QUICKTIME MOVIE: iTunes-Pepsi ad remixed

As I wrote yesterday about the latest Apple/Pepsi ad, which exploits children who were legally attacked by the RIAA, words fail me.

Fortunately, Final Cut Pro didn't...

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RIAA CHIEF CARY SHERMAN MOLESTS 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL

FURTHER READING:

The Register:

Four children bullied by the Recording Industry Association of America will re-enact their shame for tens of millions of TV viewers today, at the behest of two giant American corporations: Apple Computer and Pepsi Cola Inc.

Instead of using actors to dramatize their shame, the RIAA, Apple and Pepsi have forced the children themselves to conform with the copyright regime, and to look suitably browbeaten as a series of captions reads: INCRIMINATED Ö ACCUSED Ö BUSTED Ö CHARGED.

Is this a medieval costume drama? A low-budget dramatization of some era of America's dark and troubled past, recorded by Hawthorne, when public humiliations were commonplace? Or is it some strange and sadistic imported Japanese game show - the kind where people assent to be filmed eating worms?

p2pnet:

"It's all in good spirit," says Dave Burwick, chief marketer, Pepsi, North America.

Josh Wattles, however, doesn't think that adequately describes the commericial. In fact, "Falsely attributing criminal conduct to someone is a slam-dunk libel in just about every state," he says.

"There's no calculus of relative harm to justify this kind of abusive, untruthful and cynical behavior towards minors no matter how complicit their misguided parents may have been in this deception."

He's the former acting general counsel of Paramount Pictures, a key architect of the MPAA's (Motion Picture Association of America) anti-piracy programs in the transition to videocassette distribution, and the former senior executive in charge of Viacom's music subsidiaries, The Famous Music Publishing Companies.

It started last year when Big Music instructed the RIAA, its principal enforcer, to sue any file swapper it could identify for copyright violations. Its lawyers used 'instant subpoenas' obtained under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to pressure ISPs into handing over subscriber names and addresses - until the Verizon decision put a stop to it.

However, before being ordered to use due process like everyone else, the RIAA had been able to track down and identify a number of p2p file swappers, mostly teenagers and students, whom they threatened with civil, not criminal, court actions. Unless they settled.

The 16 teenaged Pepsi stars were among those swept up in the RIAA's 'investigations'.

By the sheer volume of ink the RIAA has been able to generate in the media, it's succeeded in making people believe anyone who downloads music, shares files, swaps music, or whatever you want to call it, is a criminal and thief.

That's not true.

But the RIAA's relentless, mind-numbing assertions have been sufficient to paint the picture and hence, the Pepsi/iTunes campaign could be catchily entitled "I Fought the Law".

And, "I was one of the kids prosecuted for downloading music," says a teenager. She was not, though, 'prosecuted' for anything. She'd never been in a court. She was, rather, mouthing words from a script contrived by BBDO and approved by Pepsi and Apple.

However, to make the theme stand up, the message that these kids were ex-criminals who'd been rightfully 'prosecuted' had to be driven home hard and therefore, Busted, Charged, Incriminated, and Accused appears over their images, and the carefully arranged lighting and their sullen looks purposefully suggest a gritty, urban, isolated feel - the kind of thing associated on TV with 'lawbreakers' and criminality."