Joel Tenenbaum keeping to the Pirate’s Code?

By Rodney Brown

Joel Tenenbaum, the Boston University graduate student convicted in late July of illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs, has been targeted again by the Recording Industry Association of America, this time for allegedly encouraging illegal downloading.

On the site of choice for illegal downloaders, The Pirate Bay, a download appeared a few weeks after Tenenbaum was convicted and ordered to pay $675,000 in restitution to four record labels. The name of that file — “The $675,000 Mixtape.” It contained all 30 tracks for which Tenenbaum was convicted of obtaining illegally, and even featured a promo image of Tenenbaum and claimed to come from “DJ Joel.”

According to a report by the Boston Globe, Tenenbaum said he did not create the file with its picture of him and the phrase “Approved by the RIAA,” and is not responsible for promoting it on a Twitter feed called JoelFightsBack. That Twitter feed was created by his legal team, spearheaded by Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, he told the Globe. The Pirate Bay users have taken the mixtape to heart it seems, and reports say there are around 900 seeders all sharing the file, potentially making the download of the file one of the most popular and one of the fastest in The Pirate Bay’s listings. So it is certainly possible that Tenenbaum had nothing to with the file, even if the question of where the photo of him with his arms crossed came from is still unanswered.

Yet in his testimony on the stand in his July trial, Tenenbaum allegedly not only admitted to the illegal downloading and sharing of the 30 separate files, he admitted he had not been truthful about it in his depositions in September of last year. So smart choices are not always on his menu, clearly.

While the RIAA has been lambasted for its heavy-handed tactics and head-in-the-sand business practices by Mass High Tech before,  if Tenebaum were so foolish as to have even participated willingly in the creation of the mixtape, he has no one blame for potentially losing his upcoming appeal of his conviction but himself.

Posted by Brendan Lynch

Tags: Charles Nesson, Joel Tenenbaum, RIAA, Rodney Brown

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Education & Training, Internet, Public Policy, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.