As I’ve discussed in this blog previously, RIAA (and the MPAA) have abused copyright law to financially destroy individuals. Guilty or not, defendants are forced into settlements rather than fight teams of entertainment and intellectual property (IP) lawyers with the likelihood of being hit with a six-figure judgment for infringement based upon laws that were bought and paid for by Hollywood lobbyists.

In the Barker case, the defendant has the audacity to actually stand up to these thugs by claiming that the maximum damages they should be entitled to is $3.50 per download. While I appreciate Barker’s legal argument that statutory damages are unconstitutionally excessive, and hope that she wins, the deck is stacked against her.

Until the entertainment industry is stopped from buying laws through congressional campaign contributions, those who download copyrighted materials illegally will continue to face financial ruin.

Her parents should be ashamed for pimping out their daughter for the photos. Is she auditioning to replace Britney Spears as the next train wreck?

If you’ve ever posed for embarrassing photos or videos and then discovered that they’ve been posted online without your permission, you’re not alone. These are typically the result of too much alcohol or trusting a spouse or lover to keep things private.

What should you do?

Approach the website’s owner and ask that the offending material be removed immediately. If the owner refuses, contact the website’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) and make the same request. Unless you’ve signed away your rights on paper, you should be able to make a strong case that you own the copyright to the material, did not give your permission for it to be posted, and that your privacy has been invaded.

You should also consult at least one attorney to protect your legal rights (if you’re married to the person who posted the material, you’ll probably want to see a divorce attorney in addition to an Internet lawyer).

Unless your name and contact details are attached online to the offending material, there’s a good chance that what is personally embarrassing to you won’t really hurt you over the long-term.

Why? A Google image search for “porn” produces 33.4 million results. What happened to you is a needle in this online haystack. It is very unlikely that those who know you will ever see the content.

Remember that prevention is the key in most of these cases. This means: (1) don’t ever agree to pose for the videos or photos under any circumstances - even if you trust the person who wants to create them; and (2) if you already have posed for pics or videos you don’t want online, destroy them now to ensure they will never be posted on the Internet.

If the allegations are true, from a legal standpoint she should be able to recover compensatory damages at a minimum — assuming the defendant has the funds to pay any judgment.

What’s the importance of this case to you?

It should remind you and other Internet marketers not to use photos or images on your websites unless you have the legal right to do so. When in doubt, either get written permission or don’t use the photo. There’s plenty of stock photography and public domain pics available for you to use without risking a lawsuit.

As for supermodel Miller’s legal claims, they include invasion of privacy, misappropriation of image and likeness, and unjust enrichment.

If you do a Google image search for model Marissa Miller, or watch her YouTube videos, her claims for “privacy’ are kind of funny regardless of the legal merit. My guess is the equity term “unjust enrichment” adequately reflects what’s at stake here. It was less the principle of the thing than the fact she didn’t get paid for the use of her photos.

Have you ever been accused of using someone’s photos on your website without permission?

Or have you caught someone using your pics without permission?

If so, what happened?

Feel free to share your experience by posting a comment about it.

However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley have filed friend-of-court briefs on his behalf that argue in part that the DMCA does not apply to Stottlmire’s activities and that he is protected by the First Amendment. You can read more about it in David Kravets’ excellent post at Wired.com, “EFF and U.C. Berkeley Defend Accused Coupon Hacker in DMCA Suit.”

To recap, the DMCA is a bad law that was passed by Congress thanks to large campaign contributions (bribes?) by the Hollywood entertainment industry. Stottlemire is just the latest victim.

As noted by the photo of a court jester above, I wish this was an April Fool’s Day joke. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Congress is already talking about passing another law (the Pro-IP Act) that’s even more absurd than the DMCA. Tell your local Representative and two Senators that you oppose it and want the DMCA repealed. After all, this time it is Stottlemire. The next time it could be you that’s facing a team of lawyers in court funded by RIAA or the MPAA.

What do you think of the DMCA? Should it be repealed? Or should the Pro-IP Act become law too?

It appears that USCR has harvested contact information for domain name registrants from the WHOIS registry. The information is plugged into the official-looking notice to add credibility to the sales pitch.

I have nothing against a company earning a buck or even clever copywriting. However, I do object to spam, particularly when it is designed to fool Internet business owners into thinking they should pay money to this company as part of complying with U.S. law as the company goes out of its way to make itself look like a government agency in its sales pitch.

Here’s a sample e-mail from USCR. Read it for yourself and warn others.

For information on how to protect your website’s content using U.S. copyright law, consult with your Internet lawyer to address specific legal issues. If you want to do-it-yourself, go to the U.S. Copyright Office’s website and learn more.

1. Increased anti-spam enforcement. The one-hit wonders in the info marketing crowd are starting to panic because price points have dropped. Packages that sold for $1500 bucks are lucky to get one-third that amount a year later. Seminar attendance has dropped and the primary attendees are newbies. Pitches are made to these new marketers with the view that there’s one born every minute and hoping the newbie will burnout (like most do) before discovering the get-rich-quick package was a bunch of junk. What does this have to do with spam e-mail? Desperate marketers are intentionally violating the CAN-SPAM Act in order to support a sinking ship. Even reputable marketers are reverting to single opt-in lists instead of double (verified/confirmed) opt-ins because conversion rates are lower with the latter. Some of the worst CAN-SPAM violators are buying launch lists from other marketers, importing the names, and then sending e-mails telling people not to forget about a special bonus for the launch that never was actually part of the launch. These are unsolicited commercial e-mails, i.e. spam. The FTC and/or a few state attorneys general will likely make an example of these spammers. Don’t let it be you.

2. Liability for your affiliates‘ misconduct. Federal and state law enforcement officials routinely hold network marketing (MLM) companies responsible for the misrepresentations made by their commissioned sales associates. If you’re marketing a business opportunity or health-related product on the Internet, look for the government to take a harsher view at what is said on behalf of your product by your affiliates. This includes unsubstantiated income and health claims as well as fake, unsubstantiated or secretly compensated testimonials. In most instances, you as the product creator will have the deep pocket to tap instead of the broke affiliate who misrepresented your product, i.e you’ll be a bigger target.

3. Increased Website content ripoffs. When you can download an entire website and have all of its content re-written, including front e-books and autoresponder sequences, for less than a thousand dollars, look for more people to rip off your sites and do so without legal consequences. While there are ways to take down sites hosted in the U.S., Canada, etc. for infringement, enforcement actions become a big problem when a site is hosted in Asia or Eastern Europe. Internet marketing gurus in the late 1990s were telling everyone to find a successful site and rip it off. When your $97 info product starts selling on a cloned site abroad for $5, that advice is going to hit home in a big way.

4. Taxes and Personal Asset Protection. This issue has the potential to be the number one problem facing Internet marketers in the coming years — it will cost more than one millionaire marketer his entire fortune and some possible time in prison for tax fraud too. What most Internet marketers think they know about this issue is absolutely wrong (because they’ve been sold a pack of lies and half-truths by asset protection charlatans). I’ll be releasing a special report to clients on this issue soon. It won’t be for sale. You’ll have to get it through a client of mine.

The solution is a music licensing system that makes piracy a moot point because of the incentives to pay for what you’re getting. Until then, RIAA and its counterparts are chasing windmills in their war on copyright infringement.

You really have to wonder if some of these experts are tied to RIAA and the MPAA because the argument falls flat on its face when examined on the merits.

In the article, Big Champagne’s CEO Eric Garland hints at the truth: “In the big picture, if people want something, some will pay, and others will find a way to take it for free.”

But that’s even just part of the story.

Radiohead’s model was successful despite the piracy because of the buzz that it created for the album. As noted in a comment to my prior post on the Radiohead album, the band’s downloadable mp3s were produced at a low quality bitrate as an encouragement for fans to pay for the higher quality CD. Although a bad marketing ploy because the quality disclosure wasn’t made up front prior to the customer’s decision on how much, if anything to pay, the concept has merit.

Imagine a distribution model where albums are intentionally released with full disclosure on the Internet at a lower quality. The model lets customers choose the amount they want to pay. Now follow up with the same music flooded onto P2P sites intentionally but laced with ads in between songs…woven into the intro and outro parts of each song so that it is impossible to crop the ads without destroy the music in the process.

The music industry needs to move away from cramming high priced CDs down the throats of the consumer that simply aren’t wanted…CDs that have one or two songs that someone wants to listen to and the rest are garbage that the customer has to subsidize in order to get the quality stuff.

And let’s not forget the music piracy hypocrites that run the industry. Don’t feel sorry for any of their copyright infringement losses until they prosecute their own executives and families who illegally download songs.