more from the court of public opinion

More letters of support (and not) came in today.  From the bottom of our hearts, please keep sending them.  Your words keep us going.  And every small donations are helping us cover our costs.  — JFB Team

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Joel,

I just wanted to wish you the best of luck and success in your trial. I’ve been eagerly following your tweets! I’ve been telling all my friends about the case, calling it the trial of the century!

I was in the same situation you were 4 years ago when I got a letter from the RIAA. I really wish I had fought them, but at the time didn’t see how it’d be possible. It’s great to see someone who is finally fighting back. Someone really needs to end the RIAA’s abuse of our legal system to extort millions of dollars from those who can’t defend themselves. Much in the way the bankers made NINJA loans (No Income, No Job or Assets), the RIAA has been engaged in a massive NINJA lawsuit campaign. These tactics are despicable. You must prevail!

Sincerely,
OJ Caldwell

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Good luck and may you prevail over this tyranny!

R. Douglas Barbieri
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Best of luck - we’re rooting for Joel. The RIAA suck ass.

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Why on earth has the US President not got involved?  Seriously, if he can sort out a spat between an NYC policeman and a professor, he can launch an investigation into these, words fail me, terrorist reptiles who have done this.
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why not argue that the filesharing program did not “tell” joel in the proper legal way that his files - while downloading - are uploaded at the same time. as a avarage-consumer he would only be guilty of downloading 7 songs without being punished for the upload. in that case you should file a third-party notice to the filesharingprogramm company that did not make it clear to joel what the consequences might be.

greets
paul
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Hey Joel,
check us out at http://www.boycott-riaa.com/.  We’ve been very active in the fight against the RIAA.  We wish you the best of luck.

Sincerely,
Heather
www.dmusic.com
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.hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { font-size: 10pt; font-family:Verdana } best of luck for your case against those greedy bastards

here’s a few thoughts:

1/ I know lots of peolple who are downloading music, mainly because they cannot afford to buy it. CDs in the UK are about £15, quite a scam when you think it costs a few pennies to make them.. most of this is for the music business, record companies and retailers.. I Know for sure that most people would buy music if it were affordable, and if they happen to have enough money..

2/ a few years back a bunch of already rich french authors wanted the government to tax libraries who are lending their books, it was a certain percentage of each rental… the main counter argument was that a lot of people, especially young people, borrow books because they couldnt otherwise buy them all. research has shown that in fact those who got hooked on reading were later very much more likely to buy lots of books once they have a steady income… I reckon the same applies to music, people who borrow music and films will spend money on this once they can afford it, I had bad financial patches when I only got music from libraries or friends, when things got better I did indeed spend a whole lot of cash on CDs, concerts, etc…

3/ a lot of artists are taking the piss, whenever I see metallica and kiss complaining they are losing money I feel like I want to puke my breakfast twice! greedy, ungrateful, disgusting bastards, they make millions on the back of hard working ordinary people and they want MORE… unbelieveable..

again best of luck

take care

MK
London

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Back in 2007, the RIAA targeted Ohio University in Athens, OH and stated our university had the most amount of illegal music downloaders in the nation.