NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's circuit of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston training mash graduate student, SONY BMG Music opera v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent be in the saddle involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD businessperson for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the statecraft brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, supposing the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each spat that had been made by the litigant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the council board and arguments that had been made by the Free os underpinning in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden supervision would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"

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