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Verdict Reached In RIAA Trial
jemtallon writes "The jury in the previously mentioned Captiol v Thomas story has reached a verdict. They have found in favor of the plaintiffs, Capitol, and ordered that she pay a $222,000 fine for 24 cases of copyright infringement."
Whoops! Guess paying the extortion money before they sue is sometimes a good idea!
Thank god I'm Canadian.
Unfortunately inevitable, since there was really no defense contesting of the network forensics, or that the username in question just happened to be the same as the defendent's accounts on many other networks, that the system in question was connected to her cable modem, and using her IP address.
Without such defense, a simple "preponderence of the evidence" (the criteria for a civil case) was inevitable.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I somehow doubt they will get all the money now owed...
liqbase
Expensive fiction, apparently.
The amount awarded per song ($9250) is downright ridiculous, but she clearly did download these songs :(
This should make up for the 20% decline in music sales this year. Keep'em coming boys!
Clearly bad lawyers! And don't use the same name on Kazaa as match.com!
http://tor.eff.org/
... that the first person with the cajones to challenge the RIAA is the one person with the worst chance of winning.
Damn....
Then again. It's a jury trial, which I recall people preferring when they think they'll lose.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I wonder if she'll be allowed to pay the settlement like the recording industry did theirs. In unpopular CDs that cost pennies to make but apply to the fine at retail price.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I thought for sure that a jury would never throw a fellow citizen under a bus for those record industry scumbags. I guess I'll have to finally realize that at least twelve in thirteen Americans are hopelessly retarded.
I've always believed, naively perhaps, that juries usually got it right. How freaking brain-dead do these people have to be? $220K for 24 songs? That's $9250 per song! That's substantially more than what the RIAA was claiming they lost on each instance (unless I mis-remembered?).
For music.
This jury of 12 idiots decided to ruin someone's life for 24 songs. Great going, guys.
From the various things I read, her attorney questioned her for about three minutes. Add to this all the soon to be repeated evidence against her, plus the fact she put on no expert witnesses at all, and I have to wonder, why the heck did she go to trial with this dog of a case? Reportedly, she spent $60k on attorney fees.
Anyway, if the damages award is not dischargeable in bankruptcy (something I would hope she looked into prior to trial), she is just screwed for life.
I suppose her only hope is on the issue of whether "making available" requires the RIAA to show someone downloaded the stuff in her shared folder. But the appeals are going to be very expensive. Even if she wins, it will be pyrrhic victory. I just don't understand.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Frankly, as much as I loathe the RIAA, Thomas' story simply didn't hold up. The prosecution was able to prove that in an attempt to evade prosecution, she had replaced her hard drive shortly after receiving a warning notice from the RIAA, not before as she claimed.
It's a shame that the defendant of this first RIAA jury trial turned out to be a liar with a bogus defense. But apparently, that's who she was. Given the facts brought out in the case, I don't see how the jury could have found for the defense.
I challenge Slashdot to boycott the US recording and movie industry... either that or stop whining...
Is it the jury who decides on the amount of the fine or whether the defendant is guilty of the crimes they have been charged with?
liqbase
The amount awarded per song ($9250) is downright ridiculous
Not many people know this, but that's the price they originally wanted to charge per song on iTunes.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I think it's time to find the houses of the RIAA executives, hack their wireless, and share from them. Capture the data and send it to the RIAA and say "Hey, please sue them."
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
I bet all 12 were selected by answering Yes to the question "Do you think stealing music is illegal?"
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
I don't know. I slightly agree that it's "high", but I also can't really argue that it's appropiate.
$20 a CD. How many times were the files downloaded? That adds up pretty quickly. I can see that hitting hundreds of thousands pretty easily if you leave Kazaa running 24/7.
Of course you can argue till you're blue in the face that nobody would have bought the music anyways. Which is not really the point. The company placed a selling price on it. Somebody distributed it without paying the price N times. N * sales price.
It would be sort of like arguing that just because you stole something doesn't mean you're liable to replace the seller with the selling price or give the item back. You can argue there that nobody would have bought it either, but it's not very relevent.
To me it seems pretty obvious. Giving away music is copyright infringement. Don't do it and get caught. And if you do get caught doing it in massively high volumes, expect to get fucked.
$9000 a song?! Makin' a list; checkin' it twice. Gonna send some random motherfuckers to hell. Please reply with suggestions.
Prosecution:
...her user name, IP address, Modem MAC address, pass-word-protected computer, and the songs in the shared folder matched her musical tastes.
...Thomas replaced the hard drive in her computer two weeks after an investigation. Defendant:Tried to get the RIAA president to testify, who has nothing to do with the facts of the case.
...There could have been a computer party at Thomas's home or someone could have been outside her window with a laptop.
...suggested that computer hacking or IP spoofing could as explanations. The RIAA had facts, and the defendant had excuses. I know everyone wants to defend the little guy, but please pick a better case than this one to represent the people. The only thing I see odd here is the fines. THAT is ridiculous.What if someone wrote a virus that downloaded a random number of songs? Then if songs were found on my PC, and the virus was on my PC, would that create reasonable doubt?
This is what you get when you have a jury of "your peers" - something that in the United States means "people not smart enough to get out of jury duty", "people who are ok with getting paid $8 a day, while parking at the courthouse costs $17 and isn't covered" and "people who weren't excluded by either side's lawyers for showing a hint of intellect"
The lack of intelligence in your average juror has turned the legal system into a joke, which allows for rulings like this to happen. Stroll out some "expert witnesses", dazzle the morons in the jury box with some bullshit (and do it better than the other guy) and you have yourself a win, regardless of the actual facts of the case.
And then there is the $220,000 in "damages"...
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
As the RIAA lawyer stated. I agree. A few generations ago people quite happily made their own, and played it for the enjoyment of their family and friends. If you believe, as I do, that music is an essential part of what it means to be human I strongly encourage you to get out and make some. Give it away. Invite your friends to listen. Bring your instruments to Slashdot parties. Whatever it takes. Just don't *buy* any from the current music cartels.
Boycott the record companies into extinction.
Somewhere along the line people who are capable of being artists (i.e. each of us) were reduced to being "consumers". It's time we stop just accepting this as a matter of course.
Because they decided her acts were willful, the range went up to $150,000. They went with a figure on the very low end of the range -- bottom 6% -- so it clearly could have been worse for her. I'm sure the RIAA isn't crying, but they'd have much rather seen a seven figure award for the sheer shock value the headlines would get.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I'm amazed. The jurors have set a precedent - even though quite a few people "share" music, they are willing to convict another person of "copyright infringement." Do the jurors realize that this ruling opens up the door for additional lawsuits against, potentially, them?
I on the other hand feel sorry for people that do not know how to secure their internet connection and open themselves up to people that feel all data should be free no matter how you acquire it.
our gov couldn't even secure its own computers against chinese hackers.
you expect any better from some average citizen?
(uhm, what world do you live in?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Even if you ignore the incompetence of the extortionists, no one in their right mind thinks a $220,000.00 judgment is fitting punishment for sharing a few songs. Extremism of this kind will eliminate public libraries and have anti-social consequences the most far sighted can not imagine. The defendant has been made a homeless slave to some of the world's biggest companies, and so have we all.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Probably they decided to ruin someone's life for a 24 thousand dollars bribe to each member and some kind of immunity for their sons, should they be caught stealing music and sharing terrorism. This level of dangerous stupidity in a jury can be achieved only through malice and corruption.
Sorry, you're the idiot if you think she deserved what she got? RTFA. The security of her connection wasn't the issue. She did it. Even so, don't you think $220k is just a wee bit over the top?
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Needs to mod this post up. This is a very good point.
So was she seeding or did she originate the tracking file?
Don't do the CRIME if you can't pay the FINE !!
Don't do it !!
Sammy says so !!
> How many times were the files downloaded? .iso's and such these days). Anywho, my point is - what if you never, ever uploaded any songs? Would they still peg you with this crazy rate?
That's one thing I've been curious about in all this. I haven't shared files illegally in many, many years (since before the fall of Napster), but back when I did, I know that I typically logged on, grabbed what I wanted while canceling all attempted uploads, and then logged off. (In all fairness, tho, I do give back 200% at least when I torrent linux
Unpleasantries.
We can sit around in forums, yapping non-stop about how horrid the RIAA is, or we can really begin to take the fight to them. I think it's time we do that. Let's do everything we possibly can to tarnish their reputation. Sadly, despite treating consumers like crap, a lot of music fans still follow them around like puppy dogs. A good starting point is to target Youtube. Universal Music Group has an account they use to post videos of their artists. These music videos can be rated. Comments can be left for them. Let's all go there and give them the lowest rating possible. Let's fill the comments section with relevant information about the unethical tactics groups like the UMG are using against consumers. If they play dirty, it seems MORE than fair that we RETURN THE FAVOR. Why should we respond to them with kid gloves? They certainly wouldn't do that for us.
So if I steal your computer or your cannabis, and then "share" them with my friends, would you still object?
Sharing is caring, right?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
This jury of 12 idiots decided to ruin someone's life for 24 songs. Great going, guys.
Remember that one of the purposes of juries is to override corrupt government and bad laws. The defendant was guilty technically but morally innocent. Juries deliberate in private for just this reason - they can agree to return a not guilty verdict when the law outrages them. The law exists to reflect the community's sense of outrage at misconduct. When conduct does not elicit outrage, juries need to be brave enough to do what's right.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Heck, our government can't even secure its machines from itself.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
The verdict hit me by surprise too. I thought for sure the jury would be sympathetic, or at least let her off with a lesser fine. But then I realized that there was a jury involved in the O.J. trial too....
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
What I wonder is, if she or her ISP had some kind of logger that magically recorded how much of what was uploaded and it was found that only, say, 3 songs had been uploaded to other people, would the fine still have been the same?
Did the guilty verdict and subsequent fine even require that some songs were uploaded? It seems like it, but the proof isn't there:
The lawsuit, brought by the RIAA... claimed that Thomas distributed 1,702 digital audio files - many of them the plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings - from the KaZaA shared folder on her computer to potentially millions of other KaZaA users for free.
It's crazy to think that a trial can come to a decision and fine based on what could possibly have happened.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Don't share a few songs online, instead share ten of thousands in person. The result will be million of computers with libraries containing nearly every song. Greed ony works in the short term.
For some reason I see those jurors as characters from "Idiocracy". I simply can't imagine them being normal human beings.
Tra-la-fucking-la.
The "victory" is mixed much like my feelings... downloading the songs illegally was wrong. I find no moral standing there. Yet, at the same time, the ridiculous approach the RIAA is taking in these cases - and this equally ridiculous reward - leave me unwilling to condemn the defendant.
Oh well. I've bought one RIAA-backed album in four years, and that was a mistake. RIAA Rader. Learn it. Love it. Tell the RIAA they can go fuck themselves with various sharp objects.
Talk to me about WoW and I'll punch your faggot face.
It would be sort of like arguing that just because you stole something doesn't mean you're liable to replace the seller with the selling price or give the item back. You can argue there that nobody would have bought it either, but it's not very relevent. I know you're not actually equating the two things, but since some people do that, it is usually worth repeating the fundamental difference between the two cases...
With the physical stealing, since the quantity of the item is limited, the seller has actually lost the value he could have obtaining by selling the item to someone else. With the digital copying, the copyright owner has no actual loss from someone getting an unauthorized copy if they wouldn't have paid for an authorized one.
I hate to talk like this in a public forum. But the RIAA has reached the point where we should consider the possibility that if the legal system can't or won't deliver any reasonable form of justice, then an alternative approach should be considered.
Let us consider a fictional character's probable response to an attempt by a bunch of entertainment lawyers to extort $250000 from him. Let us consider that his probable response is a reasonable and prudent response that any one of us should consider should we find ourselves in a similar situation.
We are trained from birth to be civilized people and not to respond to extortion in uncivilized ways. But with the complete and total failure of the legal system, it appears that the time has come to reconsider what a reasonable, prudent, and civilized response should be when faced with a lifetime of crushing debt over the trivial and even arguablely non-existent 'offence' of listening to music in a manner that is not approved by the giant monopolistic corporations who claim to own the world's music.
If we are called upon to judge a person who has chosen to respond to a legal extortion through means that are not permitted within the legal framework, let us judge that whatever action that this person has taken in response to this legal extortion was justified under the circumstances. And that person is innocent of any actions taken which might be considered punishable were they done to without the provocation.
I'm quite serious about this. Cruel actions instigated by cruel organizations against randomly selected ordinary people justify cruel responses against such organizations and their representatives.
This is the way that the world works.
"Because they decided her acts were willful, the range went up to $150,000."
Willful as opposed to what? You can be found guilty for accidental?
After all, they acquitted OJ.
But, I guess her peers decided she's a quarter million dollar threat, even if it was her neighbor using her wireless connection to do it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Anyone who uses TOR for file sharing is either maliciously or negligently engaged in the destruction of the network. TOR cannot handle file-sharing loads. The most that TOR can handle is control communications (like tracker communications in BitTorrent). If you actually start passing data transmissions through it, you'll kill its usability.
You're better off using a P2P program that's designed to hide your activity than slapping TOR over one that isn't designed for it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Fuck Capitalism!
220k ought to be enough for anybody.
Did they prove anyone actually downloaded any of those files?
Or was infringement proven just because they were sitting there on an open computer?
Say I stole a painting of your great grandmother (valuable to you, street value $25 for the frame). In my defense, I think it kinda resembles my great-grandmother which is why I took it. You sue me in small-claims and I lose. I would compensate you by either A) returning the painting or B) giving you some money to make up for the lost value (in the range of $20) or possibly both.
A penalty equivalent to the crime. Pretty simple and something we can all agree on.
But how does that apply that to this case? There was no loss of property or the utility of the property. So, while she is guilty of copyright infringement, her penalty under something that would resemble common-law would be "delete the music from your computer and stop doing it!" No financial liability since their was no financial loss to the record company.
However, in the United States of RIAA, the question of what losses the record company incurred is irrelevant. She violated copyright on a handful of lousy songs, her penalty is to pay $200,000?! How is that equitable?
This would be like if I took a picture of the painting of your great grandmother and used it on a flier for my garage sale and you sued me for a million dollars.
It shouldn't be the law. It's in contradiction with hundreds of years of jurisprudence in this county. It doesn't make any sense and yet, it is the law. And you and many others just shrug and say, "that's the it is and the way it shall always be". Lord I hope you are wrong.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
This smells of corruption. The RIAA probably threatened to give each jury member 100 copies of the latest Britney CD.
1. Juries generally take the damages amount suggested by the plaintiff in a civil trial. Most people have no idea how much a random tort is really worth and just take their word for it.
2. Juries in America are specifically picked to exclude anyone in the slightest bit knowledgeable about the activity in question (to avoid both bias and to avoid questioning the testimony of expert witnesses due to -- right or wrong -- assumption about the dispute in question), and they are picked to avoid people who have done similar crimes in the past (again for bias reasons).
Pretty much the only people in America who haven't downloaded a song illegally are people who thing it's inherently immoral or unethical. These people would not be sympathetic to the defendant.
Now we get to see where this goes on appeal.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, you'd have to go read the jury instructions. There were two levels: non-willful: 750-30k. If it was willful, then up to 150k. Both willful and non-wilfull are "per song".
verdict form: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/riaa_verdict_form.pdf
instructions: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/jury_instructions.pdf
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If you think this is correct then the RIAA and labels are just as guilty of the exact same offense. If it's ever played on a radio there just as guilty as her. Spreading copyrighted work to the masses. Could be copied and uploaded to some other device. Throw em in jail. The USA has some goofed up law down there if this stands. Don't feed the fools. Stop buying music in protest ! The software sold her out by having a shared folder that she stored her music in probably not realizing it was a shared to web folder. Seen it before many times. People don't understand how that software works. They store all there music in one place.
Even if it stands good luck collecting...
I'm sure it will be appealed. This is insane if it stands.
The law allows for a much higher award per song for willful violation. The $9k was well below the midpoint. Compensatory damages replace the actual damages and punative damages are meant to punish the violator.
I think that juries hate to be lied to. She clearly came across as a liar. I suspect there had to be a better defense. Such as admitting to downloading a few songs but not understanding that her music would be uploaded.
uhhh this was a jury case. in fact 12 people, approved by both parties, in their right mind, agreed unanimously on the amount.
One third of the jury admitted to being illiterate, but if i were them, hearing over and over how this costs them billions a year, i might pity them too. Only having studied them do they seem so evil, to the average joe they seem like a charity case
Unless you are using a one-time-pad to communicate with your router, your connection to your router (which you confused with the Internet), is not 100% secure. By your definition, you are an idiot.
What's the difference in your analogy? So she's making and distributing CD's instead of stealing them, that still basically constitutes a loss of value of one CD per distributed CD - what the original poster was inferring. You'd have to distribute a lot of CD's to get up to $9250 per song. The original comparison was fine.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, Jury Nullification should apply to civil cases, and if ever there were a case where that right should be invoked, it was this one. Given how much slashdot typically collectively whines about the unfairness of the copyright system, it's unfortunate the jurors in this case blindly followed the instruction to judge "on the law", and not on conscience - namely that regardless of the law, ruining a person's life over 24 songs is unjust.
In case anyone's not up to speed on nullification, it's a legal argument that states that a jury can acquit the defended irrespective of the merits of the prosecution's case, if it feels the law under which that defended is being tried to be unfair. Lawyers, judges, politicians and pretty much everyone else except John Q. Public is vehemently against anyone ever being aware that nullification exists, that it is a vetted right of jurors in the US, and that this right has been defended in the Supreme Court. For more information, consult the source of all knowledge (Jury Nullification).
To paraphrase a lawyer-and-judge friend:
:(
When it's something the average man knows nothing about, you stand a better chance of convincing ONE ignorant person (the judge) to see sense, than you do of convincing TWELVE ignorant persons (the jury).
And as someone else once put it, your jury is comprised of 12 people too dim to weasel their way out of jury duty. From the jury-selection procedings I've watched, there's a good deal of truth in that.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The error you're making (the same one the RIAA makes, more deliberately and with malice aforethought) is assuming that N downloads corresponds directly to N lost sales. That's just not true, and I'm sure you know it. I have no idea what the actual ratio is, but I guarantee you that it's not one to one. Furthermore, there's simply no way to quantify exactly how much infringement occurred. Obviously an estimate was made, but the number was pulled out of someone's ass. You're also confusing theft with copyright infringement, but that topic has been beaten to death here on Slashdot, and I'm sure that someone will eventually make the difference clear to you.
... but it isn't just. I don't care how much you feel the copyright holder's interests need to be protected, but when all is said and done, are twenty-four MP3 files really worth what was done to this person?
In any event, this is a travesty of justice. The problem here, as I understand it, is that the statutory penalties for infringement were meant to deter large-scale piracy of copyrighted works, because the people who drafted those laws couldn't conceive of anything like a global network. The idea that a single individual could have the capability to make thousands of copies and distribute them worldwide never occurred them. Consequently, applying said laws to individuals is insane, destructive to society, and serves little purpose. They will tell that "Well, you see, it's for the deterrent effect. We have to have those big numbers to scare people away from copyright infringement." Now, I understand the principle: but given the terabytes worth of illegal downloads that occur in the U.S. alone each year, I'd say the law has failed in that regard, and failed miserably. Besides, this woman is already out her legal costs, and slapping a five or ten grand judgment on top of that would probably scare her away from ever using an Internet connection again. A quarter of a million dollars? Legal? Apparently so
I sincerely hope that your own ignorance of our laws trips you up in some way, puts you on the wrong end of the justice system. Not a quarter mil's worth: I don't wish you that much ill. Our legal system is so complex that everyone, everywhere, is already a criminal, to one degree or another. The only reason that this particular transgression is so noteworthy is that a number of powerful, obscenely-rich interests long ago had the law skewed heavily in their favor, and now they've chosen to use those tools to destroy individuals, not the pirates they were intended to be used against.
I guess I'm just saying that, if something like this happened to you, you might find yourself changing your tune.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Since you brought it up, yes, let's argue 'til we're blue in the face that every download does not equal sale. It doesn't, no ifs, and or buts. It's not even close.
I'm in no way saying that what she did was right, legally or morally. I am, however, saying that $9250 per song is freaking ridiculous.
Maybe a little perspective? You get a smaller fine for a DUI/DWI, which is a much larger bane on society than "stealing music." O-
It doesn't matter how you try to justify it, $9250 for 24 songs is blatantly idiotic and these jurists should be ashamed of themselves.
That said, I sincerely doubt the RIAA will ever see a penny of it. You know she's going to file Bankruptcy (Ch 7, IIRC, the one where you don't have a re-payment plan, because no way is she going to pay TWO-HUNDRED TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS back in 20 years, let alone the ~5 a Ch 13 is for.).
I know in white collar criminal cases where there's a bunch of boring accounting stuff to go through juries are more likely to just think "Well surely the prosecution knows what they are talking about and understands all this." so I'd have to disagree about juries getting it right in general.
... as soon as the judge backtracked this morning and ruled that "making available" was adequate evidence to demonstrate a violation of the copyright holder's rights. From Ars:
"Instruction no. 14 proved to be a sticking point, as Thomas' counsel Brian Toder told Ars tonight that the judge's proposed instruction indicated that the plaintiffs must show that an actual transfer took place in order for there to be a finding of infringement. "
Later, the judge reversed his opinion, at which point I knew this was over, but was at least still hopeful that the damages would be somewhat reasonable.
According to the coverage at Ars, it was pretty clear that the RIAA had found the right person; they had used this same account name for an email address that a witness had verified was hers. The only remaining question in my mind was how well the making available argument would hold up before a jury. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the defense didn't focus any attention on this critical part of the prosecution's argument (until the 11th hour when the judge was deciding what instructions to give the jury for deliberations). Had the defense been pounding the drum of "making available is not provable infringement" instead of "let me show you how fast you can rip a CD", then this jury (and perhaps even the judge with respect to the jury instructions) may have been compelled to decide differently.
In any event, it is what it is. The RIAA set their desired precedent, but for me there are still a couple of lingering questions:
1. Is this really a good thing for the RIAA? I mean, we've heard about the lawsuit threats against dead people, grandmas, and kids, but now there is an actual verdict in a jury trial that pins a $220K judgment against a single mother. I have this feeling that this case is going to make much greater waves in the main stream media then the no-go lawsuit threats (dismissed with/without prejudice) or the tens of thousands of settlement cases. Because of this I also think there is a huge potential for blowback on a large scale, not just in the geek circles.
2. Does the judge have any discretion to lower the damages? It seems as though he's given the defense every opportunity to succeed, from the "this courtroom is not your soap box" comments to the RIAA, to initially requiring evidence of a file transfer actually taking place in the jury instructions. If he does have discretion, I would be surprised if he didn't use it.
All in all, this is a sad situation. Single mother, probably with little to no idea what she was doing, targeted by the RIAA, then levied with enough fines to ruin her life. The RIAA, a lawsuit happy organization continuing to rob artists, consumers, and own our government, are having a champagne toast tonight thanks to their victory in court today. Enjoy your victory, and as far as "setting a precedent," you should be careful what you wish for.
Good point. Of course, in order to do what's right, you need to pretend to be unaware of the concept of jury nullification long enough to get on a jury, so that you can then take action to keep injustice from being done by the court.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Just an FYI. I believe Civil trials have 6 member juries in most cases. If I think with the exception of cases involving curtilage and eminent domain.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
"This is what can happen if you don't settle," RIAA attorney Richard Gabriel told reporters outside the courthouse.
Notice how they throw in an impassioned plea to roll over and take it? This court case is nothing about justice - it's an extension to their protection racket. (quote from here)
When, oh when, will somebody step in and nail these guys with a RICO suit?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
From TFA:
Excuse me??? I have done this. I have successfully spoofed IP address several times. It's easy in many cases. This so called expert is most certainly no expert at all.
There are some other things that sure make it look like she might be guilty. But this (trying to downplay the real possibility of IP spoofing), is not one of them. Time for an investigation at ISU.
It is too bad that the jury did not get to hear the truth in this case. I don't know who all might be lying. But I definitely know at least one person who either lied about the technology or lied about his qualifications.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Generally speaking, state & local trial court verdicts are not considered binding in any jurisdiction -- only appeals court verdicts. Most states don't even publish lower court opinions -- NY, OH, & CT are the exceptions AFAIK, and they only publish a handful of lower court opinions issued each year.
Precedent will not be set until this goes to an appeals court. They may well try it, but the evidence doesn't look so good. Their only solid grounds for appeal in my opinion is over whether or not the replacement of the hard drive counts as an attempt to misplace evidence.
No, the case looks solid based on the (admittedly one-sided) write up, and it looks like the defendant doesn't have enough money to appeal.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't know. I slightly agree that it's "high", but I also can't really argue that it's appropiate.
Let me tell you a story...
A photographer I know submitted a number of photos to a publishing company for potential use in a book. His picture was used. He was never contacted. He was never paid.
He discovered this completely by accident a few months after the book had been published and contacted them. They first claimed he didn't have rights to the picture. The copyright office disagreed (he registered the photo months before).
When they finally "accepted" that he owned the image, they offered $500 to settle.
When he sent them a letter saying $500 was insufficient, they told him to take the $500 or fuck off - or, in their own words
"In fact, if you continue with this unsupported demand for payments which are due to you, you will never be able to do business with [redacted] again." (this is after they received a copy of the registration)
and
"We will simply refuse to communicate with you on this matter any further."
When (very) large publishing companies offers "$500 or fuck off" for illegal, commercial use of a picture, yes, $220,000 for distribution of 24 songs is actually rather high and inappropriate.
And even though the photo was registered with the copyright office, not a single lawyer was willing to speak with him. He has contacted literally dozens of lawyers, none of whom are willing to take the case on without him putting a heck of a lot of money up front.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Yes, because in this case the instructions to the jury were to have the plaintiff(various members of the RIAA) prove that the files were "made available" rather than prove that actual downloads had occurred. Here is the article on the jury instrctions
This is a public announcement. From now on, i will NOT buy ANY original movie or piece of music EVER.
Now sue me.
Of course according to the article this said a 12 member jury. So WTF do I know.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I'm totally going to shoplift or buy stolen CDs next time I want to listen to a song, seems less risky. This copyright bullshit is just out of touch with reality. Big brother is watching, but he is not the government, he is the media cartels.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
All trials are about what might have happened. It's all about the degree of certainty.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
$20 a CD. How many times were the files downloaded?
Doesn't matter.
Statutory damages are computed based on the number of works infringed, not the number of infringements.
That is, if you make one copy of a book or a million copies of the same book, the maximum possible statutory damages would be $150,000. But if you make one copy of a different book as well, then the maximum is $300,000 (i.e. 2 x $150,000).
The real issue, which apparently didn't come up much here, is whether serving files is in fact distribution, or something else, and whether it has to actually occur, or if merely making it possible without it actually occurring is sufficient. So I suppose there is some dispute as to whether zero downloads should count. Anything more, though, there's no argument.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Realizing that war had been declared on me, I decided on my response. I would never again buy one of their products as long as I live. NEVER. That was years ago, I still haven't, and I never will.
I won. Their war against me is over, I won.
There's a larger war they're waging, of course, and it's important that we fight that one too... but each individual has had their own war declared against them, and each individual can win in the same way I did.
Incidentally, I just bought a new piano and am composing some of the best stuff I've ever done. I'm not doing without music.
This space available.
I keep hearing about this process and I don't understand why the bright people on /. don't get a clue.
The ONLY thing the morons at RIAA will ever understand is a cash flow interruption. But to make this work, everyone has to be in on it. No file sharing, turn it all off for one week, no music purchases of any kind, turn off the radios, don't listen to any form of recorded music.
It's not a hard thing to imagine. Maybe the better thing to do is to stop being a consumer and start being a creator. Get an instrument and make your own music!
Then you can give it away on KaZaa.
So if you get upset about what RIAA does to protect their cash flow, get off your butt and stop playing their game. Start playing a new game. Make your own music.
And quit whining about RIAA. There are bigger issues ahead beyond "I can't listen to what ever music I want. I must be entertained at all times."
Those willing to serve - those who want to serve - get to make the decisions - which in a democracy is as at it should be.
The jury is most likely to be middle class, middle aged, small-C conservatives, with a strong sense of civic obligation. The same men and women who take their right to vote seriously.
The successful trial attorney does not romanticize the jury. But neither does he bring into court the adolescent assumption, so prevalent on Slashdot, that he is dealing with a bunch of morons.
And then there is the $220,000 in "damages".
Damages in cases like these are usually framed in terms of some statutory or judicial formula.
The jury doesn't make the rules. It applies the rules.
Consider this: downloads from a service like iTunes have a generally recognized retail value of $1-$2 a track. Implying that the 2,000 tracks in your shared Kazaa folder are worth serious money. To the rights owners and their licensed - legitimate - distributors.
Yes. Copyright is a strict liability offense, like speeding, or statutory rape. If you don't realize you infringe, didn't mean to infringe, and could not have possibly done anything reasonable that would have prevented you from infringing or resulted in your knowing you'd infringe, it doesn't matter -- you still infringed.
This is known to be problematic for people on the Internet, since computers necessarily make copies (potentially infringing copies, according to the courts) in order to do any damn thing. But it's no so bad -- you'd only have to pay $250-750 per work in such a case, if the jury was quite sympathetic to you.
Perhaps this would be a good time to encourage you to support copyright reforms?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
That said, I sincerely doubt the RIAA will ever see a penny of it. You know she's going to file Bankruptcy (Ch 7, IIRC, the one where you don't have a re-payment plan, because no way is she going to pay TWO-HUNDRED TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS back in 20 years, let alone the ~5 a Ch 13 is for.).
... this isn't about a redress of grievances. It's about deterrence, about control, and I'm sure they're feeling like they just did one hell of a job justifying their salaries right now. On the other hand, whether this judgment will have any effect whatsoever the level of illegal downloading is another story. It might even make the problem worse: I know I'm feeling like grabbing a couple of tunes just for spite.
And you know what? I doubt they care even a little bit. See, and that's the thing
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe she is really back by the RIAA... Setup a case where they know they will win... take it to trial... scare everyone else... hmmmm....
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Ever ripped a CD? You might as well have.
The moral of the story? THE RIAA IS SCARED STUPID. She had 400 CDs at one point!!!!!!! They just sued the shit out of one of their best customers!
Fuck these people. Hey, I just 'stole' a CD. Yep, I got a perfect digital copy of the recording and the recording industry didn't get a DIME. Know what I did? I bought a USED CD! Roll up a hondo and snort that Sony.
So that's the moral of the story. BUY USED MUSIC. Hey, old vinyl is cheaper than iTunes and sounds better too. It's the best way to 'steal' from the music industry because it's 100% legal, and it robs them of a sale from a person WHO IS ACTUALLY WILLING TO PAY MONEY FOR THE MUSIC.
If you're a musician, record yourself, it's far easier than it ever was. Then sell your own stuff through iTunes or something if you want to get paid. You don't need these people unless you want them to pay for publicity or your recording (but they'll just take it out of your check anyways).
It sounds way better than mp3, it's cheaper, and best of all you'll be doing YOUR part to help kill the record industry!
You're better off using a P2P program that's designed to hide your activity than slapping TOR over one that isn't designed for it.
Such as?
Libraries can count on the doctrine of first sale. At the current time, they have nothing to worry about.
Let's phrase it a different way:
The Recording Industry now has very little reason to exist. It's pretty much time for them to either find new value to contribute, or go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers.
The recording industry used to have 5 major missions:
1: Provide studio and production facilities
2: Provide replication and distribution facilities for sales
3: Provide editorial control (quality improvement)
4: Provide distribution for airplay
5: Provide publicity/advertising
It's easy to argue that modern electronics and the internet have reduced the costs of #1 and #2 to the point where the recording industry has nothing terribly special to offer. The internet arguments could also be made about #5, that at the very least it's transformed. That leaves us with #3 and #4. With the quality of much current music, one could argue that they're falling down pretty badly on #4, though they should clearly be doing better, and it *is* an area where they can and should contribute. #5 remains.
Oddly enough, of course the face they present most is #2, one of the most clearly obsolete of their roles.
It's quite simple, the "recording industry" should be transformed, probably to a fraction of what it is, but still a contributory role.
Tell ya what, it ain't gonna happen. We're in an "ownership society," last I heard. For the relevant interpretation of that, "creation" of art/science/IP is no longer valued, the "ownership" of it is. In the fading days of manufacturing in the US, some very powerful people look to IP and licensing as our remaining/next engine of growth. With this attitude in mind, I look for strengthening of IP laws, and more legislation protecting the "rights of IP owners," not less. Note that that's "owners", not "creators." That squares with recent legislation, too. "Creators" seem to be treated kind of like dirt - to be mined, or crops, to be harvested.
IMHO this is a shortsighted attitude, if only because "IP ownership" is entirely a legal/financial fiction. Facts on the ground tend to overcome legal/financial fictions, given time. In the meantime, we deny reality and impair our ability to face it, eventually.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The practical reason is that by "making available", they can claim huge damages.
If you download a CD, they can claim damages of $18. Even if you pump that up, the liability is so small that it's not worth the letter.
And even though the photo was registered with the copyright office, not a single lawyer was willing to speak with him. He has contacted literally dozens of lawyers, none of whom are willing to take the case on without him putting a heck of a lot of money up front.
... but one-on-one ... yeah, "fuck you" is about their level. Hypocrites, all of them.
Lawyers have to look at the potential payoff (what are the chances of winning a lawsuit, and if they do win, will any award be worth the risk?) The fact he's been turned down repeatedly indicates that the publishers have all the guns, so much power than they can steal with impunity. And that's too bad, because it's just one more indication that copyright law only works for the big boys. They're absolutely terrified of us when it comes to what the Internet allows us to do
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Some enterprising insurance company should start pandering to parent's fears and begin offering RIAA lawsuit insurance. Since the insurance company would be vitally interested in reducing the cost of any claim, they could afford to provide competent representation for their clients in court. Since the odds of any particular file-sharer being sued are pretty low, I would imagine an insurance company could offer $250,000 of coverage for a very modest premium. The hassle and cost of going after any file-sharer with such insurance might be enough to deter RIAA litigation against those who are insured.
The owner has the right to sell--an exclusive right during the period. The owner is entitled to the sale price for each and every copy conveyed to a new person. By interfering with their exclusive proprietary right to sell, you are causing direct and concrete harm. Whether you "would have" paid for it is wholly unimportant. You can't apply the argument to any other rationale, so why should you here? "I wouldn't have purchased the Rolex, and Rolex can always make more and it's 99.9% profit anyway, so at most they lost 0.1% of the cost, so I will pay that much." Come on.
Having a potentially infinite supply and practically zero costs are not legally relevant to the commission of an illegal act.
The issue of "theft" is also a distraction at best--theft and stealing are not the same, nor are burglary and robbery or larceny and conversion. The semantic argument is wholly incomplete here, being simply and erroneously pedantic without resulting in any viable point. Copyright infringement absolutely is stealing. It's not theft. No matter how hard the Slashdot groupthink tries, this is a simple fact and not an issue anywhere but here.
100,000 full downloads * ~5mb (around size of most mp3's) == 500,000MB or 500GB.
I don't know what kind of pipe you have, but if your uploads were 1mb/s (very high for a home internet line) and 90% capacity (once again very high considering p2p overhead) you're still looking at (500000 * 8(bits)) == 4000000(mbits) * 1.11(overhead) == 4440000 seconds or
3083 DAYS of non-stop 100% pipe saturation seeding to come up with the numbers you're pulling out of your butt.
I can't say I read the rest of your post, but the top was great. Yes, if you leave your system running 100% upload for around 8 years, you'll hit that magic 100,000 songs uploaded and prove us all wrong!
Bye!
ASCAP.
They want money from anywhere that music is publicly performed, even if it's your own origional creations.
We (as Americans) need to bring the Jury Duty selection system under reform.
There are way too many people abusing a right that was given to them by lying about their stances and history within court.
I know I can weasel my way out of Jury Duty yet I feel compelled to perform my service truthfully because of the many individuals before me who fought for this right.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
> no one in their right mind thinks a $220,000.00 judgment is fitting punishment for sharing a few songs
It wasn't a few songs. According to the article it was "1,702 digital files." That's almost $130 per file.
you will never be able to do business with [redacted] again.
Why are you protecting these assholes? If your story is true, you have nothing to fear by smearing their name. Personally I'd like to know who these thieves are so that I can be sure never to buy one of their books.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Please tell me, troll, what does an organization like the RIAA actually contribute to the economy?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From the various things I read, her attorney questioned her for about three minutes. Add to this all the soon to be repeated evidence against her, plus the fact she put on no expert witnesses at all, and I have to wonder, why the heck did she go to trial with this dog of a case? Reportedly, she spent $60k on attorney fees.
I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, and it isn't very likely, but it is possible: perhaps this was all set up by the RIAA, so they could win a case at trial to encourage others to settle. It's not unheard of for a party who wants a precedent set a certain way to arrange for someone to act as defendant and put up a really weak defense. Behind the scenes, they could supply her with the money to pay the judgment, and perhaps some other kind of bonus. Like I said, it may not be the most probable explanation, but it would explain the really weak defense. Of course, if the lawyer is in on it, it is probably grounds for disbarment if it is ever discovered.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Sure it is. Read a link from the article - racketeering.
A quote:
Typically, this usage is based on the example of the "protection racket" and indicates that the speaker believes that the business is making money by selling a solution to a problem that it created (or that it intentionally allows to continue to exist), specifically so that continuous purchases of the solution are always needed. Example: in a protection racket, a representative from the racket informs a storeowner that a fee of X dollars will be required every month for protection money, though the "protection" that is provided comes in the form of the racket itself not causing damage to the store or its employees.
Threatening people with lawsuits and then offering them a chance to pay to avoid "what might happen to you" - is racketeering. It's also extortion:
Extortion or outwresting is a criminal offense, which occurs when a person either obtains money, property or services from another through coercion or intimidation or threatens one with physical or reputational harm unless they are paid money or property.
The RICO act seeks to prevent people from using these tactics to make money. And threatening people with lawsuits and offering them a chance to pay protection money rather than go to court (and have to pay even more for a lawyer to properly defend themselves) is a protection racket.
It's really that simple.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Boycott the RIAA. It's easy to do. Just check the RIAA Radar before purchasing any music. Encourage your friends to do the same.
This woman's lawyer needs to be disbarred. He called no defense witnesses and rested the entire case on "well, it could have happened this other way".
...electrolytes are what plants crave!
Don't worry, this will win on appeal. When the technical details come out, the truth will prevail.
This case hardly had any time to delve into the details of how it isn't possible to determine exactly who "made the files available" using the methodology the RIAA's "expert" uses.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The moral of this story is simply to make sure you take the RIAA to court every single time then if you lose just sell your assets for cash conversion before filing for bankruptcy. Instead of them getting 10k from you they spend 30k to get nothing from you. With 200k plus in bills with no on paper capitol and limited income its very easy. Wait 3 months, take a silly class, and show up to court a few times drive around a small old car for a while is really all you need to do.
When they are this stupid???
Were I on that jury (and I've served on several juries, so I know what its like), and the prosecution presented me with that evidence (and yes, I did RTFA), I'd vote in favor of the plaintiff also. Slashdotters can split hairs on the technicalities all they want, but especially when you toss in that she changed out her hard drive two weeks after notification, yep, she did it.
The reason the fines were so high is because she had piss-poor legal representation. In fact, had she had intelligent representation, and assuming that representation knew what evidence was going to be presented (IP addresses, user names, etc etc), he should have advised her to settle.
If you can't pay the fine, don't do the crime.
And if you still insist on doing it, at least get an intelligent lawyer when you get caught.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
And that is why you fail.
Juries draw on the ordinary people who are willing to take on a job that makes significant demands and offers few obvious rewards - which may help to explain why they do not share the geek's sense of entitlement to the work of others.
Is this jury paid off?
stop stealing music bitches. fucking pay for it like everyone else or get your ass beat. this woman ruined her life by being a fucking thief. i hope she's disgraced in her community like the fucking leech on the ass of society that she is.
Morally innocent? I disagree.
The laws have changed quite a bit. Unless you pretty rich, you can't just walk away from your debt anymore like you used to...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What about you?
Soooo... They extract a $200,000 fine from the victim. How much did it cost them, in lawyer's fees, to get that? I bet they are losing money. Maybe if everyone fought them, they'd go bankrupt.
Join the window installer's union, where prosperity is a brick throw away!
The incompetents took their case to a jury and won.
If you've got something to say, controversial or not. Have the audacity to represent what you believe in. They should have charged her $1.50 a song times the amount of people who allegedly downloaded the song... Sounds like a fair punishment to me. For those of you who think that's just, remember that pen you stole from work or school? or that pencil, the RIAA is going to get you, put you in court and charge you $9,000 dollars per infringement. No matter how many pieces of paper you wrote on, sorry, should have bought your own pencil.
I'm sure we all can agree this is bad, but can we keep the dramatics down please?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Because they're just going to make their money on lawsuits instead? Lawyers aren't like musicians, they aren't going to get stars in their eyes and let the record companies rip them off- they expect to get P-A-I-D. High priced corporate lawyers trying to squeeze blood out of a few radishes is a scare tactic, it belongs in the advertising budget.
So that makes no sense. If you can really hit them in their bottom line by doing something everyone agrees is OK, then they have to take it and like it or do something really dumb like going after the secondary market.
But here's how you REALLY hurt the record companies... There are already places where you can take your album, sell it on itunes, and keep 100% of the royalties. That will fucking kill the record industry as long as these places:
.1. Make the product high quality (nice bitrate) and more convenient than piracy (super fast downloads, instant previews, incredible selection- so no waiting or hunting everywhere, and still no DRM)
.2. Charge a reasonable price that makes people feel like they got their moneys worth, especially compared to the hassle of stealing.
So you only need to make piracy inconvenient and charge based on the much, much lower costs of distribution rather than trying to keep it all.
If this exists, artists keep their work and their royalties and even if half their songs get stolen it's good advertising and they will still come out FAR ahead of the pennies-per-dollar contracts the majors sign people to (if they sign them at all).
In this case, that has to be unconstitutionally high of an award for the offense. They can appeal it, but unless there is a good technicality to appeal the odds are probably not good.
It wouldn't be too unusual for the amount to come down as awards are sometimes in excess of limitations, and it strikes me that this one should represent a violation of the 8th amendment, as pretty much any reasonable person would regard this as being an excessive fine. But it won't be overturned, as the judiciary lately is pretty adamant in the proposition that everybody has huge bags of cash sitting around.
It is very simple...boycott.
Don't buy music. Don't buy movies. Don't download music or visit streaming sites. Don't go to the movies. Don't watch TV or listen to the radio. Just drop all commercial content.
If you need a content fix, buy music directly from unsigned artists. Go to concerts. See local bands. Go to a live theater.
I
I create artwork using cat litter and the various objects naturally found in it. I believe this is the highest expression of modern artwork and the world is suffering from not being able to behold in large public forums the beauty of my creations.
I believe any reasonable government would support me in the lifestyle that I require in order to achieve the relaxed, stress-free state that is required to create my artwork. The beauty of these creations would certainly justify several million a year in support in order to ensure that these creations continue to flow from my creative hands.
Please write your local government officials about this so that I can be releived of my tedious day job so that these magnificent creations can flow from my talented hands
Point made?
I've always believed, naively perhaps, that juries usually got it right. How freaking brain-dead do these people have to be? $220K for 24 songs? That's $9250 per song! That's substantially more than what the RIAA was claiming they lost on each instance (unless I mis-remembered?).
It's statutory. The jury was told what the law mandates regarding damages, and they followed the law. And I can guarantee a good percentage of the people here complaining about the jury and/or justice system have also complained about "activist judges" who don't follow laws they don't like.
This jury of 12 idiots decided to ruin someone's life for 24 songs. Great going, guys.
Her life isn't "ruined". She'll have a large judgment against her. She might get her wages garnished but that's pretty much it.
Something I've never seen discussed here before, but have always wondered is what exactly constitutes an infringement? Twenty-four songs sounds like it's about two albums to me. Let's consider the following cases:
2 albums = 2 infringements
2 albums x 12 songs each = 24 infringements
2 albums x 12 songs each, with each album encoded as one single mp3 = 2 infringements?
2 hours worth of music / 31 seconds (just outside the scope of fair use) = 233 infringements?
1 two-hour movie = 1 infringement?
1 RAR of 100 albums, or 1200 songs = 1 infringement? or 100? or 1200?
1 continuous download session of 24 songs, or a habitual pattern of download one song each session over a long period of time? 1 or 24 infringements?
This seems to me like it's WIDE open for interpretation however the prosecuting lawyers feel like it. I'm not aware of any letter of the law or precedent (besides this case) where this is laid out. Does anybody know of any? I'm honestly curious.
If you ask me, a potential fine of $3.6m (24x$150,000) for something a ten-year-old might do when he's bored on a rainy day seems HORRIBLY excessive, and I think it's important that the media companies aren't allowed to skew the numbers in their favor by using whatever definition they like.
Agreed - And the GREED is the issue. Let's all stop buying music at the box stores! There is plenty of free music on the internet. Oh, wait...
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Ok, so the average slashdotter should be fined for say around 2 million dollar and the slightly more elite ones for say 0.5 billion dollar instead? ;D
Boy, this trial sure was fast tracked. I'm sure it would have come out very differently if the jury's technical knowledge of computers didn't stop at the 'start' button on the task bar.
As for the court system, there IS NO JUSTICE for Jane and Joe average. Justice is bought by those with the deepest pockets, what chance did this woman really have against the enormous financial resources of the RIAA. Furthermore, where do they think this single mother is going to get nearly a quarter million dollars. I could care less if she shared music on the web, the RIAA just wants to blame all of it's fucking problems on 'file sharing'.
It would also be nice to know if 'Media Sentry' committed any kind of entrapment in a bid to just make an example of this woman.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
That woman had hundreds of music CDs at her house, she pirated two dozen songs and got charged more for each individual song than she paid for her entire CD collection. It's not the jury's decision itself that I have a problem with, it's the entirely ridiculous extent of the charges.
I bet they used the Chewbacca defense didn't they
Make SELinux enforcing again!
The court of appeal does not re-try the facts.
The court of appeal is not interested in facts. It is interested in process - how the judge and jury came to their decision.
The appellant must make a clear and convincing legal argument that the trial judge made a fatal error. In the admission of evidence. In his instructions to the jury. Something of that sort.
It protects the rights of people that made great (really great in some cases - some of the best things you will ever hear in your little life on this planet) music and their right to give up their "secure" job or their "free" time to make music that is good enough to actually replicate and disperse. If you want it, you should have to pay for it (like a blender or toaster or ...
Only upload music to parties who declare that they will not, under any circumstances, purchase said music.
The actual damages will then never differ from zero, and punative damages are no longer applicable (statutory or otherwise) since there is no cause for punishment.
And they rarely have anyone with any real knowledge or competence in the subjects discussed during the case, because those people are pointedly excluded from serving. Furthermore, the folks that are left are barred from directly asking questions of witnesses and have to rely on wherever those witnesses are taken by counsel, even if they're personally more qualified in the subject at hand than the expert witnesses provided by the parties. As a software engineer, I know it would drive me nuts as a juror to be presented with a computer-related expert witness (on either side) that obviously was trying to blow sunshine up the jury's skirt and not be able to ask questions to find out what the real story was. We won't get into the stuff like jury nullification and the sometimes ridiculous instructions the jury is given and expected to abide by.
I understand that the idea is to prevent bias and to provide the fairest possible trial for both participants in the case. However, I believe it results in a less-than-optimal jury, and the jury not getting the most and best information possible and being severely hamstrung in what they can do.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Just a symptom of the problem; the government. But that's what happens when a system is run "for the people, by the people". And jurors? A complete joke. These are the same people that are blindly patriotic enough to think that voting makes a difference and that coming to decisions based on their own complete lack of knowledge, education, and general information is a civic duty.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Libraries can count on the doctrine of first sale. At the current time, they have nothing to worry about.
Try that with a DVD, CD, or electronic journal. The Library of Congress is timidly thinking about "fair use" rights that will be technologically impossible to enjoy. Of course, the owners of "premium" content will make you chose between participation in your culture and software freedom in order to enforce their insanity. Would you share with your neighbors if it could cost you your house?
Richard Stallman tried to think of all the bad consequences of greed and restriction of knowledge. He predicted many policies that came to be but he remained an optimist because he did not fully explore the personality changes that kind of society can create. His characters remained brave and altruistic, much like people are today. To fully appreciate the corrosive effects of tyranny, you have to look at societies like East Germany, North Korea and the USSR. We know more about them now. The degree of distrust and self interested reporting that existed in East Germany is sickening. Yet, those societies had a small degree of information freedom that came from imperfect control technology and external societies that were free. The society being built by copyright warriors will be worse in many significant ways because technology has made perfect knowledge possible for the oppressors.
Freedom is a matter of principle that must be zealously guarded. The smallest infractions should cause outrage and be defeated. Each right lost makes it that much harder to get back any. A society where your phone can be tapped without a warrant, you can be put in jail without charges or trail, and you can lose your home for sharing a few songs with your friends and neighbors is a long way from free.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Was it that or 12 copyright violations? Does the number really matter? We are not talking about a commercial publishing operation - perversely enough, it might be safer to run one of those.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's not punishment. It's to compensate the plaintiff. The 8th Amendment has nothing to do with this.
Why does a musician need to make money hand-over-fist anyway? The whole modern model of producing and selling music is artificial and absurd anyway. I've gotten to where I never buy CDs anymore, and I never download music either. It's entertainment. You won't die without it. And, if organizations like RIAA weren't around, maybe there would be more regional differences in music again. You know. Culture. The thing that's missing today.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Yeah, and the MAFIAA's victims counted on the 8th Amendment... You think they won't go after first sale (with DRM, they've already started, in fact).
That's cute.
Can we get the names and addresses of the 12 assholes who think 24 songs are worth this obscene award. That's more than many can accumulate with a lifetime of labor. It is absolutely sick. This decadent society of morons really needs a shakeup.
I hope that at least the 12 fucksticks on the jury at some point become victims of the rapacious monster they just fed.
The artists of songs that where infringed should find a nice lawyer to make sure they get their cut.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
No, not under the 8th, but it may be a violation of due process under the 14th.
As I hinted upthread, this defense is being used in UMG v. Lindor. I was correct that Ray Beckerman (aka NewYorkCountryLawyer) is the counsel for the defense.
I am a gun owner, and if I don't take precautions against my firearms being used unlawfully, I could find myself liable. If my kid or friend takes my firearm and commits a crime, no judge or jury in a civil suit wants to hear that while it is my gun, what is done with it is of no business of mine.
So lets assume someone used her computer and account to commit piracy (is this awesome, yes/no?), she wouldn't be out of trouble.
A quarter of a million dollars from a working-class person, though? Yeah, that's crap.
THL phish sticks
We told you to be convincing.
You're fired.
-- RIAA Overlord I. M. Skumme
It's true that the defendant's guilt or innocence involves a degree of certainty that has to be judged. The assertion that they are the one who committed a crime is something that might be true. But usually the fact that a crime did actually happen, regardless of who did it, is a 100% certainty.
"Your Honor, we the jury aren't sure if the plaintiff's widgets were stolen from his warehouse, or if the plaintiff ever even had a warehouse full of widgets in the first place. But if he did have them, and if they were stolen, we are sure the defendant is the one who stole them. So we find the defendant guilty"
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Seriously, does nearly a quarter million dollar fine punishment fit the actual crime?
Or is this money not punative, but merely recouping RIAA financial losses?
Thats $9250 per song.
Does that mean that at $.99 per song on iTunes she supplied nearly 10,000 would be customers with free music?
Sure, and I challenge everyone on /. to jump up and down at the same time. We can cause an earthquake!
Boycotting is not "action." It simply makes those who practice it feel better about their perceived lack of power. One person, or even one website with its users making a personal choice, is not even a blip on the radar. It is really no better than whining.
If you want to do something about the injustices in the world, take real action. Spread the word beyond Slashdot; convince your friends and your artists. Get out of the bubble.
Wouldn't it be a huge statement if a band, say singed to Capitol Records, that doesn't agree with it's companies practices of suing its customers, stepped-up and offered to pay this (plus whatever it takes to cover the applicable taxes). It would be better still if it was a band that produced some of the music the defendant was found liable for sharing.
I buy a lot of CDs. I've also downloaded a few things but in no proportion to what I buy. This thing has left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time now. I was convinced that the courts would see these strong-arm tactics for what they were--extortion--and act accordingly. I really anticipated a fuilty verdict with damages set for something like $1 to send a message to the RIAA. This did not happen. Now I have to wonder how on earth I'm going to continue to aquire a good collection of classic jazz without sponsoring this cartel.
Jazz is an important art form that has been best documented and controlled by this cartel. With copyrights looking more and more like they will be extended to a holder for eternity this puts music historians in a bad situation when it comes to properly documenting 20th Century musical development.
This whole "making available" thing is a contested topic. To me, a non-lawyer, in order for copyright infringement to actually occur, someone has to take (download) a copy. To me, making available (uploading) is not infringement. If no one ever downloaded the copy, how much was the rights-holder damaged? If I leave my car in the mall parking lot with the door open and the key in the ignition, did that vehicle get stolen? No, not until some one takes the vehicle and attempts to operate it for their own use. If the a phone system plays music while you are on hold, is that phone system guilty of infringement by "making available"? How about the Star Spangled Banner being played before a high school ballgame. Is that "making available"? Is showing a movie in a theater "making available"?
... or only one second of silence? What if an office phone system somehow contained some silence (they all do), is that phone system guilty of infringement?. See where this leads? Under the "making available" theory I could be walking down the street making no sound and be guilty of infringing upon Ok Go's copyrights. The whole "making available" concept is fatally flawed and should never have been allowed in the jury instructions.
No? Then tell me what is the difference? With a high end cell phone I can record the Star Spangled Banner at the ball game. With a camcorder I can make a copy of a movie at the theater. Do you say that expectation has something to do with this? You mean the movie theater has no expectation that someone might try to use a camcorder to copy a film while everyone else is merely watching the movie? Why do they search people for camcorders then? I guess that some courts have fallen for the "this is how the system works" theory. In other words, if the song is available, it is certain to be downloaded so we don't need to waste our time proving that the "taking" part actually occurred. That is so wrong and here's why.
Collectively, we can't even agree on the topic of if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a noise.
Personally, I don't think that atmospheric waves caused by the movement of the tree constitute sound unless and until those waves bounce off of an eardrum and that signal is sent to the brain and then registered as something that we humans call sound. But that's just me. I think that the tree merely pushed some air around and "sound" is only created by the brain's perception of the air movement. Therefore I agree with the defendant and disagree with Mr. Gabriel and the Judge. I think infringement could have only occurred after someone actually downloaded the content and then listened to it. Similarly I don't think that marking digital ones and zeros as available to share on a computer equals someone's brain registering and understanding those digits as sound. At the point of "making available" the perception of sound has yet to occur. No listening has happened at the "making available" point. Infringement at this point, has yet to occur.
Does the infringement occur at a point after "making available" and is that infringement dependent upon other factors occurring? Yes, infringement is dependent upon some one else listening to the content in question and that action occurs later in the sequence of actions and is uncontrollable at the earlier point of "making available". So it follows that infringement is not a necessary or certain outcome of "making available".
The Ok Go cd titled "Oh No" has a 34 minute track called "9027 Km" that is silence. The story goes that the track is the sound of somebody's girlfriend sleeping. If I were to upload 34 minutes of silence to a file sharing network, would I be guilty of infringement by "making available"? What if I only uploaded 33 minutes of silence or only 32 or only 31
Now in this immediate case of Capital Records vs. Jammie Thomson, Mr. Gabriel, the RIAA attorney never claimed that anyone even downloaded the files that were "made available". All he ever claimed was that Thomson "made available" content and for that they win $220,000.00. Something is very, very wrong here.
The defendant needs to appeal this decision and find a better attorney.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
A verdict of $222,000.00, for infringement of 24 song files worth a total of $23.76?
In a case where there was zero evidence of the defendant having transferred any of those files?.
It is one of the most irrational things I have ever seen in my life in the law.
If the Judge doesn't set aside the verdict sua sponte, I expect there to be motion practice to set aside the verdict, based on its obvious unconstitutionality and numerous other reasons, and if that fails I expect there to be a successful appeal.
It is an outrage, and I hope it is a wakeup call to the world that we all need to start supporting the defendants in these cases, and the attorneys who are sacrificing so much to represent them. And the support cannot be with words, it must be with check books. And it cannot be next year, it must be now.
All the business people who make a living from the vibrancy, democracy, and freedom of expression which is the internet, need to get behind the RIAA's victims; if they do not, the world in which they hope to thrive and prosper will disappear rapidly.
The RIAA ghouls smelled blood in Duluth, and I guess they were right.
But it isn't over.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I mean who else could possibly get hurt buy killing off the media industries?
You seem to be missing the joke. Buying used CDs will not actually kill the record industry, any more than piracy will. But the record industry should and will eventually have to change, and it will ultimately benefit both consumers and musicians much more- but at the big boys' expense. This is because their primary role, putting physical discs on shelves, is no longer necessary. That's just how technology works, it changes things- but they want to blame something they think they have (some) control over.
When everyone has a huge hi-def screen connected to a ultra-high bandwidth connection, television companies and movie chains will no longer control distribution of content either. Everyone from Joe Schmoe to NBC will have their own spot on the dial. Movie theaters will have to get into the 21st century in a big hurry or they will be a thing of the past too.
The main thing that's happening is not piracy, that's a consequence of the technology but not the fundamental shift that these people most fear. They need to maintain their control of the distribution system far more than they need to contain piracy. Piracy can't get much worse in music and people are still making money. Piracy will always be a psuedo tax on any information industry but the real shift will be who makes the money.
You bash indie movies, music etc, but it's just a consequenece of lowering of the barriers to entry. The big boys can still play, and will still make whatever you're willing to pay for- they will just have much more competition. (That being said, big budget popcorn movies are definitely going to be an endangered species- mostly because video games will almost completely kill them. People will have to go back to telling stories.)
You complain, but you will love it. You're disrespecting indie music and movies because you have a preconceived view of them- you won't once more people like you start doing that stuff, and once technology makes creativity king once again. While high end equipment gets cheaper, better and more user friendly, people's ears and eyes will notice the high end less and less. When industries begin to mature, that's what happens.
So, now remind me... what part of musicians keeping more of their money and their rights is going to discourage them from producing good music again?
I thought it was the jury that decided the verdict but the judge decided the penalty. At least that's what the movies told me.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Sigh. I was so sure that the first file sharing case to go to trial would find in favor of the defendant, or the jury would award damages of one dollar. How could this have happened? Did the jurors not know about jury nullification? Did the judge make up the $222,000 number? What's going to happen to Thomas now? Is she going to have to make payments for the next 20 years? I blame the jury. Stupid podunk rednecks! Even if they were instructed to only determine the facts and not the level of punishment, they should have had two braincells to rub together to not trust the judge to give a fair number.
You could spend your entire life savings up to send your kid to college, and just like the children of music industry executives, your kid shares his music/movies with somebody. Given human nature, it is inevitable that every parent with a teenager will have to deal with a situation in which it has already happened. With arbitrary punishments for petty crime committed by your kid, you can't plan for the future because a small slip up by somebody that doesn't fully comprehend the consequences can sink you forever.
From this perspective, the RIAA, MPAA, and groups like them are threats to our kids' futures, and must be put out of business.
If professional musicianship becomes a lost art, then so be it. The music industry is a threat to more important things.
If high budget action movies become a thing of the past, then it won't be a loss for civilization.
It's all just entertainment, and the cost is too high now.
When your kid has done the inevitable, the price is so high, and there is so little mercy, that nobody can afford to be just honest and make amends.
The music industry would rather line up the heads of kids and their parents on pikes to make examples of wayward customers. Why does the music industry ever bother spending a dime on advertising when they do things like this? I got a survey from Arbitron with a dollar bill in it today, asking me to call in with my opinions; which is ironic because everyone in the music business is hurting so bad that they need to slap single mother file sharers with quarter million dollar fines to stay alive.
I used to spend a lot of time and money on music. I feel like I'm funding a terror campaign when I purchase something now.
You're only allowed to walk away from debt if you're "RICH"???
How does that work?
No sig today...
I have no doubt that this would is going to be hell on the defendant. We need video, showing just how much the RIAA has done to completely destroy the life of a human being. How about we hook that together with some pictures of the RIAA execs' fancy cars, and their lawyers' cars, houses, etc. How about some choice quotes from the above.
Get it made, and get it on youtube, facebook, myspace, and whatever else. Make it as "viral" as possible, and spread it around. End it with "this is what you pay for when you buy music from the RIAA (and follow with a list of RIAA member companies, as well a link to an info site." Start a donation campaign for this woman, and get the fucking word out about what these companies truly stand for. Maybe some choice clips from the MediaSentry correspondence. Make it truthful, but hard-hitting. Bitching on slashdot isn't enough. Maybe we won't buy RIAA music, but that's not enough. We're geeks, not lawyers, so do what we're best at and make use of technology. Spread the message, make people listen, and make people act.
The amount is high for the same reason that my local township has a $1,000 fine for littering and/or dumping in isolated areas: deterrence.
When the odds of getting caught are extremely low, the law tends to compensate by escalating the fine to the point where only an idiot would think that breaking that particular law is a good idea. In all probability you won't get caught... but if a cop just happens to be cruising by and you do, watch out.
Unfortunately, this is going to have to happen quite a few more times before all of the idiots who think they're entitled to free music/movies/software get the message that maybe, just maybe, that latest 50-cent download isn't worth the risk.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"The days of people blindly going out and buying CDs in the off chance that they might like the music are *long* gone.."
Yeah, it's not like you can preview songs on any music site, listen to them at a store, or hear them on the radio or TV or in a movie or in a concert or covered at the local bar. Or that there's, like, totally no reviews or comments or blogs or "if you liked X then try Y" referral systems or even--friends you can talk to. Yep, people today are COMPLETELY at the mercy of the labels, totally blind and helpless in their buying decisions, with no resources whatsoever.
I would "hazard a guess" that the vast majority of the stuff torrented or traded online is popular music people have already heard somewhere and simply want for their own. (Actually, I don't need to hazard a guess. Stat's already prove it.)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You realize the jury also directly set the amount of damages?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
That or it runs through the way the big cartels try to form the world instead (through bribery): Everything new gets crippled until it's worse than what came before.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
That's exactly what I meant, and that's why I called their lack intellectual capacity into light ;)
> Regardless of what you think, the entire basis for the rule of law is undermined by jury nullification.
Argument by definition. Great.
> Jurisprudence depends on the fact that the law is above all, fair and relatively predictable.
Emphasis added. (You're assuming all laws are fair if two branches of the government - or all three - say so.)
> If you break the law, you will be punished for doing so.
Even if you did so to save someone's life and are only being prosecuted to save someone political embarrassment.
> Juries are not supposed to go around deciding what laws exist, what they really mean, and how they mean it. That is the jobs for judges and the legislature.
You're right. Juries are supposed to serve justice. You tell me if it is justice to condemn a mentally disabled man to death. Is it justice just because one judge interprets the law loosely enough to allow it?
> Having annoyed citizens running around randomly nullifying cases because they feel like it undermines our entire justice system.
Strawman. Jury nullification has been around for 200+ years and there are no records of this happening. I think you will find jurors making 'random' decisions to be very rare. If nullification was happening frequently it would probably not be random and would probably be indicative of a schism between the law and popular notions of justice.
> Discretion is important, agreed; but this is why we have judges.
Indeed. Let's get rid of the juries, since we're not allowing independent thought.
> Jury nullification perverts not only the spirit of law, but the rule of it.
Except in your disturbed view the jurors are only supposed to pay attention to the letter of the law. How does jury nullification pervert the spirit of the law by acknowledging its existence? The rule of law without justice is fascism.
The full statutory damage limit is clearly unconstitutional, and had the jury awarded $millions in damages it would have been very easy to prove that on appeal. It might still be in this case, but it'll be somewhat more difficult than if they'd gone all out.
It's still a developing area of case law, but some recent Supreme Court precedents have frowned on damages that are in excess of a single-digit multiplier of the actual damage incurred. Since a music file has a value of approximately $1 on most sales sites, that would mean a reasonable damage award would be an estimate of the number of users who actually downloaded the file from her times $10 (or less). I.e. probably something like $100 per song at most.
Since the judicial system moves glacially this argument hasn't yet seen a court, though a few law professors have suggested it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The Supreme Court has held several times that monetary awards must have a reasonable relationship to the actual damages to pass constitutional muster. They look skeptically at anything with more than a single-digit multiplier over actual damages--i.e. 5x actual damages might be ok, but not 10x, much less 1000x, actual damages. This has been used several times to reduce large punitive damage awards as unconstitutional.
To my knowledge several law professors are of the opinion that this line of argument has a decent chance of success in copyright cases, but it hasn't yet been tried.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That or it runs through the way the big cartels try to form the world instead (through bribery): Everything new gets crippled until it's worse than what came before.
They can't stop the technology that is making this happen though, even if they wanted to! Information is information and the core technology has far too many uses for even an industry like big media to kill. Once people have the raw power to move the bits around it's so hard to stop. Either the media companies come up with DRM and people sidestep it, or people say 'screw you big media' and do things their own way- using the _same_ basic infrastructure!
For example, once people could move bits around the world for a flat rate, long distance service as we knew it was going to die. People just had to figure out how to move their voices instead of their data. MCI didn't get a veto. Once people get pissed off enough they can bypass traditional phone service all together. Either phone companies figure this out and set their expectations (and their prices) accordingly or they die.
1,700 songs is really a lousy share... she wouldn't be able to get on any decent DC hub with a share like that. Plus she used KazaA. These trials make it sound like listening to music is a crime.
You don't have to be able to pay back 100% of the debt in 5 yrs to be forced into a Ch 13. A Ch 13 basically takes most of your disposable income (income after allowed expenses) and gives it to your creditors for 5 years. What they get is what they get. If they get 1% then that's what they get. If they get 100% in 5 yrs or less then that's what they get.
That said, she won't be forced into a Ch 13 unless she makes above the median income for her state AND has over $100 of disposable income per month, and even at that, there are a bunch of priority debts (legal fees, secured loans like mortgages or cars, child support, student loans, etc) that will be first in line. It's likely, that even in a Ch 13 that RIAA never sees a dime.
Of course the point of these suits isn't to collect money. It's to scare people away from file sharing. Is it working? Probably not. Will they stop trying? Doubt it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm feeling like sharing a bunch of them from the office. When the subpoena arrives, I'll just tell them the truth. All of our PCs are behind NAT and we don't log TCP connections. So good luck proving which one of our 300 employees was sharing them on the personal computers that we allow them to plug into our internet connection. Sorry, wish I could help you more, I really do.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
File pro se. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and you'll spend hours on the internet or in the law library doing the required research, but I'll bet your ass that they come back with a higher offer then $500 the minute that summons arrives on their front door step. It's going to cost them more then $500 to have one of their lawyers even LOOK at the summons, let alone respond to it, file the required motions and show up in court. They'll drag it out for awhile trying to get your friend to cave, but you can bet your ass they will come back with a better offer before it even gets close to a courtroom.
And once he does all the legwork and has a pretty decent case it will be a lot easier to get a lawyer to take it on contingency if he decides to reject their settlement offers and stick it to them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Actually, the statutory rape law in my state has an affirmative defense if the defendant had a good faith reason to believe that the person was legal.
That is, if you fuck a 16 year old (17 is age of consent in NY) after you witnessed her at the bar ordering drinks, you have an affirmative defense to any prosecution of statutory rape. Any halfway reasonable person would assume she is 21 in that scenario.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
LOL
My advice would be: don't steal
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
time to move to Antigua methinks
Not just from this case, but from the whole parade of file-sharing stories:
(1)If you're going to illegally download music, be prepared, able and willing to pay the RIAA settlement should you get caught. Chances are that you won't, but the possibility is always there. (Much like speeding -- everyone does it, you will rarely be caught if you do, but don't bitch when you get nailed and have to pay the fine.)
(2)Likewise, don't use your home PC or work laptop, or connect in any way that is traceable to you as an individual user. Glom onto some free wi-fi connections somewhere to do your dirty deeds, don't use the same one twice, and buy cheap, used, non-state-of-the-art-but functional laptops and swap/discard them often.
(3)Don't keep any downloaded tracks on any computer you own. Put them on an iPod, store backups on a flash drive or portable HDD; in short don't use anything that can't be easily "lost" in a public trash can somewhere if need be.
(4)Above all, if you're caught, don't even think of fighting it in court. Your grandiose dreams of beating the system and fighting what you may feel is unjust, outdated, and conifscatory copyright law are just that -- dreams. Don't think that a judge or jury is going to see things "your way" -- they are there to uphold the law, not change it. Don't expect them to understand or sympathize with your arcane theories and arguments. You can stand on your beliefs and fight on principle, but only if you are willing to get slapped down ever harder when you lose (and you will). Remember what the great philosopher Zonker Harris once said about using pot: "It may be right, or it may be wrong, but it sure is illegal."
(5)Most of all, if you are not willing to take the risk, or go through all the above, then just do without. There is plenty of music around that will not land you in a courtroom. Buy used CDs when you can afford them. Swap tracks with friends offline (not nearly as traceable as downloading.) Do business with DRM-free music sites and discover very talented artists who simply don't have a "name" that you recognize -- you might just find some little-known nuggets of musical gold there. Go to live concerts of local bands. See if there are any local college or alternative radio stations that play something other than the usual mass market crapola. Or learn to play an instrument and make your own music, by yourself and with friends. There should be plenty of music to keep you entertained and occupied without having to grab every over-produced, over-hyped, under-talented piece of popular dreck around.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Let's be realists here - whatever you and I think about the ruling, there is NOT going to be some huge consumer embargo on buying RIAA-financing CDs.
The sheep for whom money comes far too easy will still be there buying their souless music as much as they ever were.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This result is proof that everyone needs to share more music. There aren't enough people clearly in violation of the retarded law yet that it sounds ridiculous enough to say that all people sharing music owe the RIAA $250k or more.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
the problem is promotion, anyone can put thier songs on the web and put up a paypal link to pay for them and get a code to download them. Anyone can get thier tunes added to iTunes for a reasonable fee. None of that helps if noone outside of a few locals who have seen you in a pub gig knows they want your music. You need to get a LOT of sales to get enough money to give up your day job and that means you need promotion on major radio stations.
The way for an artist to make big money in the music buisness is to sign on with a record company, take thier promotion and then stay popular for long enough to get out of the "abusive" initial contract. After that they can either break out on thier own or get a much better contract with a record label. It is the staying popular that is the difficult bit, one hit wonders will never reach that point.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Suppose you get caught stealing $10 in such a way that the odds of you getting caught were one in ten thousand. How large a fine do you think is enough to ensure that everyone doesn't steal because it is rational to do so?
The penalty has to be enough to make the harm irrational.
Do the RIAA own all the songs she had on her machine? Were any of them independant songs not from the RIAA?
Why 9000$ per song vs 1$ per song same as itunes?
Since you don't seem to understand Bankruptcy in the US I will explain a little.
The company (in this case the RIAA) cancels the debt. they fill out form 1099c and file it with the IRS.
They write off the canceled part as a loss. The IRS writes on the canceled part as income on your part.
you are now on the hook for income taxes for the canceled part of the debt. the IRS always gets theirs.
I am a believer in Jury nullification. In this case, nullifying the judges instructions.
First he ruled that making available did not amount to infringement, then at the last minute decided it was. The judges decision and his instructions was pivotal and perhaps the entire crux of the defense along with user identification.
The "system" gets pissed, especially judges (read ego), when all their years studying in college and dedication to their craft gets squashed by a laymen like me using common sense (read Jury nullification). Oh well... They want respect but when the "system", manufactures a product like this, they appear blind or at least dismissal to what it looks like to the outside world.
My lawyer friends my disagree with my opinion but they can't have it both ways. The system can't ask for my respect and at the same time expect me to swallow this Elephant.
-[d]-
Dey terka jerb!
Start nonchalantly placing little signs outside of all music/movie retailers denouncing the tactics of the RIAA/MPAA. I wonder if I could return all of the music albums/tapes/CD's and movies I've bought since 1975 and get a refund of all my money, depreciation taken into account of course. I think I should request the Bentley that a record exec's daughter is driving in compensation. Yep, Duluth really fucked the pooch on this one and the RIAA really sucked the schlong.
A step forward for people who purchase all of their digital media through LEGAL means, even as we watch our peers shamelessly steal them. Why should I have to pay and they shouldn't? (And before the completely obvious "well why don't you just steal too"- why should I have to lower my moral standards?)
to the jury that jury nullification is possible and accepted as valid under (these) circumstances.
Our ignorance of the law is no excuse, neither is the ignorance of the correct court procedures (getting them wrong can cost you the case). So Judges and solicitors avoiding this law's practice should be sacked and fined.
To highlight how ridiculously out of sync the punishment is with the crime.
imho ... greed has corrupted the justice system and destroyed science
afaic, that "professor' should be jailed
Be a leach.
You are only liable for the cost of the CD.
Not the $$$$ the record companies lose when
you share (e.g. DISTRIBUTE) music. That way,
if you download 24 songs you are liable for
about $24 not $220K. Better yet, just go to
your local library with your laptop and rip all
you want. No IP trail = no evidence.
I still cannot for the life of me understand why people have an issue with the RIAA, MPAA, YMCA, whatever. I haven't bought a CD in 15 years. Why? There hasn't been anything good put out in 15 years. Most of the music I listen to was written what... ummm. 110 years ago. I have Mike Oldfields' Songs from a Distant Earth. I think that was the last CD\Music item I purchased. I ripped all my CDs back about what 2 years ago, boxed up my CDs and store them at a rented storage facility (Paranoid about fires, lived through one once). They sit on a removable hard disk which is attached to my computer sitting next to my stero. I listen to them on the Stereo and I sync a playlist or 3 to my MP3 player. All of this is legal, why? I own the CDs and have made my backups. The key is I don't share my collection. I don't burn CDs for friends, I don't make a custom mixed CD and send it to 20 friends, etc. I'm too busy for that crap anyways. The key is DISTRIBUTION.
The problem that RIAA has is people distributing files across the Internet. This lady was guilty as hell (and stupid). Ordinary people, stitting on a jury, decided that she was in the wrong. She was busted distributing music.
They have never gone after someone who has just ripped their CDs, they are after people sharing them. Every case they have brought, every John Doe they have issued, has all been in relation to content being shared across the Internet. In fact, I don't recall any cases yet about people even downloading music, just sharing (or in many cases with P2P you end up automatically resharing what you download, Bittorrent's nature implies redistribution as you download as a result of the packet trades). If that were the case they'd be all over the IRC channels using old school direct transfers.
Why is this an issue? All the arguements, all the complaining, and all the irrelevant comparisons. The issue is trafficing of bootleg music. Not ripping your music to MP3, AACS, FLAC, OGG, APE, etc. The RIAA has never shook someone down for ripping "Blade Runner" (which the person owns) to their laptop for a flight or their HTPC. They go after people for Ripping "Blade Runner" then posting it to a P2P network. If you aren't distributing it on the Internet then they don't really have an issue.
I just don't get what the problem here is. As far as I've seen this is no different in nature then the last 30 years or from that matter last 130 years.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Everyone always seems to think that the RIAA/major labels are dumb as a box of rocks. I highly doubt that. They know the rug has been pulled out from under them and they'll have to change. I'll even go as far to say that they aren't fighting that fact that they have to change. All this legal and legislative shell game is about one thing: buying time.
These companies are very old and very large. With the speed at which Internet technologies have evolved, they've been forced to slalom with a battleship. The labels are trying to buy themselves time while they work to change the very core of their business. Don't confuse me for an apologist, but believing your competition to be stupid when their not is pretty dangerous. The RIAA aren't going to wake up one day and finally "get it"--they already got it. If you want to successfully challenge their dominance, the only thing you can do is to remain one step ahead of them. And be prepared for a very long dance because they have a lot of interia (and resources) behind them.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
So This woman has been hit for $222,000 dollars for 24 tracks
We need to know the names of these 24 tracks, this will allow the general public to demonstrate their appreciation of the artists in question.
by boycotting sales of these artists while under contract to capitol. Since it's Capitol which chose to initiate this prosecution unless the artist is willing to come out in support of this prosecution. there is no reason to boycott the artist once they are released from their contract.
of course the Artist may be angry that their music was used to attempt to bankrupt the woman and might even wish to show that this isn't what their music is about and actually pay the part of the fine which is for their track. Actually if they did that I would download the track legally just for the embarrassment this would cause the RIAA AND CAPITOL.
Of course it wouldn't be too hard to create a torrent containing the 24 tracks worth $222,000 a download (ok thats a bit risky but funny) or alternatively a file containing the names of the tracks and just a text file explaining what they were used for and promoting a boycott of this particular music.
I know this probably will not help her but it might cause problems for future cases.
Finally a simple thing can we paypal her a few dollars to help pay the fine. Even $5 each would help and that would be another kick in the pants for the RIAA.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
But an expert witness disagreed.
:-)
"My opinion is that it did not happen," Doug Jacobson, an Iowa State University professor and computer security expert, testified. "Making IP spoofing work is extremely complicated. Pretending to be somebody else at the same time they're on the Internet is almost impossible to carry out.''
I'm sorry but that's simply not true. It's VERY simple to carry out and takes very little skill to do it. He must never have heard the term "script" kiddie.
There are open source tools out there that could do this without a lot of trouble. One of my favorite tools (/me takes a risk saying it) is ettercap. Sure it takes some skill to learn how to use this particular tool, but it's not like there isn't any way to learn if you really wanted to.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
So where is the paypal account? I'll contribute $1 to help this lady out and, perhaps, make a statement to the RIAA (@#!&*) and that (@%$#!) Judge that this is unacceptable. I keep hearing that the RIAA, MPAA, and our government doesn't realize that they are alienating a vast constituency, possibly the majority, with these actions and these laws. Perhaps now is the time they find out and clearly money is the only thing that talks in this country any more.
As for their music? I don't need to steal it, pirate it or buy it. I can just do without it and I will. They will never see another dime from me.
Would someone mod this post up?! I'd do it myself, but I already posted elsewhere.
If (biggest word in the language) the verdict holds on appeal, she's out $200,000. This for 24 tracks; fewer tracks than in many CDs.
Google is failing me in my search for penalties for shoplifting, but a couple of decades or so ago my ex-wife was arrested for shoplifting. It was a misdemeanor, and I had to pay a $100 fine to keep her out of jail.
Had the woman in TFA walked into Wal Mart and shoplifted half a dozen CDs and gotten caught, the cost would have been minimal. In fact, a DUI would cost less than this.
The law is just wrong. If it were illegal to contribute to a candidate you weren't eligible to vote for, and if it were illegal to "contribute" to more than one candidate in any given race, we wouldn't have laws like this that are hostile to humans while friendly to corporations.
-mcgrew
PS: If you steal my cannibis, I have no legal recourse, fool! There's another example of a bad law.
I don't download songs illegally... But I do have a linksys wireless router plugged straight into my cable modem. Then I have a firewall/router between that and the PCs on my network. So just in case anyone does get a hair up their ass about something that I supposedly did, it is completely plausible that any of our neighbors or a war driver could have easily used my network.
It strikes me as ironic that the best form of personal security in this case, is an utter lack of network security.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
All Hail to our mighty corporate overlords! May they reign supreme. All mighty crack-dealers of media! Hey, we asked for it, right?? I mean look how we were dressed.....
Cmon' all you idiots... She WILLFULLY shared this. As in PREMEDITATED. What don't you fucking get about this?
News flash, you can't give some one a copy of what is yours. It is not your right to make copies of and make available. You have went WAY outside of fair use at that point.
All your minority whining is going to do is disenfranchise you from the public at large as condescending and know-it-alls. She is lucky she got away with only a $222K fine. If you ain't got the time, don't do the crime. The collective moral compass here is as fucked up as the industries want of un-workable DRM. I am a fan of NEITHER DRM or wanton copy right infringement. I don't purchase DRM'd music and I don't share it out. That is how I avoid $222K in fines.
Did ever occur to you that this is Miss Thompson's fault? That she is responsible? I forgot that in the USA nothing is ever anyones fault.
If someone wondering who is it Contact Information: Doug Jacobson 2419 Cover Hall Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011 Telephone: (515) 294-8307 Fax: (515) 294-8432 E-mail: dougj@iastate.edu hompage: http://vulcan.ee.iastate.edu/~dougj/
I think you'll find that $9250 is the actual iTunes price in the UK. :0)>
I tend to believe that Jammie Thompson ruined her life over 24 songs. The jury was just the mechanism to bring it to reality.
/.'ers were able to get theirs on the quick.
And I thought Steve Jobs had the only reality distortion device on the planet. I guess most
I think theoretically and philosophically it's better for the little guys to have more power and there be more competition. I think it's absolutely great, actually. The only thing I worry about is if the quality as a whole will somehow go down. Old TV (before cable was in most homes) and British TV (don't they still only have 4 channels) had less competition, but somehow better quality overall. In the world of 500 channels, most shows are complete garbage. And the good ones are like 5 episodes a year. WTF. MUSIC: Typically I like music that isn't the most popular, but I don't like the super oddball stuff much either. Somewhere inbetween. So will music be affected the same way as TV with shittons of competition somehow watering everything down? Or am I wrong, and TV actually got better or stayed the same... and my perceptions are just different??
I'll start out by admitting that I haven't RTFA or reviewed the facts in the case. But, assuming someone was somehow using her internet connection (i.e. via an open wireless access point), doesn't that mean we're all at risk of paying for crimes we didn't commit.
What if my neighbor connects to my access point and starts sharing music. What if he used my last name as a username to avoid getting in trouble with the RIAA. Am I liable for that? What if I have my firewall forward RDP so I can access my computer remotely but someone guesses the weak password for my home computer (which doesn't really need to be secure, as it doesn't contain any particularly sensitive data). If they use my computer to share music and avoid getting caught, I'd be none the wiser unless I looked for it.(Say they unchecked desktop icon and start menu when installing P2P and I have a 1T HD so I didn't even notice the disk space.)
And that's just a case of the unsecured computer getting "hacked" by someone who only needs a bare minimum of know-how. Especially after this case, I assume people who want to illegally share music will be willing to go to greater lengths to hide their activity. (Maybe my neighbor breaks out kismet and wepcrack and maybe that hacker finds some RDP buffer overflow to circumvent my strong password).
I don't think I should have a responsibility to go to the trouble of securing a system if I don't need it to be secure. And what happened to innocent until proven guilty. I am saddened that an IP address and a username could be even remotely close to acceptable as proof of a crime, especially when $200K is at stake. Even if she was guilty this should be a minor infraction, like shoplifting, not bankruptcy. The RIAA has both the interested and resources to protect their property, so the burden of that protection should fall on them, not their customers or the legal system.
The jury's hands were probably tied.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
There are other ways to promote your music for free. We have a local college radio station that only plays new music and offers local bands a medium to play their music. I often end up knowing new bands before the mainstream catches on. Some of the music ends up on mainstream radio station after a couple of months because of popular demand, not cause of the RIAA promos.
My latest find: Grand Analog - Calligraffiti (cool hip-hop / rock with a touch of blues... sounds a little like K-OS)
All the music I bought in the past 2 years were played on that station. They all come from independent record labels so I hope it doesn't finance the RIAA in any way.
However, one hit wonders will have problems getting out through these channels since they probably wont do well in the underground crowd.
Is it the government's fault that people extend credit to those they know are likely not to repay it? There are times where companies have bad luck (hurricane wipes out a whole town and lots of people start defaulting for example) and I feel for them when they have to write off the accounts. But, companies that keep extending more and more credit to those whose debt-to-income ratios are way out of whack and FICO scores are in the basement but the company knows it's collecting enough in fees that it will still turn a tidy profit by selling the accounts for less than they're worth, writing off the difference against profits thus avoiding taxation I have no sympathy for. Why should it require more government regulation? No one forced them to open the accounts. They should have to live with the consequences of their own avarice rather than run to daddy government to make it all better.
We'd better get out our wallets. Hundreds of billions of songs have been shared around the world since the invention of cassette tape. Maybe trillions. Hard to tell.
so we all owe, what, ten grand per each song we've taped or recorded or copied into a file. Call it a trillion tunes recorded OR LISTENED TO. Don't forget, eventually they will con a judge or senator and most certainly a jury into believing that listening without paying is infringement.
$10,000 * 1,000,000,000,000 = $10,000,000,000,000,000. Ten quadrillion dollars.
That's the answer to you "law and order" types. We all owe ten quadrillion dollars. Since that kind of money isn't even in circulation, we'd best call the Federal Reserve and warn them of some serious inflation coming up. And the Treasury better get cracking on printing up that ten quadrillion in SINGLES, 'cause that's how we're going to pay the fines. Hell. Better yet, pennies.
And you "law and order" types? The ink is still wet on the laws that made copying a song a criminal felony. Those laws were purchased after the government was sold to wealthy interests during the Reagan administration on up to the present ohmygod disaster. Anything can be a felony, now. They merely have to drop a few bucks into the coin slot of our new, streamlined, business-responsive neocon/neoliberal government engine.
We somehow managed to kill a million people in Iraq and no one seems to be up on charges. Some things are important, I guess, and some people aren't. Murder on a Hitlerian scale is a "partisan" issue not worthy of criminal investigation, but some computer downloading 24 FUCKING songs is a felony case worthy of a quarter million dollar fine and a stretch in prison.
God **** America. Really.
What really bugs me about all this is the instructions that simply making the files available on the network is the same thing as actually distributing them, even if no one actually downloaded a single song.
We enter into the realm of "could have" instead of actually did. This is disturbing on so many levels.
Also, in typical thuggery fashion -- RIAA found the weakest defendant to prosecute to insure they can set their precedents. Now it becomes easier for them to extort large sums of cash from any one they wish to (after all you don't even have to be shown to have actually distributed a single file -- just that it "could happen"). That's scary.
Of course, the true irony is that even if the woman did pay, the artists are virtually guaranteed to NEVER see any of that money.
As for me, each attack that the RIAA does drives me away from any artists connected with RIAA. I'm just about ready to stop supporting any artist connected with RIAA in the same way one might not due business with a company directly tied to the Mafia.
But I'm sure RIAA will blame any future losss of revenue on piracy, giving them reason to sue more people (especially with this victory under their cap).
The Sony exec tells it like RIAA sees it: Making a copy of a song is just a nice way to say you're stealing a song. Fair use does not apply in the eyes of RIAA. Hell, they'd love to find a way to force us to pay for every time we listen to a song. I mean imagine the losses they feel as we play the same CD (which we bought) again and again. That's lost revenue in their eyes.
No felony.
No record for the defendant.
Not a criminal case.
THIS WAS A CIVIL MATTER! The copyright law calls out these damages, without the RIAA member companies even having to provide proof of actual damage.
Reread.
If you infringe their copyright, they can be awarded statutory damages as the result of a civil proceeding without ever having to show that you personally cost them a penny.
>>> Not only do you think it is "illegal" to download music
Well, downloading copyrighted music for which you don't have permission is against the law as written. That would make it "illegal", no?
Regardless of what you think the law should be, that's what the law is.
(Assuming he's in the US; the laws are different in different countries.)
>>> you've also taken the ridiculous position that there is
>>> anything more than a million to one chance that you will
>>> be one of the unlucky few to get noticed by these vultures.
There have been 26,000 Americans sued over the last 4 years. Simple arithmetic reveals that even assuming every single person in the USA illegally downloads music, they have a better than 1-in-12,000 chance of being sued.
So the ridiculous position here is not his.
>So good luck proving which one of our 300 employees was sharing them on the personal computers that we allow them to plug into our internet connection.
A company that size doesn't have an acceptable use policy for its computer resources, one that's part of the employee handbook? I find that difficult to believe - that's a lawsuit just waiting to happen, if true. If the company is privately held, I wonder if the owner knows that in the absence of one, the company potentially can be sued for any illegal use of its systems by its employees?
Copyright infringement is the least of their worries. If someone downloads illegal porn, or runs numbers via the company's email system... what about hate speech - have any bigots working there that post their opinions on the Web from work?
Recording artists across the board think the music industry should find a way to work with the Internet instead of suing people who have downloaded music.
"They're protecting an archaic industry," said the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir.
"They should turn their attention to new models."
"This is not rocket science," said David Draiman of Disturbed, a hard-rock band with a platinum debut album on the charts. "Instead of spending all this money litigating against kids who are the people they're trying to sell things to in the first place, they have to learn how to effectively use the Internet."
After three consecutive years of double-digit sales losses, and having lost a court battle against file-sharing Web sites such as Kazaa and Morpheus, the Recording Industry Association of America -- the industry's lobbying arm -- trained its sights on ordinary fans who have downloaded music. On Monday, the RIAA filed suits against 261 civilians with more than 1,000 music files each on their computers, accusing them of copyright violations. The industry hopes the suits, which seek as much as $150,000 per violation, will deter computer users from engaging in what the record industry considers illegal file- swapping.
This unprecedented move brings home the industry's battle against Web downloads, which the record business blames for billion-dollar losses since the 1999 emergence of Napster, the South Bay startup the RIAA sued out of existence. The suits are expected to settle for as little as $3,000 each, but the news was greeted with derision by the very people the RIAA said they moved to protect, the musicians themselves.
"Lawsuits on 12-year-old kids for downloading music, duping a mother into paying a $2,000 settlement for her kid?" said rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy. "Those scare tactics are pure Gestapo."
"File sharing is a reality, and it would seem that the labels would do well to learn how to incorporate it into their business models somehow," said genre- busting DJ Moby in a post on his Web site. "Record companies suing 12-year-old girls for file sharing is kind of like horse-and-buggy operators suing Henry Ford."
Artists are feeling the downturn in sales, too. "My record royalties have dropped 80 percent since 1999," said Steve Miller, whose greatest hits album has been a perennial best-seller since its 1978 release. "To me, it's one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me because people act like it's OK. "
Recording artists have watched their record royalties erode over the past few years ("My Van Halen royalties are history," said vocalist Sammy Hagar), but, in fact, few musicians earn the bulk of their income from record sales.
"Bruce Springsteen probably earned more in 10 nights at Meadowlands last month than in his entire recording career," said rocker Huey Lewis.
Many artists painted the record industry as a bloated, overstuffed giant with too many mouths to feed and too many middlemen to pay, selling an overpriced, often mediocre product.
"They have all these abnormal practices that keep driving the price up," said Gregg Rollie, founding member of Santana and Journey. "People think musicians make all that money, but it's not true. We make the smallest amount."
The RIAA did not initiate these lawsuits to defend artists' rights, the musicians say, but to protect corporate profits.
"For the artists, my ass," said Draiman. "I didn't ask them to protect me, and I don't want their protection."
Artists also see the opportunities for promotion the Internet offers. Most acts maintain Web sites, and virtually every one features some free downloads. Country Joe McDonald said he posts more than 50 tracks available for free downloads on his site, countryjoe.com.
"Who doesn't want to get paid for their work?" said Wayne Coyne of the indie-rock band Flaming Lips. "But I think it works to musicians' benefit for people to be able to occasionally listen to their music and, if they really like it, go out and buy it."
Copyright infringement was made a crime, rather than a civil infraction subject to actual losses, quite a few years ago. I'm not arguing this case, I'm arguing the concept. If it's not a felony conviction, I don't care as it is irrelevant. Felony or no, it is a crime tried in criminal court and that is insane. You can prick holes in the Hindenberg to declare it a solid wad of foam but it still is a damned giant balloon.
The thing is, even if the RIAA win every case they bring, it isn't going to fix their problem, at least in the long term. It may justify their existence to their bosses for a little longer, but that's about it. As long as the RIAA think that this sort of thing is the answer to their problem it continues to underscore just how completely out of touch they and their bosses are...
The digital horses are out of the barn, and neither litigation or stringent DRM is going to put them back in. And, both of those things make one of their other problems much worse-- that of PR. Odd that, as didn't these guys start out in PR? Isn't PR essentially what the record companies were mostly about? Watching them completely trashing their raison d'etre seems rather like watching someone commit seppuku who thinks it a good way to fix their stomach ache...
And I don't see a mention of felony or no in the article. The article seems incomplete about the actual laws broken and charges made, other than the phrase "copyright infringement", which last we saw in the 90's was a civil matter resulting in a few hundred dollars in penalties based on actual dollar loss rather than a QUARTER MILLION DOLLAR judgement for 24 songs. I've no more time to waste here.
I'm glad I stopped listening to music after they capped Napster. Make it a crime, call it whatever. It's against everything copyright was intended for. This is a cartel torturing people for money. Enough with the nitpicking.
You shouldn't trust your life to 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty!
RIAA is paying her to win this case -- to warn off, scare anyone from sharing and defending (going to court).
You think that making nasty comments on youtube and giving videos bad ratings is WAR? Give me a break, it's not even going to be an effective protest.
-- QED
Ever since Edison it has been possible for the average Joe to make copies of music he didn't buy.
Either by putting the horn of the Grammarphone in front of the radio, by use of a tape recorder, or
(today) with his computer. As long as it was done in the privacy of your own home, and the copies
were for your own use you weren't going to get sued or arrested. That's STILL true today.
The internet changed everything. IF you post copies of music you copied onto the 'net you might as
well be on the corner dressed in an over sized raincoat selling the stuff on the sly.
The only safe way for people to share digital music is by swapping CD-r's (usb flash drives, or even
floppies), or having private bring you own computer lan-net parties (well that the RIAA might stage
an FBI raid on).
What I fear is some spread of a computer virus that looks for music files on your computer that
you are the legal owner of, that turns your machine into a file sharing 'bot. How would you defend
yourself against that in court? (what ports in my firewall do I block to stop that?)
You're missing the point.
In this case, it's not a crime. In this case, it's a civil matter. And, in this case, as always, back to the 1700's, the plaintiff is entitled to statutory damanges, regardless of actual harm.
I'm not saying it's OK, or right, or good, or anything of the sort. But, the jury applied the relevant law as written.
It is the staying popular that is the difficult bit, one hit wonders will never reach that point.
Especially since staying popular is heavily influenced by what the record industry decides to do or not do for you.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Um, you need to have your psychiatrist adjust the dosage of your meds... the antipsychotics aren't working quite as well as they should.
Captcha: creepy - that's what I thought when I read the parent post, too.
The award amount seems and is outrageous but it is in line with the law. Watch any DVD and pay attention to the $$ amount and potential prison time mentioned on that warning. The problem is, the laws were primarily designed to target and be applied to counterfeiters who mass-produce and sell infringing works. In these cases, then "business sized" damages are perfectly suitable.
However with time, something called "personal" copyright infringement has risen thanks to the internet, yet these SAME laws meant to apply to the counterfeiters get applied to individuals infringing for personal use. The laws and penalties really need to be amended for the two tiers.
Copyright infringement is wrong, but let's be reasonable. If she really was guilty of this she should only have to pay less than $10,000. I hope they lessen the judgment upon appeal.
Where is it codified that people have a "right" to make a their living solely by making and selling music? If you can make it work, great. If not... well, there are plenty of other fields of work in the world where you can work enough to keep yourself clothed, fed, and sheltered while giving you the spare time and resources to work on your music. Just because you want to be able to make a living selling sound waves over and over again doesn't mean you have a right to.
Artists who take the gamble and sign with a major label, only to get screwed over later, get very little sympathy from me. The label gives them the contract; they're the ones who sign it. It's up to the artist to make sure the terms are reasonable to them, no matter how deceptive and slimy the record company is trying to be to get them to sign that paper.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Please tell me you were trying to be funny.
If you were, your delivery is the epitome of deadpan. I can appreciate that and will laugh with you.
If you were not, then your hyperbole is preposterous. I am still laughing, but I am laughing at you.
Either way, you are a funny guy, I suppose.
blah blah blah
I also know that it was her and not a security issue, but according to the article she claimed it was a security issue.
I'm with Lunarsight. I think the you tube protest is a great idea.
I'll suggest a campaign name: "Negative Stars for RIAA"
Yes, but I have little faith in holding MY fate in the hands of ordinary people (guilty or not). They aren't "willing" either. You get called to jury duty, you show up, then you do everything in your power to try to get out of it. The "ordinary" person you speak of acts like an "ordinary" idiot when detained to a jury room for 8 hours each day. The mere notion that ONE juror may have changed their mind just so they could go home tells you everything that is wrong about these sorts of trials. The RIAA lawyers even setup their arguments in ways to cause jury infighting. They pick stupid people on purpose, in hopes of getting 7 out of 12 dolts who just want to be home by five so they can watch Judge Judy. My mom is a clerk of court, in charge of juries. I grew up watching these fools bicker, complain, ignore judges instructions...they've made me the cynic that I am.
Clearly, if you want to set an example, no fine is enough. She should just be hung in the middle of town square, and her 250 CDs burned at the stake. That'll show em !
The Death Penalty has proven to be no deterent. The more death sentences are carried out, the more murders occur. Why do you think this RIAA *civil* trial would be any different?
This was a civil trial, not a criminal court. It isn't the job of a civil trial to deter crime. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can't even get punitive damages, unless their is fraud involved (thank you People's Court!). I would have wrecked this jury, because from the evidence I've read (granted, I wasn't in the court room), the RIAA failed to prove how many times the stolen songs were shared. If all they can prove was she stole the songs, then they deserve about $25 for their efforts.
Judgment is for the plaintiff in the form of $25.
But seriously,RIAA's strategy as some people have pointed out is as flimsy as screenshots with filenames. If that's acheiving success, they don't have to try so hard...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Promotion and distribution deals. Why do you think you don't see any independent music at the big chains?? Because they have to sign exclusive distribution deals with the RIAA if they want to carry any of the bands on the labels belonging to the RIAA.
"But this one goes to 11!"
We are the 198 proof..
The only flaw in your logic is that the lawsuits and DMCA and all the other actions the MP/RI/AA have taken were all in reaction to the drop in cashflow that was already occuring. Unless you can cut their cashflow down so far that the distribution companies can't afford to fund the MP/RI/AA, they are likely to just extend their strategy even further.
On the other hand, think of all the money we'll save if we stop spending our money on this crap.
We are the 198 proof..
Say, estimate the number of people likely to have downloaded the file, times the value of the file (about $1 for most songs), and you get something on the order of probably no more than $20 estimated damages. So a 5x multiplier would be $100.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was thinking of of how so much of law with regard to copyright and digital property is loaded with hidden meanings. It's fairly certain to say that without treaty and law one could not feel justified in stealing from the public domain, nor one would feel the least bit guilty of stealing say the land under somebody elses feet. In many cases law is used merely to establish monopoly control of, for and in spite of the natural tendency of nature's propensity for non-scarcity. Despite the fact that nature can be infinitely reproducable it wouldn't matter to lawyers and the legal monopoly. They would have no incentive to allow for such advanced and yet primitive already in existence technology. In a sense nature is illegal and in a sense this works out to being a "myth" or a "shared hallucination" on the parts of many individuals unaware of the scientific nor spiritual aspects of the consequences of such a "belief system". Holding further to this "B.S." are so many caught up in suffering and working to increase the stress upon the natural world. OR at least the world that existed prior to human engineering. If we can build or create out of existence "scarcity" then such a fact is lost on those whom fear that they will lose all value in some sort of dystopian "communist" nightmare. If scarcity is a myth, then sometime in the near future one will merely wonder how people could construct such muderous ideological constructs in society and they will point to slaughter of the previous century and wonder why the philosophical thinkers of these eras lost so much of the point of reality. The fact that we socially construct all of these ideas and theories into reality and share them is their own reward, how someone can fail to understand such an important construction means that people don't want to advance or move forward into a future self-directed. Not wanting to self-construct a reality based around freedoms that push our understanding further into more permutations and bricolages only debases understanding, and sets the stage for ideological slaughter. Information can be thought of as a substance, of which we can construct infinite value from such tiny molecular structures, why could any artist not sit in awe or wonderment of the inevitable elimination of obscurity? It must be that the ones that have hogged so much of the spotlight in the controlled or managed press arenas are frightened and scared of the eventual unoriginality of their works being found out. So in this sense they want to obscure and block their own misdeeds and expropriation from lesser knowns and forgotten artists, from whom they owe so much....
Hey, one has to start somewhere. If you want to up the ante, by all means, be my guest. =)
Well, while I agree that recording technology has come a loooooong way in the past couple of decades, and there's much more capability available for a fraction of the traditional cost, don't discount the contribution of a recording engineer. The reality is this: it does take a lot of expertise to properly mix a complex recording. It's damn near as much of an art as producing music, and is an inextricable part of the process anyway.
Other than that, I tend to agree with you. Engineers and studio time are readily available, should one feel the need. It's not like the big studios have a monopoly on technical talent. Any way you slice it, there's no reason to go sign away your future to a bunch of pricks.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So it's not about the recording technology.
And it's not really about "who you sign with"; you don't have to sign with anybody, you don't have to sign, you don't have to do this as a business.
If you do decide to do this as a business, your choices include signing with a label, and if that's what you choose, then DUH you will definitely be signing a contract that precludes you from giving away the bits governed by the contract. That's one thing you exchange in return for what the label doses for you. I'm sorry if anyone was unclear on that.
But guess what: nothing makes you sign, nothing even makes you do this as a business. You're free and legal to put up recordings you own for others to listen to. You're not free and legal to put up recordings you don't own. You like sharing, go make some music, go share the corresponding bits, be free, be happy, be legal. Nothing stopping you.
Like Michael Walthius, for example. You may not like his music, but he's doing exactly what you're talking about.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Sure, we have a AUP. That doesn't mean that we log every single packet that passes through our router though.
what about hate speech - have any bigots working there that post their opinions on the Web from workLast time I checked, hate speech, as disgusting as I find it to be, is still protected speech in the United States. If I use my company resources to post a GNAA troll on Slashdot, I fail to see how that could get the company sued. Now if I used to them to broadcast an e-mail to the whole agency, along the lines of "I hate that nigger in accounting!" then that's a whole other animal.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
220K. extortion bad.
the problem is that it was a jury of peers- not a jury of seeders
No one said they were stupid, they're just unwilling to accept a very unpleasant reality. That's just human nature. I believe they have chosen to pursue the strategy that gives them the best shot at maintaining their present position. That isn't realistic and will in the long run hurt them more.
The advantages they hold are not going to increase over time- time is not on their side. The internet is completely unlike a cd shop, you don't need to fight anyone for shelf space, so being a major label doesn't get you in the door anymore. Conventional radio matters less and less so controlling access to who gets on matters far less. The means by which people learn about and obtain their music these days give far fewer advantages to the old guard.
They have gotten as rich as they have by controlling the bandwidth through which people get their music. There's too much bandwidth for them to control these days. I can go on and on- word of mouth spreads so much faster on the internet that artificial hype matters far less.
The only asset they have that matters now is their intellectual property, so they are obsessed with maintaining as tight a control on it as they can, so they can use it to get their way and create artificial barriers for their own benefit (killing internet radio for example).
But at the end of the day, artists sure don't need someone to own their property for them, they need someone to get it to potential fans. That argument is going to be a lot tougher for the record labels in the future.
They aren't buying time, they're just holding on as long as they can. There is a fundamental shift going on that means record companies are going to need artists FAR more than the artists need them. Musicians are getting a lot more business savvy too, look at hip hop. They know now not only what a ridiculous rip-off most record contracts are, but they are also learning every day how much easier doing it yourself is, or doing it with an independent label that might actually view them as something more than a product.
The artists are going to hold all the cards in the future, and it's about time.
You are sitting on the jury for a runaway slave. Technically he also broke the law. What if you were on the jury for the Scopes Trial?
Hmm, jury nullification is starting to sound better now, isn't it?
It is 1955 in Mississippi.
A black man is on trial for rape of a white woman. The evidence against him is feeble. A white man - a Klansman - is on trial for the murder of a black man. The evidence against him is overwhelming.
Which man walks free and which will be hanged on the capital charge?
Dayton, Tennessee, was rural, small town America. For thirty years Bryan been their spokesman on the national stage. The jurors were conservative mainstream or evangelical Protestants. The TVA is ten year in the future, The population of Rhea County is only 28,000 today and Bible lessons were still being taught in its public schools as late as 2004. Where do you find your nullifers in 1925?
As a side note, Clarence Darrow and the rest of the defense team, who were supposed to defend their client from a law that forbade the teaching of evolution, coached the John Scopes' students to perjure themselves by saying they were taught evolution in the classroom, when in fact they weren't. Clarence Darrow
I tend to agree. Historically, large corporate dinosaurs rarely manage to successfully adapt to major phase changes in their core businesses. They're risk-averse statists by definition and change is conceptually foreign to them, because change involves the potential for failure. When you have stockholders who are accustomed to a certain level of return, you don't want to take risks because your investors might get nervous and take their money elsewhere. That encourages stability, but at the cost of flexibility.
... except maybe make their products more attractive to us so we'll see more reason to buy or watch them rather than, say browse the Web or chat with our friends.
... we'll find something else to do.
Inevitably though, progress happens (that's even more true in the age of the Global Economy) and the old-line organizations will either progress with the rest of us, or become marginalized. Modern technology won't put them out of business, at least not in the near term (in spite of all the so-called "piracy" going on, in spite of all their plaintive cries of "it will destroy the industry" these people are turning profits that would make the CEOs of many more respectable corporations blush!) but it will sideline them, make them less important, less relevant to us. They really don't want that, and if they can survive this and still manage to come out on top it will be a neat trick. I'm not counting the big studios out, just yet, but their time to get with the program is limited.
Even so, I think many of the problems with music and movie sales have to do with competition for our spare time. We're all working longer hours than ever before, have less time to ourselves, and have so many things competing for our remaining attention span (Internet, cellphones, texting, instant messaging, cable TV, video games, all the other things people spend their free time on nowadays.) There's very little the media companies will be able to do about that
What is ultimately failing here is the "shove it down the consumer's throat and he'll take it because he doesn't have anywhere else to go" business method. We have plenty of other places to go for entertainment, now. If we can't have music because it's a. unappealing or b. too expensive
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Erm, 4440000 seconds is just over 51 days.
- the major players in the music industry successfully lobby for either legislation or electronics-industry-wide self-regulation that makes "professional" audio recording equipment available only under the supervision of licensed audio practitioners (as with medical devices and as in the short story "The Right to Read"), or
- the major publishers of proprietary music start suing independent recording artists for infringing copyright in songs that were semi-popular ten years ago (as in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).
Once people get pissed off enough they can bypass traditional phone service all together. Either phone companies figure this out and set their expectations (and their prices) accordingly or they die. The phone companies have adapted, buying the power to exclude uses of electromagnetic spectrum from governments, which is part of why mobile communications packages offered to individuals in North America are so underpowered for their price.Why does a musician need to make money hand-over-fist anyway? because that's how Brintey Spears did it and look where she's at today.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That's a good policy. I know I'd be a lot more willing to be in the jury pool if I knew I was only stuck with it for one day, not for some indefinite period (and maybe waste several days in the selection process on top of that).
As it is, tho I think it's an honourable duty, the way it's handled is more often as onerous as if you the (potential) juror are the ones being punished!
As it happens, they never want me anyway, because my business partner's brother is a lawyer and municipal judge, and a friend's dad is a lawyer. That puts me right out immediately; gods forbid that a juror should actually know [where to learn] about the law!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Virgin v. Thomas balance sheet
Income.......0
Expenses
Lawyers.........475,000
Other......... 25,000
Total expenses. 500,000
Profit (Loss)..(500,000)
RIAA Lawyers to clients: "This was a great victory"
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Jammie Thomas has asked me to notify people that contributions to her cause can be made via PayPal at freejammie.com.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Serious question on that. SCOTUS ruled that punitive damages in excess of ten times the actual damages were unconstitutional under the "Cruel and Unusual" clause in one of the tobacco lawsuit as I recall. So a jury can't impose such a fine anymore.
That being the case, just because a fine was imposed by the legislature, shouldn't suddenly make it not more than ten times the damages. Theoretically, just because I'm not a corporation doesn't mean I'm no longer protected by the same decisions.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
It's real simple: statutory damages vs actual damages.
The law (statue) says that damages can be up to like $150k per infringement. Thank Congress for writing bad law.
Libertas in infinitum
This British guy was jailed for 10 weeks for doing 172 mph. That's almost two and a half times the legal speed limit of 70 mph. Maybe he didn't deserve a year, but the principle of jailing someone for speeding- it it's by a significant amount as it clearly was here- isn't unreasonable IMHO.