Slashdot Mirror
Juror From RIAA Trial Speaks
Damon Tog notes a Wired blog posting featuring quotes from a juror who took part in the recent RIAA trial. Some excerpts: "She should have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars... Spoofing? We're thinking, "Oh my God, you got to be kidding."... She lied. There was no defense. Her defense sucked... I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naive. We're not that stupid up here. I don't know what the f**k she was thinking, to tell you the truth."
Why? The case was cut n dry, she broke the law and she lost.
The jury's job is to determine if she broke the law, not determine if the law makes sense.
Apparently you are lady, you put a judgement of 200K over a few songs.
She could have shoplifted the cds for a few hundred dollars in fines.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
This really was an open and shut case. There was very little doubt the woman was guilty, that's why the RIAA didn't drop the case. I think her hope was that the jury would see a bunch of rich record labels going after some poor ignorant middle aged woman, and the jury would say "fuck you" to the labels. The only gripe I have with this was the size of the award- $10K per song is pretty stiff.
Though the "IP address = person" argument is obviously pretty weak, more attention should be paid to the damages the law says is reasonable. 222,000 is in no way reasonable (~9k per song). Even if the jury gave her the minimum set by law(~700 iirc), it wouldn't be reasonable.
Well, yeah, she was pretty clearly guilty (e.g. wiping the hard drive after she got in trouble). That's not the issue. It's a question as to whether the ruinous damages were justified.
They weren't.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
"That is a compromise, yes," said Hegg, a 38-year-old steelworker from Duluth, Minnesota. "We wanted to send a message that you don't do this, that you have been warned."
Sorry, $9,250 is ridiculous and doesn't send a message about anything other than the fact that, contrary to the comment of your fellow juror that you do in fact know what's going on in Duluth, you really don't know what the fuck is going on. You awarded money that was originally meant for people who were *SELLING* copyrighted songs, not "sharing" for free.
All of the Slashdotters who are holding up Jammie Thomas as some kind of martyr remind me of the African-Americans who embraced OJ Simpson as some symbol of racial injustice.
You guys have picked the wrong horse.
The job of the jury isn't to decide on the basis of a popularity contest; the decision is...did she break the law or not?
They got to choose what her financial penalty was.
They purposefully picked an amount that had absolutely no relationship, whatsoever, to the financial damages that may have been incurred. This was not a matter of law. This was a bunch of citizens sitting in a room and purposefully deciding to ruin the life of somebody that they didn't like.
The jury decided the penalty, and it's plain ridiculous.
Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts.
Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
I'm personally against stealing copyrighted music. But this penalty is waaaaay out of proportion to the crime, IMHO.
Wrong. Half the point of having a jury of peers instead of government officials is to add another check to the system if the jury feels the law itself is a just one.
This
Contrary to what the judge and lawyers would have you believe, it is the jury's job to decide if the law makes sense. Read up on jury nullification.
This was a bunch of citizens sitting in a room and purposefully deciding to ruin the life of somebody that they didn't like.
May I introduce you to the U.S. Congress?
The law says you can't distribute stuff when you don't hold the copyright.
Did she distribute?
She was convicted of distribution. Actually, she was also convicted to pay more than 9000$ for each song she allegedly distributed. But there wasn't a shred of evidence that she distributed anything.
For that simple reason, she should not have been convicted.
Don't get me wrong here. I am no pirate. I fact I am probably one of the few rare examples of people who don't have a single illegal MP3 file or movie. I also believe that pirates should be punished.
But the evidence must be present. No matter how much I dislike pirates, ensuring a fair trial (with appropriate evidence) is far more important that collecting money for the greedy "content industry".
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
It's sort of the perfect target for the RIAA. Somebody was caught and then stubbornly played dumb, ignoring the possible repercussions. The result is exactly what they wanted - big headlines to scare the general file-sharing public. The money reward is pocket change.
Meanwhile, will it really deter piracy? No. Does the punishment fit the crime? No. They can see all that money slipping away and there's not a thing they can do about it.
This is true, the guilty/not guilty part is what I meant in the context of "popularity contest". Bald faced lies in front the jury on the other hand...they have plenty of leeway to decide what her punishment will be.
No, they decided to turn her life upside down and bankrupt her over lying to a jury. The MP3 collection was just the vehicle.
Random and weird software I've written.
The most disturbing part of these interviews was that the jurors said they would've reached the same conclusion regardless of whether a transfer had to take place to be infringement, especially since none of the case coverage mentioned the RIAA lawyers showing evidence that any transfers took place at all. They mainly focused on how file sharing is terrible for their cartel, estimates for its effect on their cartel as a whole, etc ... They never said anything like, "As a result of her making files available, N people downloaded the song for free, which translates to $D in lost sales". Absent any evidence that transfers took place, there was no way the jury could have found her guilty of infringement if the instruction was "Infringement only occurs when a transfer takes place".
The jury definitely had their minds made up well before their deliberations. They came to the right legal conclusion for the wrong reasons: they felt insulted.
Appeals aren't decided by juries. In fact, they are almost entirely to decide legal questions and procedural questions; an appeals court more or less doesn't redecide a jury's finding of fact.
If the appeals court decides, for instance, that the trial judge was wrong in the instructions to the jury in a material way, the case could be retried, but the retrial itself isn't the appeal.
Jury nullification is a consequence of the constitutional ban on double-jeopardy. This ban was put in place to protect citizens from oppressive practices by the government in the realm of criminal law. It was not designed specifically to enable juries to ignore the law.
In a civil trial (such as this one), the judge can set aside the jury's verdict if the judge finds that the jury's findings are unreasonable. So even if the jury hates copyright law and wants to find for the defendant, the judge can still impose liability (especially since there is a $750 per work minimum for infringement, a minimum that the jury cannot ignore).
The only thing this jury proved, IMO, is that people tend to abuse any power that is given them.
They were legally required to assign a penalty appropriate to the crime, but they did not do so. They ignored this obligation, choosing instead to "send a message" to a woman who they did not like.
They used the law as a weapon to destroy a person who offended them personally. They succeeded only in proving that feeble people, when given power, tend to abuse it, and that Duluth has plenty of feeble people.
It's interesting that a judge would have to recuse himself if he was unqualified to understand the evidence being presented, but a member of the jury isn't.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, actually, it's more like $200,000 for illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted material, and wasting a court's time with lies and deception to try and get off it.
She would have paid far less if she hadn't wasted the court's time and insulted the intelligence of the Jury.
I support more excessive remedies for people who bring lawsuits or escalate civil action to court under fraudulent circumstances (yes, on both sides of the battlefield).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
let's assume that the woman DID share the files.
OK, let's assume there were 50 to 100 total downloads.
100 downloads, at 0.99 cents a piece (let's be realistic here), equal = 100 dollars!
So, what's the basis to affirm that she should pay $222,000 for 24 songs? This is where the RIAA's case is illogical. They assume that the downloaders will distribute and that this will cause them many losses. But that's THE DOWNLOADERS' FAULT, not hers.
They're making her responsible for what EVERY DOWNLOADER DID. Instead of downloading from her they could have bought a CD (even pirated!) or downloaded from someone else.
And this is where "making available" doesn't equal massive infringement. The fines MUST BE PROPORTIONAL TO THE NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS.
One aspect is that, if somebody is not doing well, or has done something wrong, it's ok to kick even more so s/he "learns" and gets better (the stern father penalizes).
Effects are overpopulated prisons, total weak or missing social umbrella and an increasing number of people under poorness level.
The other fact shown here is that people are totally out of touch with financial reality. Financially ruining a life of (is she a single mother?) a person with the idea to doing something "right" shows an overwhelming degree of insensitivity.
I am appalled!
They issue isn't about breaking the law, the issue is about proper punishment.
10,000 time the value of a track isn't not reasonable...at all.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think the real lesson here is that you shouldn't lie to a jury. It sounds like the juror was pissed off that the defendant didn't respect them enough to tell the truth.
If you're going to get up and give testimony, don't tell obvious lies.
The jurors have been called away from their everyday lives to sit and listen to an argument between two parties they have no interest in. The least you can do is show them some respect.
If I was on that jury, I would have counted that as a big strike against the defendant as well.
They succeeded only in proving that feeble people, when given power, tend to abuse it
all people.
Feeble people just need to be given less power in order to start abusing it...
IANAL, but I have served on several juries, both criminal and civil.
Its obvious from reading some of the jackass comments on here that most of you have a) never served on a jury, and b) have no concept of what a jury does.
Contrary to what a bunch of people here seem to think, a jury does NOT have the option of totally ignoring the law. A jury has only two choices...does the evidence support the plaintiff/prosecution (civil trial/criminal trial) by a preponderance of the evidence/beyond a reasonable doubt (again, civil trial/criminal trial), or does it not. It all boils down to those two choices, and only those two choices. A ruling of "she might have broken a law but the law sucks so we find in her favor/innocent" (again, civil/criminal) is not allowable in most states, and I'd be surprised if its allowable in any.
In the eyes of this jury, not only was she at fault, she blatantly lied to the jury (in their opinion). So not only did they agree with the prosecution that by a preponderance of the evidence she did violate copyright law, they whacked her for thinking they were stupid.
Had I been on this jury and been presented with the same evidence that we've seen in the press, I'd have voted for the plaintiffs also. I'm not sure I would have gone so high on the fine, but I for damned sure would not have let her off at the bottom of the scale either.
Not only was she stupid to not settle beforehand, she's stupid for appealing. What her boneheaded lawyer should now be doing is trying to find out if the record companies would settle for a smaller amount that they have reasonable amount of being able to collect. And maybe now she'll make sure she acquires her music legally, and does not make it available for mass distribution to others...but I doubt she's that smart.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
... [$]222,000 is in no way reasonable (~9k per song).
Penalties for copyright violations are deliberately draconian and have been since the beginning of the law.
The idea is apparently that:
- It's very hard to identify the violators (or even that a violation took place).
- So only a small fraction will be caught.
- If the penalties are comparable to the actual damage of the offense (a pittance), potential offenders may simply make take the chance - and be rewarded on the average by nearly-free copies.
- So the penalties are set high in proportion to this fraction.
- With high penalties the offenders' bet becomes a losing proposition, a low probability of a big hit. Paying for the content in the first place becomes cheap insurance.
- And with high penalties the copyright holders can make enough from the small fraction they do catch and convict to be "made whole" on their losses from the great mass they miss.
Of course there are problems with this. And the biggest one is with the standard of proof.
Civil law is about making things right. Two roughly equal parties with a dispute go to a court. The court decides which is more likely to be right ("preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt"). The one found to be in the wrong pays the amount needed to make things right. If the one found in the wrong was found to have known what was right and been wrong deliberately, that typically means he pays the wronged party three times the amount of correcting the harm, rather than just the amount.
- Draconian penalties to shift the expected outcome of a rule-breaker's bet is the stuff of criminal law, with its higher standard of proof.
- A person paying, not only for his own misdeeds, but for that of thousands of others, is hardly "setting right" the result of their own misbehavior.
- If the punishment is to be, not three times, but nine thousand times the cost of the alleged offense, how fair is it to use a "more likely than not" standard? If an innocent person is to be put at risk of paying nine thousand times the price of the stuff he allegedly obtained, shouldn't this require a "nine-thousand-to-one" standard to prove the case?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
just because a jury can go against the law doesn't mean that's half the purpose of a jury.
It's not "half the purpose of a jury", it's the whole purpose of a jury of the defendant's peers. When the law is wrong, the jury's constitutional, patriotic duty is to overturn the bad law. If not for jury nullification, a jury of peers is useless. Laws are laws and peers or not, a jury would have to uphold them against any benefit to society allowed by removing the bad laws. Except they can nullify bad laws and not have to uphold them.
Only in the case of a good law (i.e. not indefinite copyrights held by non-human, non-individual entities) would a jury need to find the accused guilty.
In Soviet Russia, the fines are... actually reasonable?
How does no evidence... none... not a fucking shred.... Equate to the defendant "wasting the court's time" exactly, idiot?
Fine the judge, jury, and the useless sack of garbage that is the RIAA if you want.
But in THIS country, evidence is what is used to convict or punish. Not "not gitten no respect" like you seem to imply.
"I support more excessive remedies for people who bring lawsuits or escalate civil action to court under fraudulent circumstances... "
Liar. That sentence is incompatible with the rest of your expressed views.
I really really hope some cop gets a bug in his blue bonnet about you glancing at his well-beaten girlfriend and tasers your ass, throws you in jail under "resisting arrest". After all, it's a bad bad thing to piss off the authorities in your view. The evidence be damned, and fuck you if you are unlucky enough to get noticed.
That witness does not even validly qualify as an "expert witness" and has had their testimony thrown out of numerous courts as well as being threatened with legal action if they continued their work in the state of Texas. Their "facts" have been proven invalid again and again as well as being laughed at and torn apart here at Slashdot. Unfortunately her lawyer didn't mount a strong attack on this or apparently even object to their ranting in court about all the harm being done by "pirates" as being irrelevent as to the matter of whether or not his client was liable in this particular case. Further, the "expert witness" has been known to break into people's computers to look for evidence, once that happens how can you expect to be able to call anything they "find" on a computer to be valid?
The interviewed juror seemed to think spoofing was an unbelieveable claim just because he didn't know how ("we aren't stupid") and with his comment about his wife you have to wonder if he didn't discuss it with her, which would be a conduct violation on his part. Being as this jury wanted to prove "we aren't stupid around here" then it was likely that in their ignorance they decided to go with the "higher authority" and perceiving that to be the RIAA instead of one individual.
All this case proves is that the system works and I don't mean the Justice System, I mean the one that starts with you being taught to blindly accept authority by the Public School System. The jurors perceived the RIAA as the authority here and accepted all the crap they fed them.
One of the major problems with the civil justice system is that "preponderance of evidence" is too often equated with who produced the most evidence. It is undeniable that a corporation can afford to produce a greater quantity of "evidence" then an individual can and it is almost impossible to prove you did NOT do something. In this case Best Buy even had the sales records where she had purchased the albums that include the songs she was accused of sharing. There was no Kazaa software on her hard drive nor any evidence it had been there. Yes the drive had been replaced but it was testified by the Best Buy tech that this had been done before the alledged events.
She testified she ripped all those songs from cds she owned, RIAA tried to say she couldn't have done it as fast as the times indicated. Feel free to test this, grab a fast entire cd at a time ripper and race it against finding and downloading the same tunes, willing to bet the ripping process wins hands down especially if you have your cd collection right there and run it like the back up operation it is.
There is more that could be said but I am tired of ranting. Maybe Mr. Beckerman will log in and give that "cut and dry" line a proper roasting.
Um. Do you think that's what she was figuring when she was breaking the law:
"I've got a good job and two kids. But you know, I want to get music for free instead of paying for it. So I'll go ahead and break the law and if they catch me I'll tell them I'm a single mother."
Ultimately it's her job to make sure that she provides a good home for her kids. I mean, having kids doesn't suddenly mean that all criminal punishments are reduced because you have to take care of children.
The application of law is already whimsical and often capricious. Bush had the Justice Dept. stop prosecuting Microsoft. Cops have the freedom to not give tickets to friends. DA's have the freedom to (silently) choose not to prosecute for political reasons.
And besides, we can't really expect judges to support the people's overriding of a conviction the judge would like to make. We the People are the final authority in the U.S. system, even if judges, DA's, congressmen, and Presidents claim otherwise. I submit that we just lack the balls to consistently assert our authority.
RTFA before you comment. The juror quoted was one Michael Hegg. Also, the fairness of a jury's awarding of damages is one of opinion, not intellect. See: punitive damages.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
in light of the 10 year anniversary of /. and a bunch of people completely pissed off at the RIAA agenda, someone could easily setup a paypal donation account or something of the sort and we could see if /. user base really cares about a woman who's life has been ruined by the RIAA. That would make sense, be easy, help someone who thousands of people find has received injustice, piss RIAA off, and perhaps grab headlines around the globe.
She may be guilty of sharing the songs, she may owe SOMETHING, but if so many people can plainly see the injustice, then how come no one helps another citizen? Corporations and government have already won, good game.
Thankfully I live in Canada where the amount of statutory damages are far more sensible for a crime of this nature. To quote Michael Geist from his blog: Second, the statutory damages provision in Canada is marginally better, with the prospect that a court would never arrive at this kind of award. Indeed, the Act allows a court to go below $200 per infringement. Statutory damages still have no place in these kinds of cases, but at least Canadian law is a bit more reasonable.
I think we can all see the problem here. Anyone in the US who hasn't been on the internet by 2008, well, they have no clue what the hell they're talking about. Also this guy calls her a "liar", while she was off by a year in terms of when she had the HD replaced, she had it replaced *before* the RIAA notified her and the guy who replaced it testified that it was really, honestly broken.
Apparently, there was only one juror who held out for reasonable damages (the $750 minimum) and the $9,250 per song was a compromise.
Naïve? No. Ignorant? Yes.
At least she plans to appeal.
I've been around Slashdot for quite awhile. Based on what I've read, I would have found her liable. Remember, the standard of proof is "more likely than not" in a civil trial. And yes, most likely this woman distributed the tracks they say she did, in violation of copyright laws.
My intimate knowledge of how software "REALLY works" wouldn't really have much to do with this decision. Sure - maybe her IP address or MAC address were spoofed. It's possible, but unlikely, given all of the evidence supplied.
The application of law is already whimsical and often capricious. Bush had the Justice Dept. stop prosecuting Microsoft. Cops have the freedom to not give tickets to friends. DA's have the freedom to (silently) choose not to prosecute for political reasons.
In other words because the system isn't perfect, we should make it worse?
And besides, we can't really expect judges to support the people's overriding of a conviction the judge would like to make. We the People are the final authority in the U.S. system, even if judges, DA's, congressmen, and Presidents claim otherwise. I submit that we just lack the balls to consistently assert our authority.
The jury already has authority on matters of fact, and it's typically the evidence that's lacking when if the judge is out to "get someone". The judge has very little leeway to interpret law, and is likely to get overturned on appeal if he tries. There are in fact supreme courts that only deal with matters of law and whether it was correctly applied. From what I've understood, the primary function of jury nullification is to counteract corrupt laws.
But when the legislative process is working properly, I'd much rather trust the "we the people" that through representative elections vote in congressmen which pass law, rather than the "we the people" biased sample of a dozen, where any single individual is given the authority to fuck the process. To give one member of the public the authority to override the authority of we the people, is not to empower the people.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Perhaps you can explain WHY the Constitution specifically requires that people can be tried by a "jury of their peers", if not for the reason if giving common citizens a way to nullify unjust laws or judicial decisions.
A little hint: it's not because such a jury is going to "weigh the evidence" better than a panel of people who have received training in analyzing legal & evidentiary issues.
It's specifically because the Founders wanted a last-ditch mechanism for common citizens to protect each other if all three branches of government are operating out of the bounds of common sense.
It's only natural that the judicial system try and discourage this kind of thinking (and it's a damn shame that schools don't teach enough American Civics anymore to make people aware of their duties in this area), but that doesn't change the original intent of the Founders, and it's one damn good way for people to push back against an out-of-control government.
It's too bad there aren't more such ways. I personally think that it should be a Constitutional right to vote, regardless of whether you've been convicted of a crime or not (unlike the usual policies of disenfranchising convicted felons).
The way I see it, if your society is running in a healthy way, then there shouldn't be too many criminals & their vote won't have much of an effect on votes/elections.
If the government is heading in a direction where it's criminalizing a large chunk of the populace, however (which is a common tactic when the "leaders" of a society want to disenfranchise people who don't support them), then the votes of the convicted should provide a valuable negative feedback mechanism to the officials being elected to make them think twice about what kinds of laws they are passing.
Not a damned thing they can do about it?
It's called Judgment Notwithstanding the Verdict. You know, the other half to jury nullification, which itself is nullified when the jury does not obey instructions not to engage in questions of law. Jury nullification is when a jury refuses to punish an individual for violating the law. It is *not* an open-season referendum on whether the law should be enforced.
It depends on what you want to focus on. It'd be a pretty hard sell to explain to 11 people who have at best a passing familiarity with computers how spoofing and viruses introduce an element of doubt into who has what IP address on a filesharing network. It'd be easier to wonder aloud whether $750/song ($18,000) wouldn't be more than enough deterrent to casual downloading on the defendant's behalf. And it'd probably be easiest to speculate that if there are millions of people on P2P networks at any given point the odds are pretty good that even a steelworker's kids might find their way into some pretty major financial damages on the family computer without his knowledge until it's too late. I think it's easier to change minds when the argument you put forward is in terms that others can understand, process, and judge based on what they know, so if it comes down to explaining technology against trying to work out how long it'd take anybody in the room to pay off $222,000, I'd definitely try the latter approach.
In a federal civil trial the verdict must be unanimous unless both sides agree to a non-unanimous verdict; basically, if you're sufficiently motivated you can stick to your own decision and force a new trial (likely after a few days of being sent back in the little room by the judge and getting 11 people + most of the courtroom frustrated with you.) So -- depending on the Slashdotter -- the result could have been significantly different, but as it depends on either employing persuasive communication techniques or sacrificing personal comfort for the greater good... well, I don't know that I'd put money on it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
There is nothing in the Constitution that even REMOTELY implies that juries should have the power to determine which laws are good and which are bad. And the mandate in the Constitution for equal protection under the law completely opposes that argument. The purpose of having a jury of your peers is to have an objective judgment concerning the facts of the case. It is not their role to judge the law.
If she was aware that she was breaking the law, she probably didn't think the punishment would be so ridiculous.
If mp3 copyright infringement was prosecuted as this case was, 99% of the people aged 15-22 would be in bankruptcy.
This case was akin to being charged a $1,000,000 fine for a speeding citation. The statutory minimum damages are unreasonable, and the jury is even more unreasonable for assigning an even higher fine.
If the RIAA cared about her at all they wouldn't have tried to go for a per mp3 infringement ruling. They could have argued it was just one,or gone for some other measure. Note that the RIAA did not actually want this court case, but since she wanted it, well, they decided to slap her down hard.
They did try to be nice, in their warped world view, by asking for their original small fine that is piddling in the face of this court ordered fine. I wonder at her intelligence to be honest, she was caught stealing, whatever the nature. They said uploading, but she downloaded too, both aren't especially wise. The best course of action would have been to admit it, pay the small settlement amount and move on. She did bring this upon herself.
I am distressed more by the way the government appeared to applaud the destruction of her life in this manner.
I would just like to point out that my peers are technically literate and know a little something about justice (and jury nullification).
I am not actually guaranteed a trial by my "peers," but rather by the lowest common denominator of whatever turns up in a completely random sample. Anyone who is intelligent enough to think critically about the situation will be the first pass of the opposing lawyer.
The idea is nice in theory, but falls down in practice.
Aside: this is a fine example of how one person's stupidity makes her dangerous to those around her. Choosing ignorance for bliss is not simply a self-indulgent lifestyle preference, it is also directly harmful to others. I don't look down on stupid people because I am arrogant, but because they are a threat to me.
-copies or phonorecords distributed (which there weren't) and
-they must have been distributed "to the public" (which they weren't) and
-there must have been "sale[s] or other transfer[s] of ownership, or
So, out of all of the required elements, the RIAA proved exactly..... none. And under the jury instructions, were required to prove exactly..... none.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful