[ga] Interesting political twist: Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post

["Jeffrey A. Williams" <jwkckid1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

  Well it seems that those hoping that the next/new administration
will be more favorable to P2P advocates, and other IT initiatives
may be in for a big and less than happy surprise.  Frankly I was
a bit surprised that a more political centrists were not selected...

  These nominees will no doubt have a significant impact
on how some Domain Names can or will be allowed to be
used and even in some instances, allowed to continue to
exist in their current content forms/areas of emphasis...
I have no doubt that cleanup of errant Domain Names that
are used for the proliferation of Pornography of all sorts, will
find themselves and their perspective Registries and Registrars,
as "Service Providers" in some legal difficulty at a minimum as
excessories/enablers of the fact...  P2P users and providers
will also find themselves under more intense scrutinity with less
consideration by DOJ.

See:
 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10133425-38.html

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Politics and Law
January 6, 2009 2:55 PM PST
Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
Posted by Declan McCullagh

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal
adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry
Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the
Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate
Party.

That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related
decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of
America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice
Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second
most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the
Copyright Term Extension Act--the same law that Lessig and his allies
unsuccessfully sued to overturn.

Obama made both announcements on Monday, saying that his picks "bring
the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of
Justice demands in these uncertain times." The soon-to-be-appointees:
Tom Perrelli for associate attorney general and David Ogden for deputy
attorney general.
Tom Perrelli

Campaign rhetoric aside, this should be no surprise. Obama's selection
of Joe Biden as vice president showed that the presidential hopeful
was comfortable with someone with firmly pro-RIAA views. Biden urged
the criminal prosecutions of copyright-infringing peer-to-peer users
and tried to create a new federal felony involving playing
unauthorized music.

Perrelli is currently a partner in the Washington offices of Jenner
and Block, where he represented the RIAA in a a slew of cases,
including a high-profile bid to unmask file sharers without the
requirement of a judge reviewing the evidence first. Verizon initially
lost to the RIAA, but eventually prevailed in 2003 when a federal
appeals court ruled the record labels' strategy under the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act was unlawful.

Perrelli has represented the RIAA in other lawsuits against individual
file sharers. One filed in Michigan accuses a university student of
distributing "hundreds of sound recordings over his system without the
authorization of the copyright owners." A lawsuit against a Princeton
University student makes similar arguments; Perrelli and his
colleagues also tried to force Charter Communications to give up the
names of 93 file-trading subscribers.
David Ogden

A 2004 summary of a Boston lawsuit written by Harvard's Berkman
Center--which opposed the RIAA in this and a current case--quotes
Perrelli as telling a federal judge that it would be easy to determine
who was using a wireless network to share music. "It is correct that
the actual downloader may be someone else in the household," he said,
but any errors can be determined easily after a "modest amount of
discovery."

An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented
SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board--and obtained a 250
percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the
Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo. Perrelli previously worked
in the Clinton Justice Department.

An article in Legal Times titled "Building an Entertainment Beast in
D.C." says that in 2002, Perrelli used Jenner's reputation as an
appellate law firm to "get a meeting with officials at the RIAA, at a
time when Internet file-sharing entities like Napster were threatening
the music business." A year later, in 2003, the law firm recruited
Steven Fabrizio, previously the RIAA's senior vice president for
business and legal affairs, and business began booming (the RIAA also
used the Jenner law firm to write a friend-of-the-court brief in the
copyright extension lawsuit).

If confirmed by the Senate, which is unlikely to pose much of a
hurdle, Perrelli would oversee the department's civil division, the
antitrust division, and the civil rights division.

Obama's choice for deputy attorney general--the second-in-command at
Justice--is David Ogden, who's currently a partner at the WilmerHale
law firm.

As assistant attorney general for the civil division, Ogden was
responsible for organizing the defense of the Child Online Protection
Act, or COPA, an antiporn law that has been challenged by the ACLU in
court for more than a decade with no resolution. His department also
successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ogden's biography at Wilmer Hale says only that he represents the
"media and Internet industries, as well as major trade and
professional associations," without listing details. The Justice
Department, barring exceptional cases, has a duty to defend laws
enacted by Congress.

Perrelli, on the other hand, went out of his way to recruit the RIAA
as a very lucrative client: his law firm bills some partners' time at
a princely $1,000 an hour.

During his confirmation hearing, it will be instructive to see if
senators ask whether his zealous anti-file sharing advocacy can make
him an objective civil servant--especially when these same politicians
want the Justice Department to sue peer-to-peer pirates at taxpayer's
expense. (Then again, if that proposal becomes law, Perrelli's surely
the right man for the job.)

It will also be instructive to see if this week's news prompts some of
the RIAA's longtime adversaries to moderate their enthusiasm for
Obama's technology policies.

Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles
the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics,
technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has
turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We
oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.

Regards,

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