Slashdot Mirror
Jammie Appeals, Citing "Excessive" Damages
Peerless writes "Capitol v. Thomas defendant Jammie Thomas has officially appealed the RIAA's $222,000 copyright infringement award. She is seeking a retrial to determine the RIAA's actual damages, arguing that the jury's award was 'unconstitutionally excessive': 'Thomas would like to see the record companies forced to prove their actual damages due to downloading, a figure that Sony-BMG litigation head Jennifer Pariser testified that her company "had not stopped to calculate." In her motion, Thomas argues that the labels are contending that their actual damages are in the neighborhood of $20. Barring a new trial over the issue of damages, Thomas would like to see the reward knocked down three significant digits — from $222,000 to $151.20.'"
The Constitution doesn't "grant" us our rights and freedoms, it legally protects them. This is not a minor philosophical point.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Nope.
She's citing the 14th. The penalty runs afoul of due process. See BMW v. Gore.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Actually, the correct Latin is "vira" (it's one of those odd neuter words that look masculine at first glance) but as stated by another responder, the correct English is "viruses."
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
But then again, if you just want to sit around and make-up stuff to believe instead of actually reading up on some of all the research that's being done, be my guest. Hey, why don't you start a church?
Money for nothing, pix for free
I'm sorry, perhaps you missed the part where I quoted statistics from your own study that seem to oppose your argument? As I said, I didn't have time to read the entire thing in detail, but there were several other sections that were not nearly as one-sided in their view as you're making out, either.
But since you don't seem to read your own links, here's another one for you from the summary you cited this time:
An explosion in research (mainly dependent on access to proprietary data) as a result of public interest in these issues means that we are now in a position to provide answers with some degree of certainty. The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing probably has some negative impact on traditional sales but the effect is appears to be quite small. The size of this effect is debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent years, but a figure of between 0 and 30% would be a reasonable consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 0-30% of the decline in sales not a 0-30% decline in sales). At the same time there is still substantial disagreement in the literature with the most impressive paper to date (Oberholzer and Strumpf 2005) estimating no impact from file-sharing.
I've even emphasized the important parts for the hard-of-reading. Clue: this clearly states that on the basis of all the studies to date, file-sharing is not an overall positive influence on sales. The only question is how much of a negative impact it has, and figures quoted in the literature cited work out to millions of dollars per week in some cases. And this is from a literature survey with a slight bias in its presentation!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
it's a motion to set aside the verdict, which is quite different than an appeal.
An appeal is to a higher court.
This is a motion directed toward the trial court.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
The US constitution grants the vast majority of American's rights and freedoms
No, the Constitution affirms a number of rights and freedoms which all people innately have, and defines bounds on the extent to which government may restrict those rights and freedoms.
In this particular case, the most applicable passage from the Constitution would likely be Amendment XIII: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The law, as written, allows copyright holders to collect statutory fines from infringers far greater than actual damages. But if the appeals court finds that such statutory fines can meet the Constitutional standard of "excessive", then the law providing for such fines will be found in violation of the Constitution, and overturned.