It turns out that Michael Greene’s speech at the Grammys — which has been seen as insane on its face by most mainstream media commentators — seems to have consisted mostly of falsehoods anyway. This New York Times article has some interesting points to make:

[…] it seems strange that [Greene] would admit on national television that he hired three people to break the law (the Electronic Theft Act) and then show them in the process of doing this, especially since one is a minor. And now one of these downloaders for hire (at about $12 an hour), Numair Faraz, has stepped forward to say that Mr. Greene’s claim that three students downloaded 6,000 files from easily accessible Web sites isn’t even true. […] “I was the only one who used Bearshare and Kazaa extensively,” he continued, referring to two popular file-exchanging programs. “And half of my files never completed: they were halfway downloaded or not downloaded at all.” As for the two others, both students at the University of California at Los Angeles, he said they hardly even used file-sharing sites. Instead, he said, they used AOL Instant Messenger, a chat program, to receive songs, which friends sent them from their hard drives. This not only means that the songs weren’t on public Web sites, but also that there is no guarantee that they were ever illegally downloaded, since some could have been from CD’s purchased by students and ripped into their hard drives. Mr. Faraz estimated that 4,000 of the songs were sent as private messages using Instant Messenger, and a few songs were legitimate authorized downloads from the Web site MP3.com.