Why the RIAA sucks, the troubles of the Jets and talking with your enemies

- Nothing has infuriated me more over the past few years than the Recording Industry Association of America filing extremely punitive and bitter lawsuits against people accused of downloading music illegally. And perhaps no case is more emblematic of my beliefs than a federal appeals court’s February decision ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 — $750 a track — for file-sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader. That case has now made its way to the nation’s highest court and the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing into the first RIAA file sharing case to reach its docket. At stake is the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement, to which the court has demanded a response from the music labels’ litigation arm. The defendant in the case is Whitney Harper, who was ordered by a Texas federal judge to pay $7,400 — or $200 per song for the music she illegally downloaded WHILE A MINOR. Even more infuriating is the fact that under the Copyright act, a standard $750 fine is required. Harper will serve as a template for how the legal system handles the estimated 20,000 individuals the RIAA has sued for file-sharing music. In trying to make its case, the ass-hatted RIAA has slanderously referred to Harper as “vexatious” and bemoaned “her relentless legal jockeying.” Without commenting on the case itself, the Supreme Court has asked the RIAA to respond to Harper’s petition to review the appellate court’s ruling. Her defense centers on whether the innocent-infringer defense to the Copyright Act’s minimum $750-per-music-track fine may apply to online file sharing. In legal terms, an innocent infringer is someone who does not know she or he is committing copyright infringement. It is worth nothing that the justices have not granted review of Harper’s case, although Wednesday’s action by the high court substantially increases the chances that an RIAA file sharing case targeting an individual will be heard for the first time. Look for that to happen when the court’s upcoming term begins Oct. 4. To give you an idea of how rare that would be, the high court usually grants less than 1 percent of petitions sent to it. Here’s hoping that the high court not only agrees with that Texas federal judge who granted Harper the innocent-infringer exemption to the Copyright Act’s minimum fine, because she claimed she did not know she was violating copyrights, but tosses out any fines against her all together. If Harper claims she thought file sharing was the same as internet radio streaming, I believe her. So what if she swiped some songs for free on LimeWire? Back of, RIAA, because you are the epitome of The Man oppressing the little guy and that’s a battle I’ll fight every day of my life……….

- Remember all that rage and vitriol Rex Ryan has spewed ever since he became head coach of the New York Jets? As it turns out, Ryan has no problem whatsoever turning that anger against his own team in very public fashion. On the heels of the latest black eye for the Jets - Braylon Edwards' drunken-driving arrest in Manhattan - Ryan sounded like he’d had just about enough. "Quite honestly, I'm basically tired of dealing with these issues," Ryan told reporters. "I'm tired of the embarrassment to our owner and this organization. Let's just end it. Let's just stop. However severe or minor, we don't need to be that team." He termed the arrest an "embarrassing moment for the organization" and explained that he learned of the incident in a phone call from general manager Mike Tannenbaum at 6:30 a.m. ET Tuesday. Edwards was actually in the room Wednesday when Ryan delivered his address. The receiver did practice with the team and will play Sunday night against the Miami Dolphins, even though he won't start. The arrest comes just one week after the team was publicly reprimanded by the league and its own front office for sexually harassing Mexican TV “reporter” Ines Sainz. Add those incidents to the gratuitous profanity unleashed by Ryan and his coaches during HBO’s "Hard Knocks" TV series, the addition of trouble cornerback Antonio Cromartie and wide receiver Santonio Holmes during the offseason and Ryan’s own offseason misstep in which he let fly with an obscene gesture to a rowdy Miami Dolphins fan while attending a mixed martial arts event in January in Sunrise, Fla. and you have the recipe for a team becoming the laughingstock of the NFL. Even the team’s performance on the field has been uneven as best, including committing 14 penalties in a prime-time, season-opening loss to the Baltimore Ravens. Cornerback Darrelle Revis suspects other teams and fans are mocking the Jets because of all of their mistakes. "It's embarrassing because everybody is pointing fingers at us," he said. "They say, 'What happened now up in New York?' We know things happen, but as players, we have to be more careful. [Edwards] got jammed up. Me, truthfully, I don't think he should've been out that late." And I think guys shouldn’t get behind the wheel with a BAC twice the legal limit, try to drive home and then attempt to talk the cops into allowing him to take a cab home once he was pulled over……….

- Sometimes you have to put the shoe on the other foot in order to successfully promote your book. Comedy Central talking head Jon Stewart is finding that out as he promotes his new book Earth (The Book), a pursuit that has put him face to face that he would normally be considered to be mortal enemies of on his own program, The Daily Show. One of the first stops for Stewart on his book tour was Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, an ironic stop because there is no bigger mocker of Fox News than Stewart. Still, he agreed to the appearance and while there, was asked by Bill O’Reilly whether he had “Obama remorse.” After a few minutes of back and forth banter, Stewart theorized that the problem with President Obama is that “he ran as a visionary, and he’s led as a functionary,” adding that the president kept too much of the “same system and the same people in place” when he came into office. Before exiting stage left, Stewart also took the chance to promote his planned Oct. 30 “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington, D.C. He noted that it would last from noon to 3 p.m. and its battle-cry would be, “We’re here but we’re only here til 3: We have a sitter!” He also tweaked O’Reilly by referring to him as “Fox 1.0″ and taunting that the current “Fox 2.0″ is more radical: “I think you can’t believe what you’ve unleashed,” said Stewart, a veiled reference to another of his nemeses, Glenn Beck. “On this network [now], you’re left-wing,” Stewart chided O’Reilly. In the end, the two ideologically opposed media men got along well enough that O’Reilly announced he’d be appearing on The Daily Show next Monday…………

- Ready for some more Mohammed-centric uproar? Regardless of your stance on the Muslim faith, I think we can all agree that seeing angry, finger-pointing arguments and fights over cartoons depicting the central figure in said faith adds some spice to this planet of ours. In case you’ve forgotten, the initial controversy over the cartoons erupted four years ago, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten first published them and touched off the battle over their appropriateness. In January of 2007, a Norwegian newspaper reprinted the drawings and several more European papers later published some of the cartoons as a way of covering the controversy. Now, four years later, the cartoons will be republished in a new book scheduled to hit stores on September 30. Jyllands-Posten cultural editor Flemming Rose created the cartoons (and by association, the controversy) and will be the driving force behind the book, to be titled "The Tyranny of Silence." Of course, the reason for all of the uproar is that Islam forbids depictions of Mohammed. On top of that, many Muslims took offense to the drawings themselves, one of which showed the religious figure wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse. Could there be similar outrage and outcry this time around? Four years have passed and the cartoons aren’t new and unknown at this point, but I think there is still rage a-plenty to be mustered and I’ll be disappointed at anything less……….

- Not that anyone needed any reason to question the reliability of online mapping and driving directions Web sites, but losing an entire town for a month would provide just such a reason. The site doing the losing would be Google Maps, whose computers somehow managed to “lose” Sunrise, Florida for a month even though it’s a city of 90,000, boasts a professional sports franchise and one of the nation’s largest malls. Anyone searching for Sunrise during its dark period were redirected to Sarasota, Florida, some 200 miles away. No Sunrise business, addresses or phone numbers could be found and even public buildings had fallen off the map. Google said this week that the “technical error” has been fixed, but the response from the search engine didn’t come until several weeks after Sunrise residents and officials brought the issue to Google’s attention. "I don't have any problem with the idea that mistakes happen," Sunrise mayor Mike Ryanhe said. "The algorithms they have to apply to understand what my search is are undoubtedly complicated. What disturbed us is that this wasn't the first time it happened." That’s right, Google has now wiped Sunrise off its digital maps three times, a figure Ryanhe deems “unacceptable.” Yet somehow he summoned up a healthy dose of disbelief at the latest mapping slight. “I said 'holy cow,'" he said. "It felt like a bizarre novel -- that all of a sudden we disappeared. We woke up one morning and we didn't exist in the ether world." Personally, I don’t know why Sunrise is so bent. Other cities - La Jolla, California, Rogers, Minnesota and Wickliffe, Ohio for example have suffered similar fates and I haven’t heard any of them b*tching about their fate. Suck it up, Sunrise, because if you’re not careful Google may wipe you off the map permanently and yes, they have the power to do it………