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P2P Defendant Destroys Evidence, Case Defaults
neoflexycurrent writes "A court in Texas has thrown the book at a defendant accused by the RIAA of file sharing. The court determined that she had intentionally wiped her hard drive clean, so it entered the most severe sanction possible — default judgment against her. The record companies now just have to ask the court how much they want in damages."
This is the way it has to be. To use the extreme example, if I'm charged with murder, and I can get away with it by destroying evidence, then the penalty for destorying the evidence that would have proved I was guilty should be a guilty verdict for murder. Otherwise it makes no sense NOT to destroy the evidence and take the lighter penalty for evidence destruction.
The crimes for destruction of evidence etc. are meant to be in addition to the crime you're being tried for when the offender is the party on trial, and separate crimes when the evidence destruction is carried out by 3rd parties.
Or, on the flip side, if the plaintiff willfully destroys evidence, the defendent gets default judgement as well. Fair is fair.
paintball
No chance. The record company is crushing somebody, destroying their life just because they can and they think it will scare people into paying their information tax. They are terrorising people. Sooner or later, someone is going to start bombing these companies.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
If we have reason to believe that we will in the future be charged, keep a clean hardrive that is "mirrored." If she had spent the extra $80 to have a second hard drive, installed windows and other programs, she could have turned in that hard drive and disposed of the original.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
I'm still impressed by what can be considered copyright infringement under the US law, and how exaggerately high the compensation for damages can be.
If they were to be fair, I think they should charge with $1 for each Mp3, since that's what it would cost her to buy them through iTunes (or maybe $2, or $10, since she could make copies, but nothing near $150,000), and the costs of the trial.
My 0.02 cents
Did your report the theft? File an isurance claims? Have you been seen, perhaps photographed, using that "stolen" PC. IMs, MySpace, Skype? Foling a false report to the police is worth at least a misdeameanor, perjury is a felony charge. Compounding stupidity with reckleesness makes sense only only on Slashdot.
If copying a copyrighted song counts as theft, does deleting the evidence count as giving it back? Shouldn't that warrant a reduced sentence?
I think copyright infridgement should be just that: I infringed someone's copy rights. I think it should apply when I'm trying to earn money using someone's work without their authorization, or when I'm trying to claim the copyright on something ilegitimately.
I think those concepts should be clearly separated from "getting a song at no cost from some other peer". Maybe you'd like to claim it's also ilegal, but I don't think "Copyright infrigdement" can apply to both.
PS: The difference? The money involved.
My 0.02 cents
Examine the word; copyright. It refers to the right to copy. If you don't hold the right to copy something and you copy it anyway, you have committed a copyright violation. Money is not a factor.
I'm not saying I agree with the way it works but there you have it. And the penalty isn't for how many MP3s you may have downloaded to your drive, it is for how many times they might have been downloaded from you. It is pretty harsh.
In order to prevent a crime you must make the penalty equal or greater than the gain divided by the chance of getting caught
But for the justice system to be perceived as fair, you must make the penalty commensurate with the crime. Otherwise you end up with a situation like this, where people are punished very severely for crimes that are so trivial that the authorities do not usually bother to investigate them.
A similar phenomenon could be seen before the establishment of modern police forces, when criminals would be hanged or transported to Australia for trivial thefts. At the time, this was justified in the same way, but looking back on it now, we regard it as barbaric.
She "stole" 200 songs, yes? Say 15 albums. What do you think the punishment is for busting a store window and stealing 15 albums? I'd wager it's far less than $150,000 per song. If the record companies are going to oversimplify things and call it stealing, they should be forced to accept the same penalties as judgement.
I think you mean the majority of the people under 18. Most adults would consider it theft whether they'd do it themselves or not.
In my experience - rubbish.
Large numbers of adults of all ages are copying music to each other, especially using more traditional methods such as tape/CD copying. These same people would consider it abhorrent to steal something.
For most people, saying "Would you like this CD? I just nicked it from the shop the other day" would be unthinkable, but offering a copy of a CD, even to someone who disagrees with any form of copyright infringement, is considered okay.
Though with most filesharing software you automatically share the files with everyone else. She could have had thousands of songs, and thousands of people could have downloaded from her.
Emphasis mine. This is the problem as I see it with the damages being awarded for these infringement cases. Even if you prove the person had copies of the songs on their computer and were obtained through copyright infringement using a P2P service, where is the proof that thousands of others actually copied the songs from the defendent? And what about if the sharing feature of the P2P app is turned off? The courts are not in the business of punishing "could have" cases (except for this recent NH judgement which is rediculous, with the dissenting judge plainly stating no crime was committed or proven). So perhaps I should say the courts shouldn't be in the business of punishing "could have"s except where laws already allow for that sort of thing (e.g. attempted murder). But there are no laws that I am aware of that make the potential to copyright a crime. Otherwise, anyone owning a copy of a piece of media could be prosecuted because simply having the media would meet the low standard of having the ability to infringe copyright. IMHO if the RIAA wants damages of $150,000 per song they need to demonstrate that the defendent caused that much damage, not that they "could have" caused that much damage. If I own a gun and I'm arrested for some other crime, say tax evasion, can I also be convicted of attempted murder because I could have shot someone?
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --