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Testimony Wraps In RIAA Trial
Eskimo Joe writes "A federal judge surprised observers in the Captiol v Thomas file-sharing trial yesterday by barring RIAA president Cary Sherman from testifying. 'After a brief recess this afternoon, plaintiffs' counsel Richard Gabriel and defendant's counsel David Toder made their cases before the judge as to the relevance of Sherman's testimony. Toder argued that Sherman's testimony was not relevant to the question at hand, the fact of whether Thomas was liable for copyright infringement. Gabriel said that Sherman would be able to tell the jury why this case was significant, and more importantly, describe the harm the RIAA believes piracy has caused to the music industry. "I don't want to turn this case into a soap box for the recording industry," Toder argued in response.' Testimony wrapped up today [Wednesday] with closing arguments expected Thursday morning." Ars has up a summary, filed a few hours earlier, of other testimony in the trial. The jury could come back with a verdict later today.
It's called a victim impact statement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_impact_statement It gives victims of violent crime the opportunity to let the court know how they were affected by the crime. It is given at sentencing after the verdict has been reached.
Letting the suit spout before the verdict is delivered (in a case that didn't involve violence) would be an abuse of process but hey this is the RIAA. The judge did the right thing. My guess is that if the testimony had been allowed, the resulting appeal would have been successful.
Don't get too excited.
Reading over the summary of testimony at Ars Technica, they have Jammie Thomas dead to rights. The fact is, she was downloading and sharing music over Kazaa, and unless the jury is made up of idiots, they're going to find for the RIAA.
The RIAA aren't idiots, they deliberately chose this case because it was extremely low-risk. They're looking to get some momentum back in their sue-everyone campaign, and by winning this case, they may very well do it. Of course, the down side is that if they had lost this case that is about as slam-dunk as it can get, they never would have been able to win another, period, but given how unlikely that outcome is, I think they acted correctly. ("Correctly" meaning in the interest of their idiotic short-term near-sighted goals, that is, not correct in a moral or ethical sense.)
I really kind of wish that Toder (Thomas's lawyer) had gone for jury nullification instead. He really didn't have that much to lose. Anyone remotely technically competent will know that she is guilty of infringement, and anyone who isn't remotely technically competent will believe so even more. At least with nullification, problems with the law itself could be addressed instead.
The BEST we can hope for out of this is that the jury awards the RIAA some token amount of damage like a dollar. Something that says that they are technically correct, but that the rules that they've exploited fly in the spirit of what the law is intended to do.
Please, don't be discouraged when Ms. Thomas loses this case. That's exactly what the RIAA wants to happen. Keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully someday, this stupidity will end. Just because they may win this battle doesn't mean that they have to win the war.
"None of which have any relevance to the matter of the trial, which is whether she did or did not install Kazaa and thus share music with others on the internet. All that would have to happen is that the RIAA attorney would argue that the questions are irrelevant and have the judge agree. The plantiff's attorney made the right call in arguing against the testimony of the RIAA guy."
Ahh, but that is the point! If the plaintiff believes that wider issues are relevant, and they get to present them, then they are precluded from objecting when the defense does the same. You have your pi and delta mixed up - the Planitiff (Capitol) was the one wishing to have the executive testify as to the wider impact of filesharing, and the Defendant (Thomas) objected on the grounds of relevance. I am arguing that, it might have been a tactically better position to allow Capitol to make an irrelevant but emotional appeal to the jury, since that would allow the Thomas to use the same topics with a greater emotional impact. If the Capitol guy says on the stand "Industry profits are down by 10%", it would be just as legitimate for the defendant's lawyer to ask "And what percentage of those profits goes to artist royalties?"
As for the rest, a) I have served on juries, and b) what are you smoking if you think that juries aren't swayed by emotional arguments? Look at the news, fer chrissake.
I also wonder about your reasoning - "Juries are rarely made up of well educated people with a grasp of technology and technological issues.", so "A jury might hear such testimony and decide that while all those things are bad and believe that the RIAA did them all, they have nothing to do with whether or not the plantiff broke the law. " So, juries are stupid and that makes them LESS vulnerable to an emotional appeal?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It would be a useful tactic if the jury knew about Jury Nullification. As it stands, it seems unlikely that they do. When they're told to go back and decide whether a law was broken, they're going to be told that they have to determine if the defendant broke the law. All the rigamarole about the industry as a whole is going to be pointless, unless they can understand that the current laws are unjust and that they are allowed to find in favor of the defendant despite the fact that she broke the law.
Certainly. Send checks to her lawyers, earmarked for the Virgin v. Thomas case. Here is her lawyer's information:
Toder, Brian N., Chestnut & Cambronne, P.A. 204 North Star Bank 4661 Highway 61 White Bear Lake, MN 55110
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This was one of the least of her worries.
She used an e-mail address that is the same e-mail address that she used for her screen name on a bunch of other sites. (Even match.com, which had her profile that was shown in court.) She also had one and only one computer on her network, and it was password-protected with a password that only she knew. (No "someone else was using my computer" defense.) The songs that showed up on KaZaa were, lo and behold, the exact same songs that were on her computer.
I mean, seriously, I can't think of any plausible defense that she could have had. When the judge decided to include jury instruction 14, where he said that making files available for download was infringement, that was it, game over.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071004-verdict-is-in.html
fter just four hours of deliberation and two days of testimony, a jury found that Jammie Thomas was liable for infringing the record labels' copyrights on all 24 the 24 recordings at issue in the case of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas. The jury awarded $9,250 in statutory damages per song, after finding that the infringement was "willful," out of a possible total of $150,000 per song. The grand total? $222,000 in damages.