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RIAA Sues 12-Year Old Girl
tcp100 noted an article running at fox about
The RIAA suing a 12 Year Old girl: "'I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,' Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother."
Social engineering is right. The BBC is also reporting that the RIAA is suing a 71 year old man. Apparently his grandchildren were coming over to his house and downloading music.
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A few years back ASCAP threated to sue the girl scouts for singing campfire songs without a license.
"They buy paper, twine and glue for their crafts - they can pay for the music, too," says John Lo Frumento, ASCAP's chief operating officer. If offenders keep singing without paying, he says, we will sue them if necessary." I don't think the RIAA will care that they are going after children.
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This would be a good time for the People invoke jury nullification, assuming any of these go to trial. (Note that the Bill of Rights grants any RIAA victim a right to jury for lawsuits worth over $20 if they decide to take this to trial.)
So what is jury nullification? It is the principle that jury's may find a defendent "not guilty" if the law is unjust. This harkens back to British colonial days and is the primary reason we have juries in the Bill of Rights: both the defendent AND the law are judged. It is the Peoples' last check against unjust law when the three branches of government fail.
A prominent case of this was when William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was charged with assembling Quakers for worship when only the Church of England was permitted to assemble. (Again, pre-Revolution colonial days.) Though the jury found that he did indeed do just that, they gave a "not guilty" verdict on the grounds that the law was unjust. The judge held the jury without food and water for a couple of days and imposed fines, demanding that they give a "guilty" verdict, but they refused to budge. Events like this are what inspired our nation's founders to recognize the right of juries over the judge and the law. Jury nullifications also played an important role in overturning Prohibition. Juries often ruled against the law even when finding that the law had been broken, thus making Prohibition unenforceable, and I believe some regions of the nation still regularly have non-violent marijuana prosecutions lost due to jury nullification.
Jury's are unfortunately not informed of this right when they go to trial. I believe during the slave days the government realized that it was near impossible to get a conviction for violating the Fugitive Slave Act since people in the northern state juries, which was the only place the law really had any use, would rule "not guilty" on the grounds that the law was unjust. And so the government sadly decided to stop telling juries of their right to jury nullification.
So how does this apply to the RIAA? Well if enough 12 year olds, or any one else for that matter, being sued millions of dollars for downloading music take it to court then the People (ie-the juries) could toss out the cases as being unjust. Given enough of these rulings, the law could be forced to change to reflect what the People consider just or the RIAA could be forced to change tactics. Though this will remain unlikely if we do not go back to informing juries of their rights. (Plus stacking the jury by having the prosecution quiz them instead of making it truly random also undermines things...) So write to your state and federal legislative representatives today and demand that they pass laws requiring judges to inform juries of their "jury nullification" rights!
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
That's the amount specified by the laws governing copyright infringement -- $150K per instance.
For example, if you make a copy of a book, sell 100 copies, and get caught, you can be sued for 15 million dollars by the publisher.