September 9, 2003 by s.z.

UPDATE: Girl, 12, Settles Downloading Case Brianna LaHara, the 12-year-old girl in New York who was among the first to be sued by the record industry for sharing music over the Internet is off the hook after her mother agreed Tuesday to pay $2,000 to settle the lawsuit, apologizing and admitting that her daughter's actions violated U.S. copyright laws. "We understand now that file-sharing the music was illegal," Brianna's mom said in a statement distributed by the recording industry. "We also understand that Madonna's 'American Life' CD is well-worth $15.99, and we urge everyone to buy several copies of it, or otherwise Bob, the janitor at Maverick records, will have to go without insulin this month, and it will all be your fault." Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also alluded to Brianna's case. "Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?" Durbin asked RIAA President Cary Sherman during a Senate Judiciary hearing. Sherman responded that most people don't shoplift because they fear they'll be arrested. So, presumably RIAA is just trying to put the same fear of God into teens that psychotic security guards do at malls. But personally, I don't shoplift because I believe that stealing is wrong.  And I don't swap music the internet because the music industry isn't putting out anything worth stealing these days.  But I'm old and cranky, so you can't go by me. 5:59:07 PM

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And briefly, in other news, 12-Year-Old Nabbed For Music Downloading.  "The music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers — including a 12-year-old New York City girl who thought downloading songs was fun."  Well, I guess she'll think again from JAIL!  Young Brianna told the reporter, "I thought it was OK to download music because my mom paid a service fee for it. [The family had Kazaa.]  Out of all people, why did they pick me?"  A RIAA spokeswoman said they picked on Brianna because she is evil and she makes them sick, and they hope she uses her time in prison to think about what she's done. And Leni Riefenstahl Dies At 101.  "Leni Riefenstahl, whose hypnotic depiction of Hitler's Nuremberg rally, "Triumph of the Will," was renowned and despised as the best propaganda film ever made, died Monday, a German magazine reported Tuesday, quoting a long-time friend. She was 101."  Sadly, she did not live to see the Showtime premiere of her last movie, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." 7:09:28 AM

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Mel Gibson Turns the Other Fist  Says of foe: "I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog." "Action Christian" Mel Gibson In articles in today's WorldNet Daily and Saturday's NY Daily News (A Passionate Mel Gibson Strikes Back Against Critics , Mel's 'Passion'-ate Defense Gives Offense ), a fuming Gibson is quoted as telling The New Yorker that he has it in for New York Times columnist Frank Rich, Frank's dog, and Frank's intestines because Frank implied that Gibson's father is "a Holocaust denier."  Regarding his father, Mel says: "He never denied the Holocaust. He just said there were fewer than 6 million." Mel also claimed that some of those attacking his film were being "anti-Christian," and accused "modern secular Judaism" of trying "to blame the Holocaust on the Roman Catholic Church." For his part, in a 1 August NYT article (The Gospel According to Gibson) that didn't endear him to Mel, Rich said that the Times wasn't allowed to a screening of Mel's movie because Mel said that earlier that year theTimes Magazine had run an ‘‘inaccurate’’ article in which: Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father and a prominent traditionalist Catholic author, was quoted as saying that the Vatican Council was ‘‘a Masonic plot backed by the Jews’’ and that the Holocaust was a charade. But in fact, neither Hutton nor Mel Gibson — nor anyone else — has contacted the magazine to challenge the accuracy of a single sentence in the article in the four months since its publication. In his 1 August column, Rich also accused Mel of falsely claiming that the Jews were picking on him as a publicity gambit: His game from the start has been to foment the old-as-Hollywood canard that the ‘‘entertainment elite’’ (which just happens to be Jewish) is gunning for his Christian movie.  But based on what? According to databank searches, not a single person, Jewish or otherwise, had criticized ‘‘The Passion’’ when Gibson went on O’Reilly’s show on Jan. 14 in January to defend himself against ‘‘any Jewish people’’ who might attack the film. Nor had anyone yet publicly criticized ‘‘The Passion’’ or Gibson by March 7, when The Wall Street Journal ran the interview in which the star again defended himself against Jewish critics who didn’t yet exist. (Even now, no one has called for censorship of the film — only for the right to see it and, if necessary, debate its content.) Was this all just a publicity ploy for a movie that seems unlikely to attract much of an audience without something going for it other than its all-Aramaic and Latin gimmick?  We really can't say.  But we can report that the Daily News concluded their piece as follows:  The film, played entirely in ancient languages, has yet to find a distributor. But Gibson sees a halo around the controversy. "Inadvertently," he says, "all the problems and the conflicts and stuff - this is some of the best marketing and publicity I have ever seen." Oh, and you'll be happy to know that Rich doesn't have a dog, so no pooches will be harmed as a result of this feud.