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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

Yes, you are a cyber criminal
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Yes, we’re talking to you. Adrian Weckler examines 12 ways that the technology you use every day could land you in hot water with the law.

1. Putting a CD on to an iPod

This makes criminals of us all: it is illegal in Ireland to copy music from a CD on to an iPod, computer, mobile phone or other MP3 device. Although Irish copyright law has caught up with the concept of purchasing a song online and transferring it to your gadget, copying from a CD is still forbidden. (The same principle applies to burning a blank CD.)

Don’t worry, though, as the music industry has a solution to this problem - buy all your CD music again online. Alternatively, you can dust off your old CD Walkman (with a new backpack for all the CDs you’ll need).


2. Posting pictures on Flickr

Suppose you’re out and about and see a child frolicking in a fountain. Or perhaps a homeless man painting a mural. Or even a newly-married couple kissing. It is against data protection law to upload those images to your Flickr, Facebook or blog accounts. Those images are the personal data property of the subjects involved and explicit permission must be attained prior to uploading them.

3.Trying to flog unwanted concert tickets at work

Say you’ve bought two tickets for Fred Eaglesmith, one of Canada’s premier alternative country singer-songwriters. And say you can no longer attend the concert. What do you do? Send an invitation around your office’s e-mail database, of course. Problem solved, right? Wrong. You’ve just disobeyed the Electronic Communications Networks and Services Data Protection Regulation of 2003. It states that you cannot abuse privileged e-mail databases to market products or generally try to make money. Such actions are punishable by a fine of up to €3,000.

4. Bringing a TV with you on holidays

Because of the peculiar way in which Irish broadcasting legislation is framed, a TV licence is required for the premises in which a TV is used. And 99 per cent of the time, that is your home. But the moment you bring your TV outside the house - for use in a caravan, motorhome or any other abode - it is illegal to use the television without a TV licence for wherever the TV is turned on. Yes, that means your motor home needs a separate licence.

5. Lending DVDs to friends

Most of us ignore the warning at the beginning of every DVD we watch, the one that scolds us not to show the film on an oil rig. But a further legal obligation is also included: a ban on lending the product to someone. Although there is no record available of anyone being actually prosecuted for this (an offence under the product’s licence restrictions), it is still against the law.

6.Taking photos in private spaces

That new ten-megapixel camera fits right into your pocket - it’s perfect for those unforeseeable moments at lunch, in the pub or out and about. But wait, you’ll have to keep that camera shackled. When you are in a ‘public space’ - and that means shopping centres, restaurants, cafes or bars - you are not allowed to take photographs without permission from the building’s owner. Alas, the burly security guard who ‘‘doesn’t like the look of you’’ is right on this one.

7. Bitching over e-mail

We all love a good gossip. And in this age of electronic communication, giving out about someone on e-mail or text message seems a natural way to vent the spleen. Careful, though: defamation law applies as much to e-mails and text messages as it does to verbal outbursts. This is especially risky from an office computer or work mobile, as your employer also becomes liable.

8. Being a consumer champion on your blog

Among the entertaining rumblings and musings of bloggers are occasional customer relations reviews. In heated blog posts, words like ‘‘unprofessional’’, ‘‘incompetent’’ or ‘‘shoddy’’ are frequently thrown out. Big mistake.

You’re now wide open to a very real offline defamation suit, not to mention a humiliating online apology. Because even if the product or service you weren’t happy with is faulty, it’s another level entirely to accuse someone of not being up to their professional duties. Remember: this is not the US. Irish defamation laws are far, far tighter. (And no, it doesn’t make a difference because you wrote it on a website.)

9. Using iPods while driving

It’s not just a mobile phone you can’t use while driving: iPods are out, too. The Garda Siochana treats earphones as one of several signs that a driver is not in full and proper control of his vehicle. It can be used as the basis of a Garda warning or, when the current penalty points legislation is completed, two penalty points.

10. Showing news images on your blog

Supposing there’s a great story and you want to discuss it using whatever Reuters or news image is being widely used. You cannot use the image without express permission from Reuters, the Press Association, RTE or whoever owns it. It’s against Irish copyright law.

11.Video clips of your favourite show on your blog

It’s quite easy to post clips of videos or online content on your blog or Facebook account. You might take a few seconds of an RTE news bulletin and post it up. But it’s against Irish copyright law and could leave you open to a hefty fine, if the copyright owner catches you.

12. Giving out a mobile number

This sounds harmless enough. But not if you’re a ‘data controller’. Suppose someone asks you for a colleague’s mobile number because they need to contact her urgently about something. Give it out and you’re in breach of the Data Protection Act, subject to a possible fine by the Data Protection Commissioner.

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

MARK WILLIAMS ASSOCIATED PRESS


COLUMBUS, OHIO (AP) - Even as Detroit's Big Three teeter on collapse, United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said Saturday that workers will not make any more concessions and that getting the automakers back on their feet means figuring out a way to turn around the slumping economy.

"The focus has to be on the economy as a whole as opposed to a UAW contract," Gettelfinger told reporters on a conference call, noting the labor costs now make up 8 percent to 10 percent of the cost of a vehicle.

"We have made dramatic, dramatic changes and the UAW was applauded for that," he said.

Instead, Gettelfinger blamed the problems the auto industry is suffering from on things beyond its control _ the housing slump, the credit crunch that has made financing a vehicle tough and the 1.2 million jobs that have been lost in the past year.

"We're here not because of what the auto industry has done," he said. "We're here because of what has happened to the economy."

Gettelfinger also called on Congress to act quickly on a bailout plan for the auto industry, saying action is necessary before President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.

He said if one automaker were to file for bankruptcy, the others may follow. He said the automakers would find it difficult to restructure under bankruptcy laws and instead could end up out of business. "Would you buy a car from a bankrupt automaker?" he asked.

The Center for Automotive Research, which receives funding from the auto industry, has warned that the collapse of the Big Three could set off a catastrophic chain reaction in the economy, eliminating up to 3 million jobs and more than $150 billion in tax revenue over the next three years.

Gettelfinger called on Congress to act quickly to provide loans to help the automakers until the economy improves and the automakers can move ahead with their plans to become more competitive.

"We cannot afford to allow to see this industry collapse. There is a real concern that could happen."

General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC are seeking $25 billion from the government to get them through the economic crisis and the worst sales slump in more than 25 years. GM appears to be in the worst shape, warning that it can't borrow from normal sources.

The nation's largest automaker said it had $16.2 billion in cash at the end of September, raising the possibility that GM will fall below the minimum of $11 billion to $14 billion needed for day-to-day operations by the end of the year.

Democrats in the lame-duck Congress are pressing for a bailout of Detroit's Big Three with money from the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package. But President George W. Bush and many Republicans have come out against the idea, arguing that the financial rescue package was not intended for such uses, and that a bailout would reward poor management and lead other industries to demand government handouts.

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

[B] A TEXAN definition of a planet [/B]

reported by Wm. Robert Johnston
last modified 14 November 2008 Given the considerable debate as to whether such outer solar system objects as Pluto and Eris (2003 UB313) should be counted as planets, and the not-entirely satisfactory resolution on the matter recently passed by the International Astronomical Union, we offer the best possible definition of a planet--the TEXAN definition:

[INDENT] Regarding the confusion over a definition separating planets from other Sun-orbiting bodies: Since any object too small to be considered a planet is a "minor planet", a "small solar system body", or a "dwarf planet", and
Since anything bigger than TEXAS is certainly not minor, not small, and not a dwarf,
Therefore, a planet must be any star-orbiting, non-fusing celestial body larger than the smallest sphere containing TEXAS.
[/INDENT] Using the present boundaries of Texas, this works out to a definition of a planet as an object with a diameter of at least 1,298.5 km (806.9 miles). (Strictly, "object" here includes celestial objects--other than stars and brown dwarfs--orbiting the Sun or another star.) This is the distance (through the Earth) between the northwestmost point in the Texas Panhandle and the southern tip of Texas near Brownsville. With this definition, our solar system has at least 10 and perhaps 14 known planets, so far (given that sizes are not firmly known for some objects):

List of known and possible planets in the solar system: Planetmean diameter* (km)statusmean distance
from Sun (AU)year
discovered Mercury 4879 planet 0.39pre-Texas Venus 12102 planet 0.72pre-Texas Earth 12742 planet 1.00pre-Texas Mars 6779 planet 1.52pre-Texas Jupiter 139640 planet 5.20pre-Texas Saturn 116160 planet 9.54pre-Texas Uranus 50730 planet 19.191781 Neptune 49240 planet 30.071846 Pluto 2320±50 planet 39.481930 Haumea 1300±100probable planet 43.342003 Makemake 1500±300probable planet 45.712005 (84522) 2002 TC302 1150±330possible planet 55.022002 Eris 2660±300planet 67.672003 Sedna 1500±300probable planet491.742003
* mean diameter is diameter of sphere of equal volume
Here they are compared:


Of course, the original Republic of Texas extended to 42° north latitude; using the full extent of the Republic of Texas, the definition of a planet is an object with a diameter of at least 2,012.6 km (1,250.6 miles). By this threshold, the solar system has ten planets: the traditional nine including Pluto plus the newly discovered planet Eris. Surely it is not coincidental that one definition for a planet previously considered by the International Astronomical Union used a minimum diameter of 2,000 km. The final International Astronomical Union decision, to classify Pluto and other objects as "dwarf planets", however, cannot be accepted as appropriately TEXAN.

© 2006-2007, 2008 by Wm. Robert Johnston.
Last modified 14 November 2008.
Return to Home. Return to Astronomy and Space.

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

Here's how you can tell the campaign is over and the transition has begun: Barack Obama's aides now wear suits and ties, their desks are in the Federal Building on 6th Street in Washington — and Clintonites are everywhere.

Obama's victory in the general election produced what his primary campaign couldn't: A swift merger of the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party with the Illinois Senator's self-styled insurgency. The merger began, during the campaign, in the policy apparatus — which is now rapidly becoming the governing apparatus.

The absorption of the Clinton government in waiting represents Obama's choice not to repeat what he and his advisors see as an early mistake made by the last two presidents: Attempting to wield power in Washington through an insular campaign apparatus new to town.

Obama's first major appointments have been Democrats who worked for President Clinton and did not endorse him in the primary: Transition chief John Podesta and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who will be White House chief of staff, stayed neutral, and Ron Klain, who will be Joe Biden's chief of staff, backed Biden. Obama, advisers told Politico, may even be weighing offering Hillary Rodham Clinton herself the Cabinet plum of Secretary of State.

"Obama is showing great good sense in making use of their experience," said William Galston, a former Clinton domestic policy adviser who’s now at the Brookings Institution. "You have an entire cadre of people in their 30s and 40s and early 50s who were either in senior jobs or second- and third-tier jobs in the Clinton administration, who really earned their spurs and know their way around — and know something about how the institutions in which they served actually function."

Galston noted that while Clinton shunned the remnants of the Carter Administration in 1992, Obama's Democratic predecessor led a popular eight-year administration, and the party is no longer riven by deep ideological splits.

"The president-elect has the great good fortune of having a Democratic Party with a usable past," said Galston, who downplayed the differences between the Clinton and Obama camps during the primary. "It was never a substantive or an ideological split — it was more like Team A and Team B."

While only one pure Clintonite, former White House chief of staff Podesta, has been added to the Obama inner circle, the shift in Obama's universe is not to be understated. From the top down, his early choices reflect an openness, and even a warmth, to the veterans of 1990s governance. It’s a shift from a campaign that in the primary explicitly attacked President Clinton's tenure as a time of partisan strife and missed opportunities.

The single most important change in that respect is at the top, and the replacement of the slim, tightly-wound campaign chief of staff, David Plouffe, 41, with the slim, tightly wound Podesta, 59.

Plouffe was the guiding hand, operationally and often strategically, of Obama's campaign. He was also, insiders say, a sharply anti-Washington voice, key to the candidate's outsider message.

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

Plouffe came of political age inside the House Democratic leadership in the 1990s, and he was part of a core Obama group who had never worked for Clinton, and who harbored the sense of frustration and missed opportunity that prevailed on the Hill during Clinton's second term.

Plouffe remains a key adviser and was spotted in the transition office Thursday, but with a new baby, credit for a historic victory, and plans to return to the private sector, he's no longer running the show.

Podesta, who heads the Center for American Progress, was Clinton's chief of staff from 1998 to 2001 and a key figure in his second term. As one Clinton loyalist noted with some satisfaction (if anonymously) on Thursday, Podesta’s role in the transition, and the new prominence of Clinton administration officials, suggests that Obama has absorbed one of Hillary Clinton's talking points: That it takes experience to make change happen.

Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices.

Most of those appointees weren't West Wing heavy-hitters, but lower-profile policy hands such as former Deputy Secretary of Defense John White and former State Department official Wendy Sherman. They include former deputies to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Defense Secretary William Perry, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and some currently work at consultancies run by those Clinton administration principals.

Others are old Obama allies who also have Clinton ties, like Michael Froman, a transition adviser who was Obama's classmate at Harvard Law School and served as Robert Rubin's chief of staff at the Clinton Treasury Department, and Christopher Edley, who taught Obama at Harvard and also served Clinton, and who is married to a former Clinton deputy chief of staff.

"This is a good way to try to be helpful without giving up my new life at Berkeley," said Edley, who is now dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, in an email.

The highest-ranking member of the group with deep ties to both Clinton and Obama is Emanuel, a Chicagoan who is very close to Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod.

Though the transition is still young, former Clintonites say they feel a change in the atmosphere.

"It's heartening to see that that was just primary rhetoric," said a former Clinton aide of Obama's criticism of Clinton's administration.

Obama has continued to keep his distance from aspects of Clinton's legacy, however, and even his decision to bring Clintonites into the transition and administration is in part a judgment of his Democratic predecessor’s chaotic, insular transition 16 years ago.

And there remains a distinction between the policy and political sides of Hillary Clinton’s operation. Soon after the primary, top Clinton policy aides, such as economic adviser Gene Sperling, were quietly integrated into Obama's campaign. The only member of Clinton's inner circle to join Obama's campaign staff was her policy director, Neera Tanden.

A campaign's policy shop feeds the bulk of a new administration's appointments: Most of the key positions on White House staff and in executive agencies are policy posts.

But while the Clinton policy shop may feel like the gang is getting back together, the political team has yet to be invited in.

Said one former Clinton campaign aide, "Obama has clearly made a distinction between the small group of Clinton campaign staff, who clearly aren't much welcome, and the large number of Clinton White House personnel who are."

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0510/17/A01-351179.htm

WAYNE -- Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at [url=javascript:companybox('F')]Ford Motor[/url] Co.'s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working -- on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.
"We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper," he says. "Otherwise, I've just sat."
Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.
The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.
As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.
With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 -- if not sooner.
"It's an albatross around their necks," said Steven Szakaly, an economist with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. "It's a huge number of workers doing nothing. That has a very large effect on their future earnings outlook."
[url=javascript:companybox('GM')]General Motors Corp.[/url] has roughly 5,000 workers in its jobs bank. Delphi has about 4,000 in its version of the same program. Some 2,100 workers are in DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group's job security program. Ford had 1,275 in its jobs bank as of Sept. 25. The pending closure of Ford's assembly plant in Loraine, Ohio, could add significantly to that total. Those numbers could swell in coming years as GM and Ford prepare to close more plants.
Detroit automakers declined to discuss the programs in detail or say exactly how much they are spending, but the four-year labor contracts they signed with the UAW in 2003 established contribution caps that give a good idea of the size of the expense.
According to those documents, GM agreed to contribute up to $2.1 billion over four years. DaimlerChrysler set aside $451 million for its program, along with another $50 million for salaried employees covered under the contract. Ford, which also maintained responsibility for [url=javascript:companybox('VC')]Visteon Corp.[/url]'s UAW employees, agreed to contribute $944 million.
Delphi pledged to contribute $630 million. In August, however, Delphi Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert S. "Steve" Miller said the company spent more than $100 million on its jobs bank program in the second quarter alone.
"Can we keep losing $400 million a year paying for workers in the jobs bank and $400 million a year on operations? No, we cannot deal with that indefinitely," Miller said in a recent interview with The Detroit News. "We can't wait until 2007."

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

Guaranteed employment
The jobs bank was established during 1984 labor contract talks between the UAW and the Big Three. The union, still reeling from the loss of 500,000 jobs during the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was determined to protect those who were left. Detroit automakers were eager to win union support to boost productivity through increased automation and more production flexibility.
The result was a plan to guarantee pay and benefits for union members whose jobs fell victim to technological progress or plant restructurings. In most cases, workers end up in the jobs bank only after they have exhausted their government unemployment benefits, which are also supplemented by the companies through a related program. In some cases, workers go directly into the program and the benefits can last until they are eligible to retire or return to the factory floor.
By making it so expensive to keep paying idled workers, the UAW thought Detroit automakers would avoid layoffs. By discouraging layoffs, the union thought it could prevent outsourcing.
That strategy has worked but at the expense of the domestic auto industry's long-term viability.
American automakers have produced cars and trucks even when there is little market demand for them, forcing manufacturers to offer big rebates and discounts.
"Sometimes they just push product on us," said Bill Holden Jr., general manager of Holden Dodge Inc. in Dover, Del., who said this does not go over well with the dealers. "But they've got these contracts with the union."
In Detroit's battle against Asian and European competitors that are unencumbered by such labor costs, the job banks have become a major competitive disadvantage.
Breaking the banks
Analysts say the jobs bank could be a bigger issue than health care in the 2007 contract negotiations, particularly at Ford. It has a younger work force than GM, meaning any workers Ford sends to the bench are likely to stay there for a while.
"Ford is under pressure from investors to cut costs," said Roland Zullo, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. "At the same time, the unions are going to be under pressure to protect jobs."
Given that, he expects a compromise that allows for the jobs bank to continue but not on the scale of the current programs. "There's going to be a lot of give and take," he said.
But does the jobs bank make any sense in a climate of shrinking profits and declining market share?
"Labor wants the (jobs bank) because they want protection for their members," Zullo said. But he added that the jobs bank was also designed to help the companies by ensuring that skilled workers did not take their talents elsewhere.
"Companies invest in training," he said. "It protects that investment."
The investment only makes sense when viewed from a long-term perspective, a vantage point Wall Street is not known to favor.
"If they're going after the job banks, that would signal to me that the folks at the top have lost faith in their ability to recoup market share," Zullo said. "That would suggest to me that they really don't see a turnaround."
Analysts and labor experts believe some sort of compromise is inevitable as pressure builds on Detroit automakers to lower operating costs.
"The union probably realizes the money to pay for these programs probably doesn't exist," Szakaly said. "There's going to have to be some give on the jobs bank."
While the job banks may exemplify the sort of excesses that give unions a bad name, experts say it is wrong to cast all the blame in the direction of Solidarity House. He said the leaders of GM, Ford and Chrysler also bear some responsibility for the current problems.
"If these guys built cars people wanted, this wouldn't even be an issue," Szakaly said.

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-16-2008

'Put out to pasture'
That view was echoed by Dan Cisco, another member of the jobs bank at Michigan Truck, as he drained a cup of coffee with Pool and other idled workers at Rex's restaurant in Wayne last week.
Ten members of UAW Local 900 are currently assigned to the jobs bank at Michigan Truck. They are all gun-welder repairmen -- or "gunnies." It is a classification each says they earned through decades of hard work.
And none of them is ready to give it up.
While some might envy their life of leisure, workers like Cisco, 56, feel humiliated by the program.
"I felt like I was useless -- like I was put out to pasture," he said. "It's just like how they treated the veterans. During the war, we were heroes. When we came back ... "
Cisco adjusts his cap, emblazoned with the familiar silhouette of a captive American POW, and sighs.
Michigan Truck, which builds the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator full-size SUVs, used to be one of Ford's most profitable plants. Today, the nation is turning away from the big trucks and sport utility vehicles it builds.
Cisco, Pool and eight other gunnies from Michigan Truck have been in the jobs bank program since their positions were eliminated in July. They all have more than 36 years with Ford and are among the highest-paid workers in the plant. They say the company is asking them to accept one of the $35,000 retirement packages it is offering to trim its blue-collar headcount.
Most say they have no interest in retiring -- or spending the rest of their careers doing crossword puzzles.
"We want training," Dale Hall said.
Classes are available, the workers said. They have been invited to take courses on bicycle repair, home wiring and poker. Silk-flower arranging is also available.
"They might as well just give us a basket-weaving class, set us in the corner and let us feed the pigeons," Cisco said.
Community service
Not everyone in the jobs bank is spending their time marking it.
Dan Costilla, a member of UAW Local 602 in Lansing, was a body shop worker at GM's Lansing car assembly plant until it was closed in May. Now, instead of grinding joints, he rides herd over 16 of his former plantmates, making sure they keep their appointments at the local thrift store or Head Start program.
"I'm making sure that everything's going smooth," he said.
In the five months since Costilla and his co-workers have been unemployed, they have been busy mowing lawns for the handicapped, patching roofs for senior citizens and chaperoning youngsters on field trips to the zoo. It is all part of a community service effort organized by the union, with the support of the company.
"They realized you could only sit so long at the job bank office," Costilla said. "Your bones, they get sore after a while sitting down."
Bob Bowen, former president of UAW Local 849 in Ypsilanti, said the original intent of the jobs bank program was that idled workers would be gainfully employed on community projects or learning new skills -- real ones that they could actually use on the assembly line.
"The idea was not to have people loafing," Bowen said. "But that was a concern."
The problem, he said, lies in the way the jobs bank is administered.
Instead of setting up a central authority to manage them, responsibility was largely left to union locals across the country. Some organized community projects and job training. Others passed out decks of cards and hooked up VCRs.
Ken Pool said he can only take so many more World War II documentaries and crossword puzzles.
He and the other members of Michigan Truck's jobs bank planned to meet with a lawyer. They have already filed numerous grievances, accusing the company of age discrimination, but have heard nothing from the union or the company.
Now they are going to see if the courts can help.
As for Costilla and his colleagues, they are getting ready to go back to work at GM's new Delta Township plant. Costilla acknowledges that many of the union members are not looking forward to going back to work at the factory.
"The majority of us would rather stay here doing what we're doing," he said.
"You're not on the line, chasing a car."

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no wonders paddy moved - who - 11-17-2008

Rodrique Ngowi, Associated Press Writer

The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack.

A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.

The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defense of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.

Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group — the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA — carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.

Nesson, the founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in an interview that his goal is to "turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency."

Nesson is best known for defending the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and for consulting on the case against chemical companies that was depicted in the film "A Civil Action." His challenge against the music labels, made in U.S. District Court in Boston, is one of the most determined attempts to derail the industry's flurry of litigation.

The initiative has generated more than 30,000 complaints against people accused of sharing songs online. Only one case has gone to trial; nearly everyone else settled out of court to avoid damages and limit the attorney fees and legal costs that escalate over time.

Nesson intervened after a federal judge in Boston asked his office to represent Joel Tenenbaum, who was among dozens of people who appeared in court in RIAA cases without legal help.

The 24-year-old Tenenbaum is a graduate student accused by the RIAA of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, demanding $12,000.

The Digital Theft Deterrence Act, the law at issue in the case, sets damages of $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, and as much as $150,000 for a willful violation. That means Tenenbaum could be forced to pay $1 million if it is determined that his alleged actions were willful.

The music industry group isn't conceding any ground to Nesson and Tenenbaum. The RIAA has said in court documents that its efforts to enforce the copyright law is protected under the First Amendment right to petition the courts for redress of grievances. Tenenbaum also failed, the music group noted, to notify the U.S. Attorney General that that he wanted to contest the law's constitutional status.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said her group's pursuit of people suspected of music piracy is a fair response to the industry's multibillion-dollar losses since peer-to-peer networks began making it easy for people to share massive numbers of songs online.

"What should be clear is that illegally downloading and distributing music comes with many risks and is not an anonymous activity," Duckworth said.

Still, wider questions persist on whether the underlying copyright law is constitutional, said Ray Beckerman, a Forest Hills, N.Y.-based attorney who has represented other downloading defendants and runs a blog tracking the most prominent cases.

One federal judge has held that the constitutional question is "a serious argument," Beckerman said. "There are two law review articles that have said that it is unconstitutional, and there are three cases that said that it might be unconstitutional."

In September, a federal judge granted a new trial to a Minnesota woman who had been ordered to pay $220,000 for pirating 24 songs. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis called on Congress to change copyright laws to prevent excessive awards in similar cases. He wrote that he didn't discount the industry's claim that illegal downloading has hurt the recording business, but called the award "wholly disproportionate" to the industry's losses.

In the Boston case, Nesson is due to meet attorneys for the music industry for a pretrial conference on Tuesday, ahead of a trial set for Dec. 1.

Entertainment attorney Jay Cooper, who specializes in music and copyright issues at Los Angeles-based Greenberg Traurig, is convinced that Nesson will not persuade the federal court to strike down the copyright law. He said the statutory damages it awards enable recording companies to get compensation in cases where it is difficult to prove actual damages.

The record companies have echoed that line of defense. In court filings in Tenenbaum's case, they contend that the damages allowed by the law are "intended not only to compensate the copyright owner, but also to punish the infringer (and) deter other potential infringers."

But are these lawsuits the only way the record industry could deter piracy? Nesson believes the industry could develop new ways to prevent copyright material from being shared illegally. One idea would be to bundle music with ads and post it for free online, he says.

"There are alternative ways," he said, "of packaging entertainment to return revenue to artists."

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On the Net:

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

Ray Beckerman's blog: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com

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