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Judge Orders MP3.com to Pay $118M Damages
jbridleman writes "Fox News is reporting that MP3 must pay $118M to Universal Music Group for copyright violation. Much less than the $450M UMG wanted." They're calling it willful copyright violation. Says that if MP3.com is forced to pay this much for every album they made available with their beam box software, it could cost them over 3 billion dollars.
It is currently very trendy in the legal circles to slam a technology company. These judges want to get a name. (I defended copyrights, can I be a Supreme court judge?) to get higher in their career as poloticians. Is it very obvious as to what is happening, and the mp3.com case was very weak at best. Napster is going to get slammed hard, and then they will try to go after hotline, and all the other "sharing" and "warez" systems that have been here a long time. NOW, if gnutella is able to Hash the searches and transfers or make it impossible to pin down who is offering what (disallow any identity in the system and set up "reflectors" for requests) things will go smoothly.
I dont care what judge you are and what army you have, you will never stop the sharing of music. We will always have tapes, cd-burners, etc... and the poor teenagers and college students, that when they get older will buy more audio, will probably think twice about actually buying that CD, based on the actions of the industry.
I know that I will never give money to a Country Club again, after the crap pulled on me in college. (Golfers are snooty buttheads anyways) and my son will think twice about giving a RIAA company money, after the shaft they give to the fans and artists.
It's a choice of the lesser of two evils.. and they are more evil than copying.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
$118M in fines sounds like a lot of damages - in fact it sound like a lot more money that can conceivably have been incurred by UMG. So are these punitive damages then? Given that market sales continue to rocket up despite all the RIAA media spin that seems to give the impression that the arrival of MP3s is the end of the world as they know it and that they are already having to beg on street corners in order to pay for the Ferrari, I'm not sure where this figure has come from.
Given that MS gets fined $1M dollars for attempting to put a company out of business by pulling a bait-and-switch, doesn't look like the world is flat on a legal basis does it? The software industry easily pulls into the $100Billion dollar category so I can't believe the stakes are 100 times higher for UMG...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
There is some truth in what you say, but you miss some important points. First-- developers like myself are paid by salary, not through some enormously complex royalty scheme like the record industry. I am paid the same as long as I do my job. There is no need for me to produce a "hit", and hence no need for a gigantic internet-programmer-record-label system to promote my work to the masses. Why don't musicians get paid salary? Why are they allowed to collect money from their works a zillion years after they die while my work as a programmer is of no use to me after I write it in most cases? I do not depend on copyright for income. Nor does my company. We depend on the ability to sell our custom software services to other people.
Second, most of my work is web programming that is quite easily available for download and study against the wishes of my company already. That's how the web design works-- my DHTML, javascript, etc... are all right there in your browser whether my company likes it or not.
Should we sue browser makers for including a "view source" button? All of our pages are copyrighted! What about the "save image to file" button? Or the ability to save the web page source to your hard drive? We are a profitable and quickly growing web company with hundreds of employees and 5 or 6 offices (I can never remember), yet our copyrighted works sit freely downloadable for the entire world.
Your argument that wages depend on copyright does hold some merit, but our copyrighted works are totally unprotected and my mom could "pirate" them with a mouse click, yet we have a very successful business model.