I came here with 18 comments in the thread expecting to see people talk about why this person is not a great candidate and, honestly, am quite shocked to see people defending this pick. I assure you, had Bush made this pick it would be lampooned as being too corporate etc etc etc.
I understand that people want to give lawyers the benefit of the doubt and not judge them by who they represent, but honestly, I find that logic appalling. Would we really be saying that for a lawyer who defended the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal? No, b/c anyone with _any_ integrity would likely walk away from that...or anyone with any political smarts. Same in this case. It seems clear this man is not about ideals or principles but rather money and privilege. Is that who we want in arguably one of the most important non-supreme court law positions in the country?
Even if he _is_ about that, he hasn't proven it with his judgement by taking those cases. This should also count in the decision. I'm sorry, but I cannot find the silver lining in this nomination. Perhaps someone can educate me....
Would we really be saying that for a lawyer who defended the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal? No, b/c anyone with _any_ integrity would likely walk away from that...or anyone with any political smarts.
Very poor example... The right for everyone to have a proper defense in criminal trials is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I'm really surprised anyone would argue against it.
I understand your point, however the role of the Solicitor General has a specific function that leads one to wonder - "The office also determines which cases it will bring to the Supreme Court for review" This is a very dangerous role for someone who has engrained themselves in such a controversial topic. Not to mentioned (according to the article) hasn't been able to argue a consistent punishment for such crimes. I would imagine in the same token anyone else involved in another highly controversial law topic should receive the same scrutiny. Where Obama is heavily criticized is the fact that the general populous has a lynching out for big corporate media companies that are trying to fill their pockets with more money by simply "suing the shit" out of anyone that dares cross their path.
That's it for Obama. Great, inspiring speeches, but too many poor decisions, and quite the hand for choosing the wrong people for important positions. Maybe he wants to appease everyone? Either way this is not what I expect from a leader. The RIAA is the exact opposite of "by the people, for the people".
I am officially out of the Obama camp. I suppose now it's off to see that the next Republican candidate is not an un-electable retard from the tea party camp. And BTW clearly anyone remotely associated with the tea party is an un-electable moron.
Why must it be either a Democratic or Republican candidate? This seems to be a major weakness in American politics, that a failure with one party leads to people endorsing the other, regardless of their positions and merit. I know it is easier said than done, but it looks like there is room for more parties.
While I agree with you that it would be great to have a viable third party in the United States, the very structure of the voting system here (the single member district plurality system) has been shown to favor a two party system under various game theory analyses.
Check out Duverger's law for more insight on this:
I live in a country (Canada) that falls under the article's counterexamples. We have four parties in Parliament. None of them can break out of the 30s, currently, in terms of their polling numbers. In addition, no party has actually won a majority in 6 or 7 years.
I am sure it must be the same in America as here in England, seeing as you guys basically adopted our legal system wholesale. Here in England, you can not just refuse a case because you want to, so, if a paedophile instructed a barrister, he is not allowed to turn him down just because it does not look good to others. It is not simply that it is advisable that he should not refuse him, it is rather, he actually can not refuse him or gets disciplined otherwise.
Has not the choice of )Obama to reward bankers who got us into the biggest financial collapse of the world not told you who is boss? There was a coup lately, the companies won we as individuals lost and the US constitution lost
Disheartening, but not surprising. Obama has made it clear where his priorities lie, and that's with Big Content. Look to see more ICE takedowns of "infringing" sites and more COICA-like legislation.
FWIW, this doesn't disconfirm what we already knew about the administration's affection for Big Content, but what we already knew was a lot more important.
Look at the ACTA talks. It was something of a tipoff that drafts of the agreement were shared with a panel of "big content" lawyers[1], but hidden from the general public, supposedly on grounds of national security. As to substance, leaked drafts required DMCA-type legislative provisions and strongly encouraged "three strikes and you're out" policies for kicking infringers off the net, (they weren't mandated, but were, IIRC, explicitly listed in one draft as a "best practice", with no stated alternatives). And while current drafts back off of that, and some of the other more draconian positions, that's largely due to push-back from other parties, particularly in Europe.
The problem with a two-party system is that whichever you pick, they're going to support something that you really don't like. For me, with the Democrats, this is one of the biggies: on these issues, the party positions have been largely dictated by Hollywood for a fairly long time. (Sonny Bono copyright act, anyone?) Then again, the Republicans haven't been all that great on this either; ACTA started under Bush....
[1] The list is here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/these-42-peo... The White House was, for a time, trying to keep even the names secret, again claiming "national security". (How does it compromise national security if people know these drafts are going to lawyers for eBay? I have no idea...)
i think this is right. (note, i worked at jenner & block, verrilli's firm, but i don't have any inside info.) what you have with verrilli is a lawyer at the top of his profession and who's represented a variety of interests.
most lawyers you meet aren't going to frame the representation of the riaa in such stark moral terms as the folks here. for instance, representation of the riaa is nowhere near a breach of professional ethics -- on the contrary, most of the riaa's positions prevailed as a matter of law.
lawyers take on work for a variety of reasons and it's notoriously difficult to adjudge a lawyer's personal views based on the arguments he/she has made while representing a client.
Oops, I deleted my post above because I thought better of speculating, but looks like it got a reply before I managed to. =]
My speculation was more or less: the RIAAness may or may not have been a factor, but my guess is that the main criterion was a consensus pick that avoids a confirmation battle, because it's not what Obama wants to expend energy on currently. From what I can tell from the law-blog reactions, Verrilli is a well-known / well-regarded lawyer in DC appellate-practice circles, and liked by both conservatives and liberals, which makes him a good choice from an ease-of-confirmation perspective. He already picked up an endorsement from prominent conservative lawyer Miguel Estrada, so if that was the strategy, it seems to be working.
You point out that most of RIAA's positions prevailed as a matter of law as an argument against representing them being a breach of professional ethics.
I think that these are two different contexts. I don't like the term "ethics" so I'll use the word "morality". There is a difference between something being moral and something being legal. For an extreme example, everything done in tyrannical states, such as north korea or iran are "legal" because they are done under the laws of that country. That does not mean they are moral.
A lawyer who defends a reprehensible or immoral character in order to defend a moral legal principle is to be respected.
But I'm not sure this is the case here. (and I'n not saying it is not the case either.)
My point is to note the confluence of legality with ethics/morals and to point out that they are not the same, and thus one cannot support the existence of the other. That a law exists does not make breaking it immoral, nor does the lack of a law prohibiting something make the act therefore moral.
I don't like the term "ethics" so I'll use the word "morality".
You're conflating ethics and morality while making the point that ethics is not the same as legality. In doing so you (probably subconsciously) reframe the question to something entirely different.
Professional ethics and personal morality are completely different things - just because you don't like one word doesn't mean you can substitute a different concept. For example: as a professional ethical standard, you must maintain client confidences, even if they tell you where the bodies are. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Garrow)
Most lawyers probably find that morally quite challenging, but are ethically obliged to do so.
Similar to the cab-rank principle - you might not want to act for a paedophile, wife beater or the RIAA, however in most common law systems a barrister is obliged to do so.
Donald Verrilli Jr is replacing Elena Kagan. Elena Kagan is now sits on the Supreme Court. That should shed some light on how important this position is.
If the RIAA/MPAA/old media (Donald also represented Viacom in its case against Google/Youtube) wrote its own laws the internet would be a sliver of what it is today. Many entities, for profit, not for profit, corporation, or association work to crush individual rights. Few do so to the degree that the RIAA has pursued.
Its sickening and disturbing that any representative, former or current, for such an organisation would be even nominated for such a powerful role in the United States government.
Clearly this guy has had a vested interest in crushing innovation and personal freedom in the United States. And you are irked that anyone cares.
> The internet would be a sliver of what it is today.
The American portion of the internet would be a sliver of what it is today.
Keep in mind that the world is a bit larger than just the US and that whenever the US decides to shoot itself in the foot like this some other entity will take its place.
This will likely continue until the US wises up to that and starts to move with all the resources they've got directed at recovering the lost ground, which I'm sure they'll be able to do fairly rapidly.
Software patents, the situation around copyright, it's all the same thing, a temporary disturbance. On a human lifespan scale it looks like things are moving with glacial speed but since the web as we know it is not even two decades old you can bet that given the changes it has already brought about you won't be able to recognize the information landscape in another hundred years or so.
This is just a delaying action, in the long run it won't mean anything. Now if we could make it not mean anything in the short run is up for grabs, vested interests will always fight to the death to keep their gravy trains rolling.
When Gutenberg made the printing press it took another 100 years or so before the implications were really felt far and wide give it some time.
Incidentally it only took very little time after the printing press was invented for the first primitive copyright legislation to follow.
You would be comfortable with YouTube's alternative hosted in Russia connected to the web by a likely mob influenced ISP?
Laws the United States makes have a more wide reaching affect that you seem to realise. Your outlook of online freedom is quite optimistic. Smaller countries follow the lead of larger ones and for profit corporations generally do their best to follow (or write) the laws of the United States. What happens here influences the behaviour of many. After all, no CEO wants to be arrested on a layover in the United States because their company happened to break a US (this has happened.)
The reality is that organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting hard against our own government, the United States, since the early 1990s to keep the internet as free as possible. Had no one decided to take up that fight your internet would be under control of such gems as 1998's COPA, along with who knows what garbage the RIAA and MPAA would dream up.
The rising influence of authoritarian states such as China dim the prospect of an open and free world generations to come. While they may flaunt intellectual property law today, make no mistake when it is their own intellectual property being infringed upon they will happily add infringement to one of their 68 crimes punishable by death.
Make no mistake, what happens today will have a decisive impact on how free the world is 50 or 100 years from now.
Nominating Donald Verrilli Jr as the Solicitor General of the United States sends a clear message that the Obama administration seeks the same expertise in chilling internet freedoms as the RIAA and Viacom did when they hired him.
Can you please explain how the RIAA crushed 'individual rights' and 'innovation and personal freedom'? I mean, from what I know they only got it to be illegal to copy movies/music, right? And the DMCA was passed unanimously by the Senate, so it's clearly not just the RIAA that is interested in 'crushing innovation and personal freedom in the United States' as you claim. What am I missing?
There are few things that irk me more than treating intelligent, highly paid professionals as mindless modules plugged into the system. There is a difference between, say, a criminal defense lawyer who fulfills a role needed to sustain our system of justice, and a lawyer who gets paid to be litigious mercenary. I don't think it's a big leap to assume that lawyers with the qualifications and enough professional stature to get hired by the RIAA have other job opportunities. Little Timmy's not going to go through the winter without shoes because daddy didn't take the RIAA job.
Being intelligent and capable is not sufficient, wisdom and courage are far more important at the levels of leadership he will operate at.
A measure of wisdom, is seeing how the pieces fit and a measure of courage is being able to take a moral stand and use your ability for the greater good.
A person who may become a member of the supreme court, should definitely have all 3.
really? even when it's a litigation scam like that?
i understand about defending the 'guilty' and all, everyone must have their lawful rights to freedom and compensation. But a for-profit scam, c'mon. You ought have some responsibility were you choose to make a living from.
it would be completely ethic if they were defending a murder-rapist in trial. but going after people without any kind of evidence, just in the hopes that you will get money for scaring some of them. that's just too unethical to be excusable in any imaginable way.
Could you explain what you are talking about? I'm aware of the RIAA suing people whose IP addresses were used for P2P sharing of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owner, but that wouldn't fit your description, as that is not a scam, as they had evidence against the people they went after in those lawsuits. Hence, I assume you are talking about some other RIAA litigation that I am unaware of.
I think the 'scam' implication comes up because the RIAA's lawyers try as hard as they can to just get people to settle out of court, and once they are brought into court, usually try to back-peddle as fast as they can to get out of there while still leaving open the possibility of bringing suit again in the future. The impression this leaves with people is that it's meant to be a 'shake-down' since the RIAA is less interested in court cases and more interested in settlements.
I don't like the cases he was involved in either, but I don't think Verrilli was part of those settlement-demand letters, or in litigation against individuals. He's an appellate and Supreme-Court practice attorney, and the cases he's been involved with have been appeals of the RIAA's suits against content-hosting companies and P2P companies. For example, he argued their side in the Viacom v. Google case and in MGM v. Grokster.
I don't like the positions he argued in those cases, either, but I don't think representing MGM versus Grokster, for example, was a breach of professional ethics or scammy. In fact it seems the position he argued was correct as a matter of law, according to a unanimous Supreme Court (the main problem is that Congress shouldn't have passed the law in question).
When did they back peddle? All the cases I heard of where someone decided not to settle and went to court, the RIAA went along and crushed them.
Most cases settled because most people the RIAA went after were guilty, and knew it, and realized the the minimum damages they would owe if they lost in court were quite a bit higher than the RIAA's settlement offer.
>When did they back peddle? All the cases I heard of where >someone decided not to settle and went to court, the RIAA >went along and crushed them.'
proof?
>Most cases settled because most people the RIAA went after >were guilty, and knew it, and realized the the minimum >damages they would owe if they lost in court were quite a >bit higher than the RIAA's settlement offer.
That's exactly what they want you to believe. That's why they pursue these lawsuits. It's good old FUD. They can't sue everyone, but they are hoping to sue a handful and scare millions into obedience. It's pretty damn successful at that, too. I know many people who won't download anything for fear of a million Dollar lawsuit.
In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they catch me downloading. But somehow, somewhere, things went awry and people are getting sued for absurd amounts of money. That alone should be a tell tale sign that this is nothing but a big scam. Dressing it in fine legal language doesn't change that.
The RIAA is the enemy of the people, plain and simple. It's a corrupt organization which mainly benefits itself, and marginally benefits the artists it's claiming to represent. Because there is very little legitimacy to anything they do, they need to make lots of loud noise - that's the only way they can survive, after all.
Nothing good can come from electing what we must assume is a puppet for this organization into an important office in the US government.
>In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they catch me downloading.
I would like to preface this by saying that I don't like the RIAA. The damages they can sue for ARE disproportionate and copyright law is currently massively unbalanced (e.g. never-ending copyright since the 1920s).
BUT, have you actually thought about what suing for $20/film would mean? To recover any meaningful losses hundreds of thousands of people would have to be sued at once - unless civil law is radically changed this would not be economical, effectively making copyrights non-enforceable. Not to mention that "downloading" isn't actually covered by copyright law AFAIK and it's the uploading (distributing) part they are suing for.
Also, note that enforcement in cases of property theft isn't proportional either - it's not "pay for the thing you stole and you're free to go". There are often other consequences (community service/fines/light jailtime) attached.
Most cases settled because most people the RIAA
went after were guilty, and knew it, and realized
the the minimum damages they would owe if they
lost in court were quite a bit higher than the
RIAA's settlement offer.
That's exactly what they want you to believe.
That's why they pursue these lawsuits. It's
good old FUD. They can't sue everyone, but they
are hoping to sue a handful and scare millions
into obedience. It's pretty damn successful at
that, too. I know many people who won't download
anything for fear of a million Dollar lawsuit.
The people who have been sent the cease and desist letters and asked to settle have generally been sharing thousands of songs. The settlement offer is typically in the neighborhood of around $4k, which is not unreasonable--it's in the ballpark of what it would cost to pay for the download where the person acquired the song, and some for the downloads that others got from that person at the market rate for legal song downloads.
If the defendant choses to go to court, and loses, the minimum statutory damages are $750 per song, unless the court decides the defendant is an "innocent infringer" (basically someone who had no reason to believe that what they were doing was copyright infringement), in which case it can be lowered to $200 per song.
At $750/song, it only takes about 7 songs illegally downloaded and shared before taking the settlement is cheaper (just on the damages--I'm not even counting defendant's time and attorney fees) than going to court. At $200/song, the crossover is around 25 songs. This is far far under what most people who get caught were doing.
In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me
for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they
catch me downloading.
The RIAA deals with music, not movies. As I showed above, the amount the RIAA offers to settle for is in fact reasonable under your definition--it is in the same ballpark as what the infringer would have had to pay to purchase the copies they download and share.
The damages one faces in court should be higher than that, for the simple reason that if the worst that happens in court is that you have to pay what you would have paid to not infringe in the first place then the risk of being sued is not a disincentive. You could just completely ignore copyright law, and when sued let the plaintiff win a default judgement and pay, putting you in the position you would have been in had you not infringed.
But somehow, somewhere, things went awry and people are getting
sued for absurd amounts of money. That alone should be a tell
tale sign that this is nothing but a big scam. Dressing it in fine
legal language doesn't change that.
The "absurd" amount of money comes from the law not anticipating that an individual would infringe thousands of copyrights for a purpose other than trying to make money from it, so statutory damages are designed to cover the range of damages that are appropriate for a commercial setting. Every RIAA defendant who lost big in court could have avoided that by accepting the first very reasonable settlement offer (or even more simply by not infringing in the first place). Hell, even after Jammie Thomas-Rasset lost in court and suffered a large judgement, the RIAA renewed their low settlement offer. After she rejected that, and got another trial, and suffered an even bigger judgement, they again offered a much lower settlement amount that she rejected.
You're overlooking the disincentive that there is to defend yourself even when you're innocent. The costs of defending yourself in court (and possibly needing to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court) well exceed the $4k settlement offer. This is why it's a 'shake-down'.
"We think that you have wronged us, so pay us $4k or else be forced to defend yourself in court where if you win, you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees, and if you lose you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees in addition to whatever the damages awarded are."
That you're completely ignoring this possibility says to me that you feel everyone accused by the RIAA is guilty until proven innocent (in your eyes at least).
By that argument, anyone who offers to settle a dispute for an amount less than what it would cost to litigate is doing a shake-down.
Do you think the right thing for the RIAA to do instead would have been to not offer to settle, but just open with a lawsuit and insist on a trial? Or are they supposed to just ignore people who they have very good evidence are massive infringers?
In general, when a large company with deep pockets goes after many people with such a tactic, it's seen by many to be a 'shake-down.' One-off instances not so much.
Not to mention that in most cases that evidence was obtained in an illegal manner (by people that were acting as if they were private investigators, but had no license to do so). Is that okay too? Should the RIAA not be responsible for it's own transgressions because they were just 'innocent mistakes' in the pursuit of a much higher goal (corporate profits)?
What about when the RIAA tries to sue people for sharing songs by artists that the RIAA has no legal standing to represent (I'd argue that moves like this are either made because: 1. the RIAA naively view itself as some entity that 'all of music' must pass through or 2. it's part of some targeted plan to make sure that the rest of the world thinks/believes that the RIAA controls all music)?
My car was stolen. It was then found at 10pm near some bus station.
Which lawyer would have the guts to go to court and order compensation damages for my car, for the nascar tournament I would have won with it had it not been stolen that day, for every single passanger that was at that bus station at 10pm?
Yes. It sound completely idiotic to people who know how cars and buses works. And that's how riaa scams sounds to most people here.
Just because the DMCA sucks doesn't mean a lawyer shouldn't be the best lawyer they can be.
Now, if he fails to sever contact with the RIAA, or fails to be impartial to any case which may involve the RIAA or copyrights while being solicitor general, that's a different argument.
Don't fool yourself. No lawyer decides to go to bat for the RIAA in civil court out of a sense of justice, or for any other reason than to bring home giant bags of money.
I understand that people want to give lawyers the benefit of the doubt and not judge them by who they represent, but honestly, I find that logic appalling. Would we really be saying that for a lawyer who defended the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal? No, b/c anyone with _any_ integrity would likely walk away from that...or anyone with any political smarts. Same in this case. It seems clear this man is not about ideals or principles but rather money and privilege. Is that who we want in arguably one of the most important non-supreme court law positions in the country?
Even if he _is_ about that, he hasn't proven it with his judgement by taking those cases. This should also count in the decision. I'm sorry, but I cannot find the silver lining in this nomination. Perhaps someone can educate me....