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DoJ Sides With RIAA On Damages
Alberto G writes "As Jammie Thomas appeals the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict against her, the Department of Justice has weighed in on a central facet of her appeal: whether the $9,250-per-song damages were unconstitutionally excessive and violated the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. The DoJ says that there's nothing wrong with the figure the jury arrived at: '[G]iven the findings of copyright infringement in this case, the damages awarded under the Copyright Act's statutory damages provision did not violate the Due Process Clause; they were not "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable."' The DoJ also appears to buy into the RIAA's argument that making a file available on a P2P network constitutes copyright infringement. 'It's also impossible for the true damages to be calculated, according to the brief, because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement.'"
That's not the DOJ's decision to make.
the American legal system, the best justice money can buy... stays bought...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
She was obviously and unquestionably guilty and she had a slashbot's arrogance to go to court instead of paying a few grand.
Oh, right, because this is the same Department of Justice that doesn't see anything wrong with waterboarding, transporting people to secret overseas prisons, etc. It's the same DOJ that kowtowed to Microsoft pretty much the same day that President Bush swore his first oath of office.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The America's government is corrup from the lobbyists who bribe politicians all the way up to the Congress and President who accept bribes every day.
A country which is run by bribes and corruption is always going to screw the common man to benefit the people who can afford to bribe the politicians.
This is what the RIAA's bribes paid for.
Maybe it wasn't that good an idea to appeal. It was pretty obvious to me that it would end like this. It just strenghtened the RIAA. However, not appealing could be interpreted as an acknowledgment from JT and the lawyers that the RIAA was right as well... This whole RIAA thing is very unfair in general, and the fact that the government not only allows it but even encourages makes it still more miserable.
OOH sarcasm, the lowest form of humor.
NO guy, it's because the DOJ's decision is irrelevant in the face of a court decision.
THAT'S A-L-L.
'It's also impossible for the true damages to be calculated, according to the brief, because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement.'"
Given that the fair market value of a song has been established at $.99 it sure seems like the DoJ is making a directly contradictory statement. They are saying that even though it is impossible for one to know how many accesses there were it's okay to go ahead and assume that number was over nine thousand. Didn't know the DoJ should be out there supporting assumptions... oh well.
--- I do not moderate.
Since it's unkown how many other users accessed the files, the possibility that the number is zero is as possible as any other number.
If you cannot prove HOW many accessed the file, you cannot prove ANY accessed the file. Yet simply making available is a violation anyway.
The award is ludicrous.
big problem. Forget that, the US is obviously bleeding dry financially from the ungrateful copyright infringers who can't even be considerate enough to log who downloaded files from their computer. No wonder congress won't fund the war in Iraq anymore, this is obviously an imminent danger to all of the world's economies. (end sarcasm) So each song that might have been downloaded has obviously been downloaded 9250 times? I wonder how much it would cost to hire hackers to find kazaa software installed on **AA servers? Perhaps they might find some seditious reading material to help us in the US all decide who to vote for in the coming presidential election. The MPAA's ISP was just served DMCA takedown notice because of their University Toolkit being in violation of the GPL http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/03/mpaas-university-wir.html I seriously wonder what else can be found to be wrong with the **AA's internet infrastructure.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
If you RTFA, you'll find that the DOJ is siding with the RIAA because the defendant agreed to the terms put forth to the jury. She acknowledged and went along with the instructions, which included precisely how much she could be liable for if found guilty. In so doing she effectively waived her right to make this claim.
I'm one of the last people who would take something the DOJ says seriously these days, but their reasoning on this issue is sound.
More on this at Ars Technica.
Now, if only the artists were making a cent of that $9,250-per-song.... Guess the RIAA somehow convinced the DoJ that someone should make up for the lack of profit the new Simpson sister album is experiencing.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
..the Department of JUSTICE(emphasized for extra scariness)weighed in! Might as well stop the appeal and just pay up those fines when a government agency(which is surely free from media corporation corruption) weighs in. Hell, why doesn't Homeland Security and the FCC weigh in too? That would make this an open and shut case in the court system. President Bush, want to weigh in too?
"hehe, I love tacos."
This is the same DoJ that claimed that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln made wide use of electronic surveillance against citizens...
... I'd set up a honeypot limewire/kazaa/torrent/whatever and firewall access such that only the RIAA/MPAA 7 their tools can access it. And then populate the shared directories with files like:
BRITNEY_SPEARS_OOPS.MP3
METALICA_ONE.MP3
etc.
Of course the MP3's would just be actual MP3 audio of my kids singing some random song.
While I don't actually WANT to be sued, I would like to see them explain to a judge why they think they own the rights to my kids singing "The RIAA is a bunch of floppity-floofy heads!".
If only I wasn't so lazy...
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
you would not be fined $222,000 if you stole a few CDs from Walmart.
Wait, so if I share a song with fifty people and they each share with fifty people are we all responsible for 2550 shares each?
So even though only 2551 people heard the song we owe, in total, 6.5m times the value of the song?
From the article summary: "...because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement."
Sure, people can debate all day long about how much she should or shouldn't be held liable for given her infringing activities. But how the hell can you use other people's possible, but admittedly unverified activities which might have resulted from something you did to exact additional punishment on the "offender?"
Let's say I'm not paying attention and run over someone's cat. Am I now liable for the possible, but unverifiable, increase in the rodent population in my neighborhood, and consequently liable for potential damages in hospital bills for a contagious disease which might be spread by some lucky rat?
Someone's being prosecuted for stuff that may or may not have happened, and may or may not ever happen, but nonetheless is regarded as damaging in the eyes of the courts. Wow.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
So they are punishing her for the "further infringements" others MAY have done after the got the songs from her computer as well ?? This doesnt make any sense @ all to me ..
Case closed.
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig
It is impossible to have an exact figure, but an accurate estimate, at least an order of magnitude, is entirely feasible.
They say they lose billions a year due to piracy. Let's say they are right and are losing 10 billions, not an unrealistic figure, but still on the high side.
There are over 1 million people in America sharing music. We all know it's a lot more than that, but let's be conservative.
That would leave an average of $10 000 lost due to each file sharer, and that is an the upper limit. Sharing less than 30 songs is probably under the average if there are indeed only 1 million file sharers, so there is absolutely no way $220 000 can be a correct punishment in this case.
What was so tough about this?
Two things.
1) It seems to me that, given the fact that statutory damages in copyright infringement claims, are allowed in place of actual damages in instances in which actual damages cannot actually be calculated--the statutory damages are an attempt by Congress to estimate the likely actual damages caused to the plaintiff. In this case, that amount seems to be on the side of outragiously overestimating actual damages.
2) The DOJ argues that a damage of the high award is mitigated by the fact that no one knows how many other people accessed the songs made available by the defendant. This bothers me because it basically states that it is ok to collect damages that were not properly proven (which is obviously not ok).
The DMCA was written by (predominately) Democratic lobbyists, advanced by Fritz "Disney" Hollings (D), and signed into law by President Clinton.
The Republicans may have been the majority party at the time, but at least own up and take some of the responsibility. This is bipartisan hatred-of-consumers.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
The DoJ cost way too much money to tax payers, it's time to outsource it to a region where stupidity costs much less.
The right question is not how many times the song was downloaded but how much.
How much the song can be downloaded and therefore uploaded by you is limited by your upload bandwidth, which is lower than the download speed for DSL connections.
Also many filesharing programs show the upload/download ratio statistics.
Also, download speeds and therefore upload speeds reciprocally usually suck as far as I know it.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Within a P2P network, the total amount of uploading and downloading is the same. For every packet downloaded by someone, that packet was uploaded by someone. Therefore, the average user found to be sharing songs should be liable for two copies of that song: the copy they downloaded, and the copy they (probably) uploaded. Unless it can be shown that they did more than an average amount of uploading, this is the most reasonable assumption to be made.
The defendant was convicted for 24 songs. If we count each song as two infractions, this would be like stealing 4 CDs and giving 2 of those away. (Except that stealing the CDs would be worse, because it would be both retail theft AND copyright infringement.) What's the penalty for stealing 4 CDs? IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 1% of the penalty she received.
Any rational person would have to call this penalty absurd, unless they had ulterior motives to pretend otherwise.
(See also my post on why the RIAA thinks they are owed 83 trillion dollars.)
That sounds like the person who made the first copy available should allso suffer for all the wrong-doings of whomever downloaded the copy (I sincerely doubt to the legality of that), while the RIAA is allowed to extract punishment (read: a lot of money) from them too !
So, while the RIAA demands a lot of dough with the reasoning that a single copy is (no doubt at all) the top of a destribution pyramid, a distribution they want to be re-embursed for, it has no qualms to use the same reasoning against whomever in that pyramid made a copy and allso distributes it.
That sums up (pun intended) to the RIAA demanding multiple payments for the same product.
The Law can be harsh, but a Law accepting that two people can be convicted for a "crime" for which one of them has allready payed is no Law at all, but a farce. But than again, Law and Right are not the same
Whoa. What does that have to do with anything? Do these damages preempt later damage claims?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Imagine someone shares a DRM-free song from Apple iTunes by posting it deliberately on a small file sharing network. Someone in that network turns around and "shares" it with millions. Then the RIAA says, "Okay, you want us to count all of the infringement? We subpoenaed some network and found that the one particular copy of the song has been downloaded 1 million times." [Cue Austin Powers little finger.] At .99 per download, that $990,000 in damages for that one song. And thanks to the fact that Apple listened to the demands for no DRM, we can now trace that one copy of the song back to the rightful owner, the original infringer. Here's a bill for $990,000. We won't bother with just asking for $9250 for that song.
:-)
Now, I realize that many of the million people wouldn't have paid 99 cents for the song in the first place. I realize that the band probably got some publicity. But it sure sounds to me like $990,000 is as fair a number as we can ever come up with. So maybe these statutory guesstimates aren't so bad after all. I've seen file "sharing" networks. I've seen the number of songs sloshing around college campuses. The more I think about it, the more I realize that $150,000 isn't tooo outrageous.
The so-called copyfighters should be careful what they wish for. If the RIAA is forced to actually count the downloads because some pedantic fool is able to successfully argue that "making available" isn't really infringement, then they're going to do it. And the numbers could be even higher and more damning. Computers can log a huge amount of data and 64 bit machines can count pretty high.
I am very anti RIAA/MPAA, but this woman blew her credibility by LYING and destroying evidence.
The jury handed out the huge settlement in the RIAA's favor for this very reason.
She could have fought the RIAA and won if she had chosen to be honest about her actions.
She is no hero or victim. Instead she is an IDIOT.
We need to fight the RIAA/MPAA with the TRUTH to win.
Fair enough.
metadIscussions
How about a roadside traffic stop where the nice copper asks if he can search your car. You got nuttin' to hide right?
You just waived a right if you said yes.
Maybe I'm way off base here, but why aren't any further acts of copyright infringement the sole responsibility of those who commit that infringement?
Otherwise, it would seem to me that an affirmative defense would be that the RIAA has already recovered damages for your infringement because they already prosecuted your source.
Why should the RIAA recieve compensation from me for infringement that may or may not have been perpetrated by someone who is not me?
And what I said was that the Eighth Amendment may constitute a right you cannot waive. While that right cannot be stripped, it may also be a right you cannot waive, as in you cannot agree to a public dissection (drawing) if the DA wants to pursue that option. You cannot waive your right to be shielded from cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the same court said in Lockyer v. Andrade that life in prison for shoplifting $150 worth of video tapes was not excessive, so I doubt they'll have a problem with the constitutionality of the judgment.
If the owner of a record store left it unattended while going to the bathroom, he should be liable for ever possible for each person who could have come in and duplicated all the records (using a super secret instant duplicator) while he was taking a pee.
Since she destroyed evidence (log files) by having her hard drive replaced, she shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt about how many songs she uploaded
That should be
I am replying with this to Uncle Togie. Not only will his post ensure strategic placement of mine, I like the kid. He's got moxy, and he shouldn't lose that. http://127.0.0.1/ ...a classic gem!
I have again been the victim of moderator abuse http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=366293&cid=21424075. MOD me up to correct this injustice. Mod me down if you think I am a moron. Of course, in the immortal words of PeeWee: "I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you".
Too many moderators use Insightful as "I agree". Too many moderators fall for unoriginal groupthink and mod it up. People complain about trolls, but the REAL line noise on slashdot comes from the posts modded +4 or +5 that contribute NOTHING to an intelligent discussion. You can't filter that out, and even if you have your thresholds set high, you still see all the stupid stuff that you've already seen. That's why digg sucks and will never be anything but a place for 1338 high-skool haxx0rs. And it's happening here. So I used this account to call shenanigans on sucky posts. I getted modded into oblivion for pointing out truth. I guess that's how it goes. Most of you are a bunch of mindless sheeple.
You know, I once suggested that IQ tests be given to moderators to separate the wheat from the chaff. I think that wouldn't help. I kind of like having idiot moderators. MORONS! DOPES! Bring it, tubers!
It's not narcissicism if it's true!
Remind me to sue for obscene amounts of money when my next photo gets 'borrowed'.
I don't get it either. If Jammie DLd those materials, just charge Jammie what they would have made on those DLs. It looks like they're going after all the sharing that took place through Jammie, then thy should try and go after all the DLs beyond her for actual damages. Was this a jury of people who had never heard of any of the backstory to all this? RIAA says burn her. Jury says burn her. DOJ says burn her. The rest of the world says hold on. It's like OJ's trial. They managed to find the only 13 people in the US who didn't think this guy was guilty as hell and got them in the same jury box.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In terms of excessive punishments, California sentenced a man to life in prison for stealing a handful of DVDs from a store. See Lockyer v. Andrade, life in prison for stealing $150 worth of DVDs was held by the Supreme Court to not be excessive.
I don't think the RIAA agree to that...
America has almost no exports.
Most of us (Americans) live at the end of a very long supply chain. We import most of our food, clothing, raw materials, etc...we even import the oil with which we power the vehicles we use for importing. We are very dependent on the rest of the world.
How do we pay for all this? We export our culture. That's it. We do that in digital form.
If the rest of the world refused to respect our concepts of digital information ownership, our exports would buy us a whole lot of nothing. The economic consequences of this would be very devastating.
So, it is in the selfish interest of all Americans that copyright law be accepted and strictly enforced across the globe. Like it or not, we need it.
Of course....perhaps the "right" solution would be for us to treat digital data in a manner that suits the technological landscape (meaning, redesign copyright law to have a very high tolerance for private duplication and distribution), and then for America to use all that latent entrepreneurial talent to come up with new exports and new ways of adding value to the old exports. While we are at it we could maybe start moving some of our production back on-shore and reduce our dependence on other countries (and maybe, just maybe, build some new exports for ourselves that way).
Unfortunately, doing that would cost a lot of rich people a lot of money. It *will not* happen until there is no other way. So...brace yourselves...things are going to get worse before they get better.
Many people here are trying to equate her punishment to the actual damages she may have caused. You can't have a functioning society with that mentality. If you were fined actual damages when you broke the law, then everyone would try to shoplift what they were going to buy anyway. If they don't get caught, they get the stuff for free. If they get caught, they pay what they would anyway.
There has to be a lot more negative for getting caught breaking the law than the damage created. That ensures people will be discouraged from breaking the law. If you don't like the law, work to have it changed.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
If just making a file available constitutes infringement then just having the money available constitutes paying your taxes.
http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2007/07/itunes-hits-3-b.html/
7/31/07: Apple announces hitting the 3 Billion mark with it's iTunes downloads. Now, assuming that an equivalent amount have been distributed illegally since the inception of the internet we can come up with a conservative estimate of what the damages would look like.
$9,250 per song x 3,000,000,000 songs = $27,750,000,000,000
For those of your not used to so many zeroes that's 27.75 trillion dollars. You would have to almost take every sale of music since Edison first made the Phonograph to come up with that kind of money.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
Very few people could afford to pay those kinds of damages. So someone downloaded some songs. The mafIAA might actually have a leg to stand on in the public eye if instead of these financial executions, they just went for some corporal punishment and made it sting a little. The common man isn't scared of a quarter million dollars in damages because he can't fathom ever being ABLE to pay that kind of money. Fine him $10,000, it looks more like you're interested in actual justice as opposed to heavy-handed, over-the-top financial brutality. and John Q. Public can relate to $10,000 because it's comprehensible to him.
It's senseless, financial violence, and it's counter-productive. The American public as a nation doesn't like being bullied into submission, and that's exactly what the RIAA is doing. Maybe the DoJ is keen to this, sick of the RIAA and keen to see them get the backlash they deserve. Somehow, I doubt it.
since when is slashdot full of folks who support the DMCA? i've been gone for awhile but the fact this thread even exists here shocks me. i hope you all get fines for jaywalking.
the concern with this topic is not this one case so much as the legitimacy of copyright statutes in the networked age. the idea of intellectual property and copyright is relatively new and obviously at odds with the internet. all the internet does is copy things and at worst copyright could lead to de facto criminalization of all citizens.
the absurdity of the penalty and whether this punishment/enforcement model is effective or sustainable is a much more pertinent topic than if she broke the law and if she deserved the penalty.
even the changes to copyright laws over the past few years are fairly terrifying unless you are already wealthy due to holding copyrights on work you did not personally create.
They're communications majors. They can't do math.
(I double majored in CS and Comm, so I have the right to make that joke. Tell that to any Comm major, and I can almost guarantee they'll laugh and say how true this is.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Most clients keep a good record of exactly what your share ratio per torrent has been. If it's less than one, you don't owe so much. If it's more, you pay a little more. At least you could prove that you did not infringe enough to justify a $200,000 penalty.
It sounds like you are in favor of punitive damages, and I would think that most of the /. community would not argue with reasonable punitive damages. Damages in this case are not punitive, but statutory, and far beyond reasonable punitive damages. Refer, perhaps to the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
"In response to judges and juries which award high punitive damages verdicts, the Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions which limit awards of punitive damages through the due process of law clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is broad enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety, and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional."
i hope she goes bankrupt and has to live on the streets for being a common thief. she has no right to expect anything but the disdain of society for her crimes and i'm sick of these people being coddled. i say thrash them and show others that there is serious results to their crimes. slashfags play this down but it's only because slashfags are thieves too and fear their day of retribution. look at how many say they should do this and should do that but don't. they don't have the balls because they know they have no right to what they're taking and the petty justifications they use to steal the music would not hold up in court.
this cunt will pay and hopefully will all other thief fucking slashfags.
Many people here are trying to equate her punishment to the actual damages she may have caused.
OK, what are the "actual damages" in this case?
What she did: making 23 songs available over P2P that were already available over P2P.
If you can, with a straight face, say that the "actual damages" here are over two digits... you're a hell of a poker player.
If she had stolen those 23 tracks as a couple of physical CDs, she'd be facing well under $1000 in fines. $1000 seems a pretty hefty disincentive already: at least it works for petty theft. And seriously, whether you call this "theft" or not, it's pretty damn petty.
But let's go all out, let's make the fines 100 times the actual damages. Let's be really outrageous, and figure 10 lost sales for each song, and count the songs as if they were worth $1.00 each. Those are all pretty damn steep figures, but for the sake of argument... you're STILL off by a factor of 10.
If you don't like the law, work to have it changed.
That's what she's doing.
But surely
(cost of digital download of song from itunes|wherever / file size) * upstream bandwidth * time file sharing software was running
is a simple upper bound on the measurement of "damage".
Thus destroying yet another market for RIAA to try to extort money out of.
It's hard to sue for damages when the product costs nothing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I actually like the idea that copyright infringement over a linux distro should incur damages rated at 50K for each package in the distro. This would land people like RIAA in interesting waters when they use FOSS without following the licenses as we've seen yesterday.
My watch contains Mp3's.
If a Doctor left that watch inside a patient, would that be "making those songs available" so the doctor can then pay $9250 per song to the patient?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sure beats falling on your own sword to get a pardon.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Seriously, do the artist get the money from these lawsuits, or does it go straight into an executives pocket?
Can I bum a sig?
let's see...
- Cruel and unusual punishment. Over $9000 for a song with a market value of 99c? Ridiculous
- Double Jeopardy. The plantiff filing an appeal, to go after the same person for the same offense? Unlawful.
- Getting punished for another's crimes. Other people's illegal happenings are none of the defendant's concern or responsibility.
- Innocent until PROVEN guilty. Getting punished over UNPROVEN damages is heinous.
- A judge that goes along with all of this? That's grounds for severe punishment, if not disbarment.
of the justice system.
proud caffeine whore
I mean seriously...if it's evil, they're all for it. Makes you wonder.
expandfairuse.org
If you consider that Apple supposedly pays about $.70/song for iTunes downloads, $9,250 of lost revenue per song would translate to about 13,214 downloads per song, or 303,922 downloads total. If the average mp3 is about 3MB, that puts the total data transfer at 911,766MB, or about 890.39GB of data. How long did she have this crap shared? I wonder what kind of DSL/Cable plan she was on.
Not being a developer of P2P software or knowing how feasible this would be I have a plan.
Get somebody to write a program that lists on P2P networks songs from Metellica, Prince and all the other ones that are all over P2P as available for download. But have the open source software coded in such a way as it is impossible to actually download the music.
Then wait for a RIAA lawsuit against you for sharing music. Go to court and prove it is impossible for the software you have running on your machine to actually send out the files listed. Get a precedent set that just having music "available" does not prove it is actually been or is capable of being downloaded.
If a online project is done to do this which some support from a legal team anti RIAA and a few 10,000's being download and run the software wouldn't the RIAA be royally Fscked?
Lockyer's a three-strikes case. He wasn't sentenced to life for stealing dvds; he was sentenced for getting a third felony. I'm not defending that -- I disagree with the three strikes law and I think the High Court made the wrong decision here -- but the decision was about the three strikes law, not about what is a reasonable punishment for stealing DVDs.
If the RIAA assumes each download is a lost sale then logically every album downloaded must equate to one less record sale. If the number of lost record sales and the number of total downloads each year aren't equal I don't see how they can legally make the claims they do. 50 million downloads of pirated albums should equate to a 50 million unit drop in annual record sales, do we see that? I don't.
So, if every download can't with certainty be a lost sale, how can they claim such outlandish damages?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The IRAA lost maybe $5.00 total. The fact here is that the people that use P2P software aren't going to buy the product anyhow. They will spend their money on other things, not music they weren't willing to pay for in the first place.
Another point to consider is where the song originated. Did it come from someone else who shared it? Did they already sue that person? You can't double dip the chip here. They should be forced to validate where the song was first released on P2P and prosecute that person.
If I understand correctly the "damages" are being paid to compensate for a possible loss and are not supposed to be a fine (on a side note, she hasn't gained anything by sharing, so the possible fine shouldn't be that hard on her anyway). So the 9250$/song figure is the base value of a "per song" loses. If we assume that a normal CD has 8 tracks this makes 74000$ per CD. Then, with the 15$ price tag on a single cd (20$ for a new one, 10$ for older one - I suppose there was a mix of those) we get the approximate number of 5000 CDs. Since the whole case is about 24 mp3s this makes 15000 CDs total. ;)
If she was the one who released those before the official release date, I'd say those damages are not high enough. However, if she was just sharing files available from multiple other sources then... well, those 15000 CDs could make even 5% or more of officially sold CDs. Catch a few more sharers and you can get platinum just for getting them sued. I'd love to see how did they come up with those numbers...
Anyway, I have better idea - check the number of available sources and divide the potential loses by their number for a more accurate "damages"
Ah, and on another side note - I wonder if the artists will get their share of those 15000 "sold" CDs...
some drunk crashed into my car its value compared to a 1.99 song is 100 million dollars.
The DOJ is controlled by the Bush administration. The Bush administration is in bed with the *AA. As we have seen with Alberto Gonzales, the head of the DOJ, all that it has become lately is a tool to find some sort of legal justification for the administrations extremist views or corruption.
There's a brilliant idea encoded in your post. I wonder how much it would cost to get file-sharing insurance? You can get insurance for just about anything, so why not pay a few bucks a year to cover your lawsuit losses if you should happen to get caught and have to settle or be convicted for this? This would normalize the costs of songs quite nicely. :)
What do you expect? Bush BENDS OVER for big business! He could care about the 'little guy'-they don't bribe him! His Justice Dept. is stacked with hand picked cronies. It's a surprise to you that they think as he does?
... when you accuse everyone in power with a different opinion of being corrupt.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It's good that making songs available was found to be copyright infringement. Otherwise, free software would be in big trouble. The GPL depends heavily on the fact that putting something up on a server for the public to download counts as distribution and requires copyright permission. That is what gives GPL the power to force source to be made available with binaries that are distributed via the web or public FTP servers.
If the person was using bittorrent (I don't think they were) then the best number to use is 1.
Assuming that 1 person starts with a file and n more download it, then everyone has downloaded 1 copy and the average upload is n/(n+1) copies.
If you assume the person you "caught" is not the original seeder (who must have uploaded at least 1 copy), the average for all other downloaders is less than 1. 1 is a good number.
Let's penalise these people -- I think 3 times is the normal approach. So charge them 3 x the retail price of a download (about $3.00).
Not bagging your position here, because while it's one that I don't agree with I can see how, having not had personal experience with the vast majority of historical presidents and being presented with the continual illusion that the office of the presidency is solely responsible for not only foreign but domestic policy, you might land at that conclusion. My puzzlement stems from the "insightful" rating. I mean, really, this is a fairly widely held opinion and probably will be until the new guy starts screwing things up, just like with Clinton. And it's not exactly gleaned from a gaze which penetrates into the obscure complexities of politics and emerges triumphant bearing a gleaming truth which sloughs off years of misconceptions in the minds of the onlookers. And, finally, valid as generic expression of outrage and 'my political opponent eats babies' may be to the grandfather comment, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything in the more general sense, especially in context of this thread. In short, I'm slowly being convinced that the "mods on crack" cliche is less an amusing hyperbole and more a literal truth. (If this comment gets modded up it will be just as silly, by the way.)
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
no mod points for you
As much as my personal political leanings lead me to believe that the Democrats are more often on the right side of issues of rights and decency than the Republicans are on most issues, it's important that everyone remember we have no friends in Washington on issues of civil rights vs. intellectual property rights.
The Democrats sell us out happily on issues that Hollywood and the recording industry find important, and you'll find absolutely no disagreement from the Republicans on a sop to one of America's largest export industries. Don't expect much help from the Libertarians either -- they're pretty divided on the issue themselves, with many of the rather large contingency that places property rights over all other rights wanting this extended to IP as well.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I would love to see this logic applied to commercial radio stations:
It's unknown how many other users accessed the music distributed by the radio station in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement.
They are transmitting songs over the fcc-licensed airwaives, fully unencrypted, that anyone can just tap into and save. Those people can then distribute that music, and so forth. Apparently, the music industry is losing $1.2 x 10^13 a minute this way.
The law makes it clear to an average guy reading it that there is not even the pretense of making the fine proportionate to the actual damages.
That's why it is so unethical. Proportionality is a core concept of justice, maybe even hardwired.
Punishment that does not fit the crime is not justice at all.
If the damages are awarded to cover not only the illegal downloading of the songs but also the "collateral" damage caused by other people downloading the songs from the defendant, then once those damages are awarded, should that not bar the RIAA from seeking further damages from other individuals who have downloaded copies? If the RIAA were to sue every individual who has a pirated copy of each of there songs, as they seem intent on doing, their so-called "damages" would be many thousands of times more than they could have made by selling legitimate copies of the tunes. That strikes me as being very unreasonable.
Seriously. How did we get from copyright law to bush lying ???
If the motion is granted, there probably will not be an appeal.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
The DoJ also appears to buy into the RIAA's argument that making a file available on a P2P network constitutes copyright infringement. This statement is directly contradicted on the first page of the brief, where the DOJ states, in footnote 1, on the very first page: Because the defendant's motion does not contest the legal sufficiency of any of the grounds for recovery set forth in the jury instructions, and because we are participating solely to address the constitutional issue, we do not address which of the exclusive rights under the Copyright Act were violated here. (pdf)
Likewise, when the DOJ filed its brief in Elektra v. Barker, it said it took no position on the RIAA's "making available" argument, and had never prosecuted anyone for "making available".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
You got me, I was expecting to get modded troll. I'm seriously disappointed in the moderators. I got modded troll for a funny quip against an AC, and this gets modded insightful? People must really be pissed at Bush. I was just yanking the second guy's chain, because the first guy wasn't really making a point about Bush at all and guy the second jumps in with his whiney "why must everyone bash Bush?" And it wasn't even Bush bashing! So I gave him some.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
*sigh* What a disappointment. It's doubly tragic as RIAA is coming undone. EMI is cutting funding to them. Other labels will follow as their own businesses suck too fully for them to be able to afford to fund the RIAA. Implosion may just be imminent. But first, pay us a quarter-mil. That's alotta college tuition right there.
USNG: 14TPU4605
DOJ: "It's over nine thousand!!!!!"
News Flash Knoxville Mayor Victor "Victoria" Ashe Named by Kitty Kelly Book as Cop-Killer George Bush Jr's Skull & Boner Boytoy As reported by John Lee on PIRATE NEWS and censored IDIOTBOX WARS for the past 3 years! Georgie "Lips" Bush Junior loves polishing the knob of bald men like James Guckert aka Jeff Gannon aka kidnapped Johnny Gosch - Senator John DeCamp reported in March 2005 that Gannon is in fact Gosch, and that Bohemian Grove presidential retreat snuff pornographer Hunter S Thompson was one of 4 deaths within days of Gannon/Guckert outed at White House, with further confirmation at TomFlocco.com - DeCamp is author of The Franklin Coverup snuff kiddie porn S&L drug dealing trials linked to George Bush Sr "I'm very impressed with James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon. How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscortsM2M.com, WorkingBoys.net, and MeetLocalMen.com, get to meet the president of the United States? Who knew that a hotmilitarystud could so easily get face2face with the commander-in-chief?" -Maureen Dowd, NY Times, "Invasion of the Reporter Snatchers", Feb 18, 2005 (upset that she was denied a White House press pass while "Gannon" was allowed to live in the White House) "I'm also most appreciative of the Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee for being here. I've known Mayor Ashe for years and years and years. And he has done a fabulous job of being a fine public servant in Knoxville. So, Victor, thank you for coming." --George W. Bush, head cheerlader at all-male Andover High School and cheerleader at all-male Yale University "I want to thank my old college classmate -- you used to call him Bulldog, we call him Victor -- the Mayor of Knoxville, Mayor Victor Ashe." --George W. Bush, Van Hilleary for Governor Luncheon, Knoxville, Tennessee, 2002-10-08, ("Bulldog" same nickname Bush Jr. gave "Jeff Gannon"/"Jim Guckert" (kidnapped, raped, tortured, mind-kontrolled Johnny Gosch?), his homosexual White House hooker/journalist at HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com and MilitaryEscortsm4m.com. Bush has gay-style excrement nick names for the people he hangs out with: "Turdblossom" for gay puppeteer Karl Rove. David Lewis went under the name Sally Suckemsilly. "Pooty Poot" term for Vladimir Putin, Russian President and Commie KGB chief. "Mr. Big O" term for lispy treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, ex-CEO of ALCOA Corporation in Alcoa, Tennessee. George earned the nickname "Lips Bush" for his skill at giving blow jobs to his fraternity buddies, according to Kitty Kelley. Roedy Green, The Wit and Wisdom of George W. Bush. Georgie Bush Junior loves touching and kissing heads of bald men and little boys.) "That's when Yale really started going downhill." --George W. Bush commenting on Yale's decision to admit women "Why is Bush so hostile to the idea of gay marriage? Perhaps because until 1987, George W. Bush was gay. According to a group of 29 Yale classmates who comprise Gay Ivy Leaguers for Truth, Bush was "known to be at least sexually experimental throughout his time in college." One of Bush's alleged former boyfriends, Anthony Berusca (class of '70), told The Dallas Morning News that Bush was "deeply conflicted about being gay, even somewhat self-hating." Berusca is convinced that this conflict led to Bush's drinking problems, but describes the President as a "gentle, caring lover". In 1986, the Bush family arranged for George to join Worthy Creations, a church group in El Paso that focuses on converting homosexuals through faith. A year later, Bush claimed to be straight, born again, and engaged to Laura Welch (Kitty Kelly in THE FAMILY wrote that Bush's twin daughters were not his offspring, but from a donor at a fertility clinic). Bush at all-male Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts was "head" cheerleader. Drama club and cheerleading are where the gay boys hang out. George earned the nickname Lips Bush for his skill at giving blow jobs to his fraternity buddies, according to Kitty Kelley. Bush has gay-s
Yet, at the same time, the MPAA are sponsoring a "Copyright Awareness" scheme for scouts which tells them that illegal copying is no different from property theft.
They have to decide which way they want it: either it's equivalent to property theft, in which case the penalties should be the same, or it's a different offence which merits higher penalties.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
$10000 loss per filesharer each year, are you mad? I live quite confortably well and spend $150 to 200 every month in culture/entertainment, but concerning music, my #1 problem is not CD price or DRM, it's simply to find at least $50 worth of things to good enough to listen so when I found it, I buy it without second though (most of the time, the stuff happens to be about as old as myself, so the payola and other major advertisement tools don't help me).
Yup - the subject says it all!
Let's think a bit sideways here - Apple sells songs for 99c. Now, Apple makes a nice markup, and so does everyone else involved, the wholesale price is probably closer to 30c, if that. Now, I don't know about you, but if we can reach an average figure of say, 50c per song, the Jury's damage recommendations mean that the song was downloaded 18,000 times! Please!!!
This is just more proof that the RIAA owns the US government (as does big business in the US), and the RIAA can use its political connections to make the laws as they see fit. This is all to do with money, power and greed, and nothing to do with justice.
Just cos a song is up on P2P does NOT mean that someone downloaded it. And if no one downloaded it, or copied it, it has NOT been infringed. Can the RIAA prove that each song was downloaded, and by whom, and how many times, without a doubt? What happened to not convicting a person on a crime if there was 'reasonable doubt'?
The US is heading down the drain, especially with Bush Jr. and cronies (TM) in tow. I feel very sorry for Americans. My advice - renounce your citizenship and move north to Canada - a much better country!
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
Sony, EMI ? Can someone please list all the large corporations behind the RIAA? I wish to write a few letters to my local Congressman about some illegal activies performed by at least Sony. Also, please list the names of the legal counsel behind the RIAA. Thank you.
Let's take a previous poster's upper damage limit of $10 billion per year nationally. The Pew organization (http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/press_release.asp) says 51% of online (81%) teenagers (12-17 yo) download music vs 18% for adults. Let's expand that to 12-21 yo: 51%*81%10*3.5E6 = 14.46 million younger downloaders, and for adults (21-40 yo) downloaders, lets say it's 18%*81%*20*3.2E6 = 9.33 million full adults, 23.8 million downloaders. So the upper limit average is maybe $420 per downloader per year. Also given that many internet accounts have upload/download bandwidth limits of 1 GB - 5 GB, at $0.70 Apple wholesale per 3MB file, that is a severe cap on any outrageous legal claim, $233/mo to $1165/mo as dedicated (no surfing, no downloading). Frankly I think any legal claim for more than the nominal $420/yr average should at least be required to show the ISP's upload consumption records for *any* additional damages to establish even *some* evidence of actual damages. Beyond that I would morally consider the accosting organizations as any violence threatening extortion agents.
Yes, they did have a choice, and made the choice to punish her severely — although not as severely as some of the jurors wanted. We even know their opinion on the matter:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The going cost for the American Legal System and DOJ is up for Bids...So far the winning bidder is.....The RIAA! Amazing that without actual proof of damages a single mom is going to lose everything. Now to make matters worse the BUSH Cronies are siding with their recording buddies to make themselves a little more money. Guess I'm going to have to do away with all of my music and start humming to myself. I guess I can't even download or upload a classical rendition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or the William Tell Overture or the 1812 Overture because I might get sued for damages on account they might allegedly be on thousands of others computer. Oh well the RIAA and their artists don't need my money so TA-TA.
Time to pay the judge a visit.
Is this country so complacent that we've forgotten about taking matters into our own hands?
The judge should be visited by an angry public mob who knows better.
This type of unjust decision making just encourages corruption and... well, he needs to be taught a lesson.
That's great. Let' punish people for breaking the law. Now if someone steals my car, which *definitely* has a commonly agreed "blue book" type of value, then they should be made to pay me for it before they can go to jail. And when someone beats someone to a bloody pulp, what do they get...maybe 2 years in jail, probably out in a year? Payment to victim = 0.
The criminal justice system in the US can't do everything, so they have to make priorities. This is a huge red flag saying, "we don't give a damn about you victims of serious crimes that put an individual in a hole and/or shatter your life...but don't you dare go messing with a corporation's copyrighted material. Hoo no! That's worthy of few years of your livelihood, biatch. Mess with our major campaign contributors and it's gonna get ugly!" It is surreal. Absolutely absurd.
BOUGHT OUT
Read radical news here
I guess if they want to play the bad-guy, they can play the bad-guy. Congratulations, DoD, you've just made enemies out of some very able and skilled people. Well, relative to the average joe, they're more skilled and able.
You're now the enemy, too.
Internet: Serious Business
$9250 per song, so thats OVER 9000! copies.
I still find that cost excessive...
However, charging over actual cost is nothing new. Everying you buy is marked up.
If you break the law to get somethingor break the law and GIVE somethingshouldn't there be repurcussions over what it would naturally cost?
You wouldn't steal a car... and if you did, and were caught, they wouldn't charge you just the cost of the car (assuming they didn't file criminal charges!).
I read an article recently http://www.computermusic.co.uk/page/computermusic?entry=pirates_made_to_pay_as where some music companies used cracked software, which the software maker found out about. Per the article, several companies they "settled out of court 'for a sum several times in excess of the list price of the item concerned'."
Besides just the cost of the thing, there are damages, mental suffering, tons of other items one could add to a suit to bump up the price. Even if the song value was dropped to 99 cents per available download, the jury could still award $9000 for damages and mental anguish, per song. Right?
How is any one person responsible for that song being downloaded from other people's computers? By that same logic every person who downloads that song is also responsible for every one else who downloads that song. It adds up to every person paying for every song that anyone else ever downloads that has ever been downloaded from their computer. It makes absolutely no sense. This one doesn't even need a lame analogy about everyone being responsible for every person who was killed by a gun they killed someone with. But, assume your argument is correct, the RIAA can't actually show that anyone downloaded the song, so at most the person is responsible only for sharing the file, and not for anyone downloading it. Lets do the math, 0...looks like they're off the hook.
The RIAA isn't going to "actually count" anything because they can't. If they could they'd have a better case.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
'It's also impossible for the true damages to be calculated, according to the brief, because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement.'" Wouldn't this make those "other users" liable for a proportionate share of the damages?
Do you still think the government works for the people?
Actually, if you look at the amount the jury chose, it's not far off from the harmonic mean of the minimum and maximum statutory damages.
hawk
> The DoJ also appears to buy into the RIAA's argument that making a file available
> on a P2P network constitutes copyright infringement
"Honest, officer! I didn't put my penis in the prostitute. She slid her body down around it!"
I humbly await my downmod by file sharing advocates outraged I said God doesn't exist.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.