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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."
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
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.
From TFA: But Hegg said the jury in U.S. District Court in Duluth would have found her liable even if the plaintiffs had been required to establish that Kazaa users had actually downloaded the music.
/sarcasm The article made it sound like (imho) that the jury had already decided before all arguments had been heard.
"It would have been a lot harder to make the decision," he said. "Yes, we would have reached the same result."
I'm glad to see that jurors no longer need to hear evidence/proof and have their minds made up in advance.
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.
Two points here:
1) I can't imagine what a pathetic and aggressive loser you have to be to think that somebody should pay $3.6m as restitution for letting somebody copy 24 songs (even if you think they're guilty.)
2) It really sounds like they don't understand the difference between a defense lawyer saying "they didn't prove that this technically feasible activity didn't happen" and a woman who is actively claiming that this was the case.
I hope that the douchebags who pushed for $150k/song get hit by the RIAA because their kids installed some software without their knowledge, because only then will they realize how completely and totally fucking wrong they are.
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.
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.
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.
That's called "jury nullification" and judges hate it because there's not a damned thing they can do about it. In fact, attorneys are forbidden to mention the concept in their arguments. If the jury in this case had decided to do that, the RIAA would have had no grounds for appeal, because the jury is the *only* arbiter of fact. You can appeal decisions of the judge, but not the actual jury decision. IANAL and all that, but that's how I understand it.
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"I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naive."
Way to disprove that by fining a stupid Kazaa user a quarter of a million dollars.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
"I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naïve. We're not that stupid up here" implies that Duluth juries are stupid... just not *that* stupid.
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
My fiancee is a lawyer. I joked I would get off of jury duty by stating that I was a big fan of jury nullification. She told me not to say those words as I would contaminate the entire jury selection pool and probably find my sorry ass found in contempt of court.
Link
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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 $222,000 for 24 songs? This is where the RIAA's case is illogical. They assume that the downloaders will distribute and that this will cause them many losses. But that's THE DOWNLOADERS' FAULT, not hers.
They're making her responsible for what EVERY DOWNLOADER DID. Instead of downloading from her they could have bought a CD (even pirated!) or downloaded from someone else.
And this is where "making available" doesn't equal massive infringement. The fines MUST BE PROPORTIONAL TO THE NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS.
I think the real lesson here is that you shouldn't lie to a jury. It sounds like the juror was pissed off that the defendant didn't respect them enough to tell the truth.
If you're going to get up and give testimony, don't tell obvious lies.
The jurors have been called away from their everyday lives to sit and listen to an argument between two parties they have no interest in. The least you can do is show them some respect.
If I was on that jury, I would have counted that as a big strike against the defendant as well.
... [$]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
I'm thinking about something here.
Usually when you rip a CD, where does the software put it? In "my music", of course. That's the default for music - and most Joe users put their documents in guess where? "My documents"
And when you install kazaa, doesn't it automatically scan for music in "my music"? In fact, I think it scans "my documents", too!
She could easily have alleged ignorance of how the software worked, i.e. she ignored she was sharing it and was only using it for downloading.
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.
IANAL either, but my fiancee who is assures me that jury nullification is alive; the courts just don't want to mentioned.
Your woeful ignorance of the concept of jury nullification not only bothers me, but it terrifies me. The jury is the final arbiter of truth, and a not guilty verdict cannot be overturned, "legal" or not. It has a long standing tradition in North America, predating the American Revolution. In fact, citizens of the colonies used jury nullification several times to "nullify" laws they found unjust. Since you've served on so many juries, no doubt you noticed that the jury doesn't read the verdict plus a paragraph of reasoning? Jury nullification cannot be truly removed with the current system we have in place.
That said, I also believe that she was shown guilty far beyond what the law calls for.
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.
In the article, it says that she did turn the hard drive over to the RIAA. That act is just stupid, as RIAA can plant there evidence there if they wanted to do so. Also, most computers on dial up and ADSL have dynamic ip, but as most here knows, that means the end user ip changes each time it is connected to the internet. That alone should have been able to cast the whole case in doubt. The jury is a case of people how have no understanding of computers or how the internet works.
RIAA should also be sued for tampering with the evidence by demanding that people hand over there hard drives for them to "inspect" them. By there own specials investigators, but RIAA doesn't have the right to do so. Since they are not a police force of any type.
Stealing or copyright infringement? It makes a difference!
For the rest of us, however, copyright legislation contains more than just the one word "copyright". For the most part, it contains numerous paragraphs with restrictions on copying, distributing and performing the work in question as well as many other restrictions around use of the work.
sigs are hazardous to your health
> probability states that it would be worthwhile putting one of a thousand guns to your head,
> where only one was loaded, and pulling the trigger if the reward was a million dollers upon survival.
Uh, no. Probability and expectation theory only deals in uniform ideal units. Your example contains two different units: "death" and "dollar". You're confusing probability theory with utility theory here. Or with a combination of probability and utility theory.
E.g., if the person pulling the trigger knows he is sick and most likely will die in great pain within several weeks, I wouldn't think it at all extraordinary for him to take this wager. In his case the utility of death vs. money is different than for others (you, for example, it seems).
And in the downloader's case, in many cases the downloaded product has a higher utility (e.g., no DRM) than the product he can attain legally. And what the relative utility of being sued by RIAA is for him is dependent on what he thinks, not what you think.
Happened in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4374222.stm The uploader actually went to jail.
Looking at it from several perspectives. Yes they look guilty. But as stated above. The punishment should fit the crime. Be it this was a civil case not criminal. The same stands. The Jury was obviously pissed off by the defendant and nailed that person on not just fact, but emotion. Just look at the jurors statement! Its pretty obvious. The amount IS ludicrous. At worst the Jury should have only doubled the original settlement. I guess you could say don't piss off the jury, but thats obvious. But in this case, the jury did cross the line. Again, see juror's statement. I've spent a lot of time in the courtroom (not as a defendant). Jury's can unfortunately get to emotional and prejudicial.
There's really few options this person has now.