An teenaged victim of the RIAA finally sues back

My eyes lit up when I saw this article today. A sixteen year old kid being sued for online music piracy is now accusing the recording industry of “violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.”

From the article:

Santangelo is the son of Patti Santangelo, the 42-year-old suburban mother of five who was sued by the record companies in 2005. She refused to settle, took her case public and became a heroine to supporters of Internet freedom.

The industry dropped its case against her in December but sued Robert and his sister Michelle, now 20, in federal court in White Plains. Michelle has been ordered to pay $30,750 in a default judgment because she did not respond to the lawsuit.

Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, responded at length on Tuesday, raising 32 defenses, demanding a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees.

…

Santangelo also claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, “have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States.”

The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

I am just glad someone out there is fighting back, rather than giving in the way I did two years ago at the advice of my lawyer. May this be a turning point in digital rights history.

Jobs: In the end, only perseverance matters.

I doubt I’ll ever join the Apple crowd, but I have the utmost respect for Steve Jobs and how he has changed the world through his brand. Here is a lengthy but interesting transcript of an interview that was conducted back in 1995, when I was only 10 years old, the bubble was barely even getting started, and the Ipod was nowhere in sight. It’s fascinating to look back, in retrospect, at someone who had vision in the truest sense of the word (not the bullshit you read in most corporate mission statements) and saw it through to fruition over and over again. There is something admirable about a guy who sees technology as artistic, and even quasi-religious experience. For these reasons and more, “Think Different” is to me a worthy life mantra.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

Entrepreneurship is no doubt the highest risk-reward tradeoff among all the possible choices available to a college student about to graduate. I look around me and see my roommates well on their way to law school, medical school, and I myself for the sake of having some stable options am in the process of interviewing for entry level finance jobs. I don’t know where Photorgy will take me in six months, but I know that if it’s really going to happen, it will require persistence remnant to that described above. Along with a whole lot of sacrifice. But I think I decided a long time ago that I’m ready to do it. And the more I think about it, the more I realize.. those sacrifices are already underway.

I’m just going along with the ride.

(On a related note for those of you who are from Cupertino/the Bay Area–Pirates of Silicon Valley is a great movie which portrays the history-making rivalry between a young Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that took place right in our backyard.)

Petition to Congress Against the Recording Industry of America

Friends, please take a quick moment to sign this e-petition to Congress against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):

Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA!

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. After over 18,000 lawsuits and counting against P2P users, file sharing has continued to increase rapidly. Meanwhile, music fans, like 12 year-old Brianna LaHara, college student Cassi Hunt, and parent of five Cecilia Gonzalez, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits, and many other innocent individuals are being caught in the crossfire.

This irrational crusade is not generating a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect. The RIAA should be working to create a rational, legal means by which its customers can take advantage of file sharing technology and pay a fair price for the music they love. With artists increasingly turning against the lawsuits, momentum may be shifting in favor of a better way forward.

Copyright law shouldn’t make criminals out of more than 60 million Americans — tell Congress that it’s time to stop the madness!

Along with 24 students at UCSD and several thousands of other college students througout the United States, I was a victim of the RIAA’s ludicrous file sharing lawsuits two years ago and had to shell out a couple thousand dollars in order to settle my case. These ridiculous lawsuits, whose targets include normal, law-abiding children, parents, and even the elderly, are obviously having no effect whatsover on the ubiquity and rapid growth of online file-sharing. Record companies don’t give a shit about “struggling artists,” they are simply looking to appease their corporate shareholders and continue stuffing their own pockets with hard earned money of American citizens. It’s about time they found a better solution and stopped taking the easy, greedy way out.

At this point the petition already has well over 100,000 signees and will be sent to the Commerce and Judiciary committees of both the Senate and the House. Please help to put an end to this gross injustice.

The Most Inspiring Blog Post I’ve Ever Read

Donald Crowdis is a 93 year old who keeps a blog. In light of how hard it was to teach my mom, at 48 years old, how to use Outlook to send emails, that in itself is incredible to me. To imagine the amount of significant history this man must have lived through during the last century just floors me.

Anyway, the following is the most inspiring short piece I have read in a long time. These are the painfully honest thoughts of a man who’s lived a remarkable life, yet is reluctant to leave this world without having fully fulfilled that “list” we all have in the back of our minds:

At this age, I must say that I do delight in people’s amazement when I tell them how old I am. But under all this is the knowledge that I am the oldest male on either side of my family, maternal or paternal, and I know I must go fairly soon. I just don’t like the idea.

I’ve floated on the remark “Been there, done that” for some time now, but the notion that the moment is approaching when I can no longer say this bothers me. The truth is, I don’t want to go.

There are many reasons. For too long I have behaved as if I could postpone going indefinitely, and thus have so many things that I must do first. I don’t want my successors to find out how much I could have done that isn’t done, not by a long shot. There are numerous notes and letters I must write. There are places I’ve wanted to travel, but never had the chance. Actually, each of you can, if you think yourself into my age, fill out the list. At least you can try to understand why I say that I hate to go.

At 22, it’s easy to never think about death and the many possible misfortunes that could cut it unexpectedly short. Reading this really forces you to confront that list of pressing though not urgent things that have been carelessly brushed aside or put off for a more convenient time. Crowdis shows us that no breadth of experience may ever prepare us to approach the end and say “I am ready,” but we nonetheless should recognize that the opportunities available to us, even in mundane, idle moments of life, are ultimately fleeting. May we do what we are convicted to do with our lives immediately rather than at the right perceived time in the future.

For You Clueless Guys Out There

 

The key to finding love, according to Dwight Schrute from The Office:

Women are like wolves. If you want a wolf, you have to trap it. You have to snare it. And then you have to tame it. Keep it happy. Care for it. Feed it. Lovingly, the way an animal deserves to be loved. And my animal deserves a lot of loving.

Enlighten yourselves here (while it’s still around). Your welcome.

409 Useless But Awesome Facts

If you are utterly bored and want to pass time with friends or rack up some knowledge to impress the ladies with in the future, I highly recommend this site.

Some of my favorites:

10. A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

12. To escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs – it will let you go instantly.

19. More people are killed annually by donkeys than airplane crashes.

291. All polar bears are left-handed.

399. The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they can be easily confused at a crime scene.

What can I say, I guess I get a kick out of animal facts.

383. Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

Gross! My sink is literally right next to my toilet. I need to get my toothbrush the hell out of there! I leave you with a California one that will really make you ponder–

190. It is illegal to eat oranges while bathing in California.

Why be confident?

Not only are you what you expect to be, but being confident frankly just saves time. In the attempt to do that’s anything worth the pursuit, you will face pessimistic, naysaying, and chronically risk averse people at every bump and every corner. People will doubt your every aspiration even if well intentioned. Spending any time doubting yourself is simply a waste of productive time.

Even if you have to lie to yourself a little, know your weaknesses and strengths better than anyone but then exaggerate your abilities so that they overshadow your faults and always believe that the odds if success are in your favor. It doesn’t mean you’ll never fail, you’ll just decide to never waste the time being afraid of it.

It doesn’t mean to be arrogant either. Humility is a by product of genuine confidence, cockiness is a sure sign of the inwardly insecure.

Luck and Life

I’ve always been fascinated by philosophical considerations of free will, fate, and the influences of luck in the course of our lives. The role of choice as it relates to God (Calvinist predestination), actually, has played a huge role in my views on religion, but I’ll save that for a thought out and well edited post in the future.

I believe that luck plays a bigger part in life than most people would recognize. We like to attribute accomplishments to our sheer effort and hard work, when in reality so many factors indirectly or directly helped us make it happen. I hated the ending of the movie Match Point but I definitely appreciated Woody Allen’s idea that pure luck can be the sole determinant of some of the most important outcomes of our lives.

No one can be successful in anything without taking risks and getting lucky. But to be lucky, I’ve realized, a person has to make the most out of the cards they are dealt by being bold and discerning. The saying “Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity” sums it up pretty well. Preparation is just the first step but the thing is, a person can actually maximize the chances of luck by exposing himself as much as possible to situations that can yield neutral-to-beneficial outcomes. It’s times when I’ve taken an unpaid internship just to learn, or attended a networking event just to make a few connections or even just taken talked to a random dude in a bookstore that I’ve found myself surprised by luck; its rarely so when I waste time and sit around doing nothing. Preparation without actively diving into possible opportunities is useless. We overcome the deterministic consequences of circumstances we can’t control by maximizing potential circumstances we can control. This might only be the illusion of free will, but at least it will, by probability, work to our favor.

Meg & Dia: New Favorite Band of the Moment

Took my friend Jen to a Daphne Loves Derby concert tonight here in San Diego and discovered an amazing band called Meg & Dia. Meg and Dia Frampton (they’re sisters) are the vocals, keyboard, and guitar of a 5 person outfit that plays some really moving rock music. I liked all of their songs but a highlight of the set was when they covered “When You Were Young” by The Killers.

Dia, lead vocal on most of their songs, talks like Katie Holmes in a cute-like-a-mouse sort of voice, but when she sings it is like nothing I’ve ever heard. The kicker, though, is that Meg and Dia are both VERY attractive girls (the picture above doesn’t do them real life justice at all).

I bought their album Something Real right after the show for $10 and I’m completely satisfied with my purchase. Here’s the music video of the single Monster, which is supposedly playing on MTV–very surprising to me given they are a pretty new indie band and their music doesn’t suck.

As always, this doesn’t compare to the live experience.

“More”

Stumbled upon this Youtube video the other day and made a mental note to blog it. It’s called “More”– an intriguing and honestly pretty haunting animated film on the elusiveness of happiness in modern life and the deceptiveness of wealth and success in our materially focused culture. The story is wordless–accompanied by excellent music and, though extreme, its message definitely applies to our lives the way we (well off American consumers) live it.

Warning: this might depress or creep you out