We all know about the Daily Variety suit that plagues the Vandals, but yesteday bassist Joe Escalante published a column over at Huffington Post that talks about SOPA and how it bodes ill for the Internet…using their case as an example. Read an excerpt after the jump. (That case, by the way, is now set for trial in Federal Court on April 12.)
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First filed in 2004, the case [of Daily Variety vs. the Vandals] is now set for trial in Federal Court
on April 3, 2012 where the Daily Variety will claim in front of a jury,
presumably with a straight face, that mere “links” to a site that posted
artwork from a discontinued CD displaying an “infringing parody” should
result in the four members of the Vandals paying Daily Variety and
their lawyers at Fulbright & Jaworski upwards of a million dollars.
If the fear is that under SOPA, the media companies will take
advantage of a legal anomaly that will permit them to shut down entire
web sites, with the burden of proving innocence placed on the defendant,
based on trumped up claims and theories, I can tell you, it's not
paranoia. It is a real world certainty.
…
During a deposition in the Variety case. Variety's
lawyer from the 900 member firm of Fulbright and Jaworsky accused me of
having an image of the Vandals album depicting the notorious “infringing
parody” of Variety's logo on the Vandals' Myspace page.
When it was pointed out to him that it was part of News Corp's mp3
retail store and outside the control of the Vandals he signaled the
theory he will present at trial to squash us. “If you had no control
over the image in the retail store, why didn't you shut down your entire
Myspace Page immediately so that no one could see the infringing
parody?”
I laughed out loud, but then realized he was serious. This evidently
passes as logical in a giant law firm representing a giant media company
with 30,000 plus employees. He didn't care about this country's
treasured protections provided by the First Amendment for artistic
speech. He didn't care about the Copyright Act's “Fair Use Doctrine”
which protects punk bands' parodies as it does every parody created on
Saturday Night Live or Mad Magazine. He didn't care that if he won his
case, four musicians would lose their homes, and everything they'd
worked for during their modest 30-year career as a band. He only cared
about scorched earth litigation to get his way.
If you want to read more of our coverage on the Daily Variety vs. the Vandals, read these stories:
- Painful Parody: In the battle of the Vandals vs the Daily Variety, there seems to be no end in sight
- Before Going to the Vandals' Benefit Tonight, Read Joe Escalante's Uncut, Expanded OC Weekly Interview
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