RIAA ask judge to stop Thomas from objecting to their stuff

The ability of the RIAA legal team in the Capitol case against Jammie Thomas to make themselves look foolish is always a thing of joy.

You'd have thought, at the very least, they'd have confidence in the copyrights they're defending. But it turns out maybe not [pdf link] as they're trying to get the judge to stop the defence from challenging the legitimacy of the copyright proof they've submitted in the case.

The RIAA team insist it's not fair to expect them to provide certified copies of the copyright certificates:

Her objection is now untimely and will serve only to force Plaintiffs to unnecessarily expend resources on an issue upon which there is no dispute.

Hang about - are they really saying "there is no dispute, so stop them from disputing on this point"? And since when did the RIAA legal team start to worry about pissing away money on pointless causes? Isn't that their entire raison d'etre?

[via Recording Industry v The People]

Poison pill for EMI

You spend the best years of your life combing, perming, sparying and perming some more, and what sort of reward do you get?

Not enough, it turns out: Poison reckon Capitol-EMI owe them money.

They've launched a lawsuit which says not only do they believe they got diddled out of miscalculated figures on sales and tax, but they don't even know how much they got diddled out of, as attempts to audit the figures were blocked by the labels.

It does raise the question how they can be sure the losses are large enough to justify an expensive lawsuit, but we'll bet their legal team has already provided a convincing answer to that one.

RIAA reluctant to reveal costs of legal action

Capitol Records have asked the judge in their case against Debbie Foster to keep details of how much they're paying their legal team secret.

Obviously, the RIAA doesn't want people to be able to start putting a figure on the lawsuits they're pursuing, but it's still surprising to see a company like EMI trying to keep such details out the public domain. For example, wouldn't EMI's beleaguered shareholders be interested to know how much the company is burning through on stunts like this at a time when basic earnings per share have fallen from nearly 30pence to just over 10pence between 2004 and 2006?

EMI shrinks a little

The merger of the Virgin and Capitol imprints at EMI has already yielded cost savings: eleven promotional staff and the entire Capitol sales team have been canned.

When management is this poor, all it takes is for Robbie Williams to release a duff album, and all of a sudden families are an income down.