technoculture203-09

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/magistrate-clears-blogger-riaa-of-vexatious-charges/

Essentially, the long and short of it as that an attorney defending a client in an anti-piracy lawsuit was blogging some angry comments about the Recording Industry Association of American, the organization that was after his client. Even though Judge Robert M. Levy ruled that the comments of the lawyer, Ray Beckerman, were less than 'forthcoming at times', but still not quite bad enough to warrant the level of complaint the music industry had dished out. Furthermore, the RIAA was suing 30,000 people at once, and Beckerman managed to get the charges dropped against the woman he was defending (who claims that she'd never even been near enough to a computer to pirate ant music).

This entire debate really harks back to the lecture we had about the power of the blogosphere. It seems as though had the lawyer made these same comments about the RIAA in any other medium, he'd have been legally punished for it by one of the judges involved. Yet because it was done on a blog, he seems to have gotten off the hook. There's still a lot of debate as to whether or not it was ethical for the lawyer to keep a running blog about the misgivings he personally had with the RIAA, and whether or not he technically broke any laws, but I'll leave that up to the courts to figure out. I guess it just further shows the power of blogging for politically and morally motivated speech