on November 15, 2004, in testimony before the Federal Trade Commission, the RIAA openly admitted most p2p users don't even know their files are in a shared folder, says Recording Industry vs The People.
"As an initial matter, P2P software may, upon installation, automatically search a user’s entire hard drive for content," states P2P File-Sharing Workshop – Comment, P034517 - Comments of The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), November 15, 2004, going oin:
"Files that users have no intention of sharing may end up being offered to the entire P2P network. Continued sharing of personal information is hard to avoid and is facilitated by confusing and complicated instructions for designating shared items. A study by Nathaniel S. Good and Aaron Krekelberg at HP Laboratories showed that “the majority of the users…were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive."
So far .... ... 558 p2pnet readers have contributed a total of $7,588.27. And there were two single snail-mail donations to the old snail-mail address - one of $40, and one of $50.
The total of $7,678.27 looks like a lot, but it isn't. It allowed Patti to retain Glass, but much more will be needed for the discovery process, which has to be completed by May 5. How much more? We're working on an estimate, but for now, it'll be anything upwards of $100,000.
And if you're wondering if it's all dollars down the tubes, I, the 558 current donors, Jason Rohrer, who wrote the donations script and set up the central donations tracking page, Jordan Glass, Patti and her kids clearly don't think so.
As Alex H sums it up, he's imagining himself standing in the Valley of Elah, "holding a betting slip with 'David - 100 Shakels To Win' written on it."
We are too and when Patti wins, shattering the Big Four's delusions that we depend on them instead of the other way around, it's going to make a huge difference to the more than 18,000 people already being pilloried by the Big Four, not to mention people yet to be victimized.
You can make an immediate contribution to the Goliath Fund by clicking the PayPal button under the pic. Or you can send it to Patti by snail-mail address beneath it.
Patti Santangelo C/O PO Box 274 Hartsdale New York 10530-0274
If you're a web site owner and you want to post a donations button, go here for the code. You'll find a list of sites featuring donatioins buttons, and some p2pnet story links in the struggle.
420 million vs almost three billion For anyone who's not familiar with the case, Patti, a New York mother of five, is the first of the more than 18,000 people - men, women and even young children - so far victimized by the Big Four's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
Through a vast international PR and propaganda blitz involving the mainstream media and scores of 'trade' organizations, the labels, worth billions of dollars, are trying to claim they're being "devastated" by people who share files on the p2p networks. The RIAA sue 'em all campaign is the American element.
Santangelo was distributing copyrighted songs online, says the RIAA. It's unlikely it'll get far with that so the next targets will, inevitably, be Patti's children. They are Michelle, 19 (wht Patti, left), Bobby, 15, and Ryan, 7 (centre) and Nicole (17) and Jack, 10 (bottom left), all of whom live at home.
Behind specious claims of a thriving corporate music download market, RIAA spokesmen Mitch 'The Don' Bainwol and Cary 'Scary' Sherman' claim their lawsuits are driving significant numbers people to the tiny handful of sites they service and supply, although the reverse is true.
In its latest report, the Big Four's IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries) boasts, "Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year". And, "legitimate digital music business is steadily pushing back on digital piracy," declared Kennedy, contradicting his and other statements that "Illegal activity on peer-to-peer networks has stayed static in the last year". Meanwhile in the real world of online music, 60 million Americans had logged on a year ago, says the Digital Media Project, and, say statistics from p2p research company BigChampagne, the numbers are steadily increasing year by year.
During September, 2005, the average number of files available on p2p networks for download at any moment (average simultaneous files) was 2,789,154,393, BigChampagne told me. Spelled out, that's almost three billionfiles.
In America in December, 2005, on average, 6,978,715 people were simultaneously logged onto the p2p networks at any given time, says p2p research firm BigChampagne, which produces statistics centering on the file sharing phenomenon.
In 2004, the number was 5,500,314 and in 2003, 3,239,298, says the firm, which compiled statistics for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Information Technology Outlook report for 2004.
Globally, in December, 2003, 5,602,384 people were logged onto the p2p nets at the same time at any point around the clock, in 2004 the number had swelled to 7,582,248 and in December, 2005, it was 9,554,298.
But neither the Big Four Organized Music cartel members, Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and Sony BMG, nor their shareholders, are benefitting from this huge Net music phenomenon. They're still locked in the last century with outmoded physical business models and, "Many in the music industry grumble that downloading has been their downfall, and the business has aggressively tried to stop illegal file sharing," says AP.
The Big Four spare no expense in their bitter war against the 'consumers' whom, they claim, are thieves and criminals who "illegally" download music without paying for it.
This isn't, however, a criminal matter, efforts by the cartel's RIAA to elevate it to that level notwithstanding. It's a civil one. And what's at issue isn't if someone's broken a law it's whether or not he or she has infringed a copyright, which is a very long way from "criminal" or "illegal".
At the beginning of the case, Patti was a client of prestigious New York lawyers Beldock, Levine & Hoffman. However, a single mother, she couldn't afford the fees and she and B, L & H decided the only way she could continue was to become her own lawyer.
Now, spread the word. Blog, post, use IM, emails, ICR, whatever. Contact your local tv / radio station / newspaper. Can you get something on slashdot? Can you get the Fight Goliath campaign on Digg or anywhere else? And it doesn't matter where in the world you are. The results of the Patti case will affect you as well. That's why sites from countries such as Italy and the UK feature donation buttons.
Behind specious claims of a thriving corporate music download market, RIAA spokesmen Mitch 'The Don' Bainwol and Cary 'Scary' Sherman' claim their lawsuits are driving significant numbers people to the tiny handful of sites they service and supply, although the reverse is true.
Globally, in December, 2003, 5,602,384 people were logged onto the p2p nets at the same time at any point around the clock, in 2004 the number had swelled to 7,582,248 and in December, 2005, it was 9,554,298.
