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UMG Calls Infringement Damages "Excessive"
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Why would UMG, one of the four major RIAA members, consider an infringement award 'grossly excessive'? Naturally, because they were the ones ordered to pay it. While they had no trouble with Jammie Thomas being ordered to pay $222k, some 13,214 times the actual costs, they thought that being ordered to pay ten times the actual damages in Bridgeport v. Justin Combs was just too much. Then again, maybe that's why they didn't complain back when the increased statutory damages section was cut from the PRO-IP Act? Now if they could just cut the rest of the act."
Wow...just wow. I hope these people die already.
Why are they against excessive damages? They can easily afford going into revision again and again until a judge agrees with them (and some judges still have some semblance of sanity, so eventually they will hit one when they climb the judical ladder).
Their victims usually don't have the money to do the same. Though... should it ever hit me, before I hand over my life savings to them, I pump it into the courts. At least there it MIGHT somehow be used for good. After such a trial, you're broke and in debt for life anyway.
Honestly, I wonder why nobody followed the thought train of "Hmm... my life's wasted now anyway. Why not blow up the joint and go out with a bang?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've been wondering how much certain record companies might owe me. They often sell live albums recorded when their artists have been on tour and these albums contain not only the protected intellectual property of the artist but also the protected intellectual property of the audience which they often use to fill in gaps between songs or fade in and out of the main song.
Now I have attended some of these concerts which were later either televised or recorded and these recordings do contain my own work, mainly rythmic clapping and shouting but as yet I have to see a single penny from any of the record companies who, it seems to me, are intent on taking my own work and using it to sell records without paying me for any of the performance and composition rights I am owed.
If any lawyers would be like to comment and let me know how best to approach the companies in question with a view to getting my due royalties I would appreciate it.
The laws (and associated penalties) apply to you, not us.
Yours truly,
Big Media(tm)
You wish to engage in corporate hypocrisy:
>cancel
>allow
...I never thought I would be rooting FOR an RIAA member in a copyright case.
What units are they using to make the comparison between the two cases? The 13,214 ratio is $damages/$song, while the 10 ratio is $damages/$song/number of copies. If they'd use the same $damages/$song ratio for Universal, the answer would be 5,000,000.
...isn't the UMG/Universal case worse? I mean, they were clearly using the unlicenced song for profit and an album version without it wasn't even available. Jammie Thomas, on the other hand, even it was true that she was sharing copyrighted songs, she wasn't profiting from it.
"He who has the gold, makes the rules."
Well, ok. Technically, the rules aren't being made here, but this is just another example of the perversion of justice that exists among the elite in America. By and large, the America's "upper class", which include the wealthy, the politicians, celebrities, athletes, and corporations, aren't subject to the same blind justice as everyone else in this country.
If you have money and/or power, you have a way out.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Wildly speculate much? From reading the material, the case they were complaining about was about explicitly punitive damages. The section cut out from the PROIP act was about treating individual copyright infringements rather than as compilation infringement (which, in itself, makes total sense). Two completely different things.
Seriously, we all know imaginary property doesn't exist and the laws are seriously corrupt and fubar. But sensationlism and hyperbole doesn't really help our case. But don't let that stand in the way of headlines.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
You admit that there were "actual costs..."
"While they had no trouble with Jammie Thomas being ordered to pay $222k, some 13,214 times the actual costs,..."
I guess that settles the argument about whether "sharing" is theft or not.
As long as the RIAA continues to cry like babies when they violate laws they themselves wrote and go crazy on customers they can .sevlesmeht kcuf og
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
Actually the argument is that the punitive damage -vs- statutory damage ratio is too high.
The sickening part is that it will probably win. There is a new Supreme Court. All lesser judges know this and know how their decisions could be overruled by this court. The Roberts Supreme Court will do *anything* to get their corporate masters off the hook. One of the things they are trying to do is severely limit the damages a corporation can face when it royally fucks up. One way is to protect their corporate buddies is to limit punitive damages to less than 10x the statutory damages. They don't want a company loosing their shirt like McDonalds after scalding someone. The case they chose to apply this new Case law? The Exxon Valdez case. That's right it's been over twenty years and Exxon has not paid up. A third of the people directly affected and who have won their case have died waiting for payment. Anyway the "fair umpire" Chief Justice Roberts was actually a laughing stock in this case when he asked "how can we protect these companies" and a lawyer for the fisherman replied you "you can get these companies to higher sober captains".
Anyway elections have consequences and the Roberts Court is a horrible lingering consequence of 2000 and 2004.
The way I figure it, .35=26,428.
-the wholesale price per download is around 70 cents
-the expenses including royalties payable are around 35 cents
-therefore the profit per download is around 35 cents
-UMG & friends were awarded $9250 per song file
-9250 divided by
I.e., the Jammie Thomas award bore a ratio to actual damages of 26,428:1.
UMG contends anything more than 10:1 is unconstitutional.
Therefore the maximum permissible award in the Thomas case should have been:
24 songs x $3.50=
$84
Slight discrepancy there, 222,000 versus 84
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Actually that's not **AA, but ??AA or, even better, (MP|RI)AA though I suppose I would allow [MR][PI]AA to pass...
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Those conditions might not be prominently displayed before the ticket has been purchased. As such, one would wonder if the consent was properly given. Further, TicketMaster also has some language that they will not accept a return of the ticket. The same legal arguments that can be used to invalidate shrink wrapped EULA's would apply here as well. Essentially, you can't sell something to a customer with fine print locked inside that says: "If you open this, you agree to sell your house to me in exchange for the use of the software."
Also, even if you do consent to be recorded, the copyright still remains yours. You have to agree to license the copyright as well.
They're all thieves, and I hope they eat each other to death.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
One of my favorite arguments they used was that the number greatly exceeded the settlement offers.
If someone loses again to the RIAA, they should argue that the loss greatly exceeds the RIAA's settlement offer. That argument was knocked down in this case, but you might as well try to use their arguments against them.
At best, this is a case of comparing apples to oranges. At worst, it is a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader.
Universal complained that the $3.5 million punitive damage award was approximate 10 times the compensatory damage award of $366,939.
In the Jammie Thomas case, the award was $9,250 in statutory damages per song. There were no punitive or compensatory damages awarded which is what Universal is complaining about.
Another thing is that Thomas faced a maximum of $150,000 per song but was fined less than $10,000 per song. Universal was fined $366,939 for a sample of a single song, more than twice what Thomas faced for a single song.
This case involved a sample of a single song, which would sell for $.70. which means Universal is being fined 524,198 times the value of the song in compensatory damages and 5 million times said value in punitive damages.
This entire article is not news. It is nothing but a veil of self-serving misrepresentations of the facts.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Suggest you seek more facts on the McDonalds case. Like for instance the fact that the coffee served by that establishment was significantly hotter than that served by all of the surrounding establishments by a significant amount and that McDonalds had received more than 700 complaints of injuries across their chain. The temperature was some 50 degrees hotter than a normal home coffee pot would serve it at. You might also learn that the woman simply wanted her medical costs attended to (that's $15K) and that the large settlement was awarded by the jury that was outraged at McDonald's behavior and attitude. While it's true she should have been more careful and focused the spill occurred while the car was stopped and she was *NOT* driving. I think that most any sane person would expect a spill to be merely painful and not require medical personnel to remove the clothing that had MELTED into her skin. Nor would a normal prudent person expect that a spill might require skin grafts to repair the damage. Would you have felt better about this settlement if it had been a child carrying a cup of coffee for their parent and gotten scalded? Oh wait, kids *had* been burned in the past and still McDonalds insisted on the temp being kept excessively high.
Here are some starter links for you, Google can provide more.
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
http://www.centerjd.org/free/mythbusters-free/MB_mcdonalds.htm
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Since statutory is the only thing these two cases have in common, that's all you can compare. I didn't see the actual number of songs or copies in the article so I can't compute the statutory ratios.
Funny how when the actual distribution is known, the damages become "excessive."
> From reading the material, the case they were complaining about was about explicitly punitive damages. The section cut out from the PROIP act was about treating individual copyright infringements rather than as compilation infringement (which, in itself, makes total sense). Two completely different things.
...
The statutory damages are essentially punitive in measure. How else can someone say that $150,000 per act of infringement is reasonable? Yes, their purpose is to free the plaintiff from having to justify dollar amounts (which would be expensive to prove in court and require experts, etc.), but I really can't find many copyrighted works that sell for $750, which leads me to believe that it is, at least in part, a punitive measure. ($750 per work is the statutory LOWER bound, for those wondering.)
Moreover, the section of the PRO-IP Act was cut because, when questioned, no one could provide any evidence that courts had ever given too low an award in any copyright cases.
I really don't think the damage types are as different as you make them out to be, and it's also true that there were no reports of disappointment from media companies when that section was cut.
At least, none I saw. But I've only been following the story and reporting on it the whole time
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
> The land, the house, the various items of chattel in the house... these can all exist independent of any concept of property or ownership. That's not to say that they should, but they can. They are not inherantly property. The law makes them property.
Yes, they are inherently property because I can guard them, I can take them back when someone takes them from me, and I can transfer them. The only part of IP that's in any sense property are the rights themselves, NOT the work they "protect"!
So we really are conjuring property out of nothing, because I can't take an idea back from someone by force. And no, I won't count clubbing them over the head until they're dead or have amnesia...
In other words, we created the rights because that's how physical objects behave. We can't just apply those properties to something that isn't rightfully property at all and expect it to work.
You're ignoring the reasons WHY land is property. Because of the inherent rivalrousness (which was the point of all the examples you called "non sequiters" after misunderstanding them).
With IP, only the rights themselves are rivalrous. The actual underlying idea is not. You can take a copyright away from someone, but you can't take an idea away from them.
So thinking of IP in terms of "property" is dangerous because it simply doesn't work that way. It's not that I disagree that the law can make any damn thing it wants to into "property" in some sense. It's that I think that the legal rights are then the property, not that which the rights cover.
So you can declare air to be "property" (indeed, they already do a more limited form of that in terms of 'airspace'), but you can't stop people from breathing and you shouldn't even try.
With IP, that would mean that you can declare ideas to be "property", but you can't stop people from thinking and you shouldn't even try.
But I await your response telling me even more strongly that all you care about is the point that the government can make really, really stupid laws if it wants to and it's our duty to respect that "property" as somehow sacred just because it's now "property" and we need not think beyond that, but rather should attempt the foolish and futile task of making property rights for ideas work like a tangible good when they're not one and cannot be.
The reason I'm tilting at the sacred cow of "property" is because it's used to shut down rational thought on the subject. "We HAVE to do it this way, because it's property!" If you ever hope to see a free market for ideas, you're going to have to rethink every single assumption from the ground up. And "property" is just the first one on the list.
> That is no more or less correct, than the statement "With land, only the rights themselves (to use or occupy the land) are rivalrous. The actual underlying land is not." The only thing different is how accustomed you are to the relationship between the land and the rights, as opposed to the relationship between the music (or other protected item) and the rights.
That's ridiculous! You can't say that the underlying land is non-rivalrous, because we can't possibly both build a house on exactly the same spot, nor do anything else.
> You misunderstand what copyright protects. It doesn't protect an idea. It protects certain uses of an idea, which very much can be taken away.
There's no real difference between an idea and using it, because ideas that are never communicated to others in some form are useless.
> Land rights protect certain uses of the land, which can be taken away -- just like with copyright.
ALL uses of the land, actually, minus easements.
> That is because air to breath is neither like land to live on nor like music to distribute.
Actually, it is like music to distribute. Very exactly. Mostly because we don't need distributors any more.
I mean, it's not like that's the fundamental flaw of copyright today or anything. We DON'T NEED distributors, or we wouldn't have people infringing upon the distribution right of copyright at every turn.
> Funny, I would say the same about the phrase "imaginary property" -- it's a tagline meant to sway opinion without actual thought about the issues... issues like 'what really is property' and 'what does copyright actually protect', which you seem quite adept at avoiding.
That's very the point of calling it imaginary! To draw attention to that misuse of language. Because there's no difference between twisting and untwisting words, that is, ironically, the only way to make an issue of it.
What 'really is' property is anything inherently rivalrous. Nothing else is well-addressed by laws, which are founded on assumptions that they cover goods that have properties like that or are close enough. When printing presses were expensive, the enormous statutory damages made sense and there was greater need for protection. With the currently low barrier to entry, there's far less need for protection, and the law is far more onerous and far less enforceable. Thus, it requires reform.
No, I won't accept that any random "right" the government dreams up should be put on the same level of "property" as if it deserved the respect land, homes or money has. It's merely a government fiat and a bad one and it should get no respect whatsoever until such time as it is brought into line with reality.
As for the other issue I'm 'dodging': what copyright actually protects is too numerous, but the main rights I worry about are the distribution rights and fair use with respect to reusing ideas (because very nearly all the ideas of today are built upon those of others, right down to the very words we use).
There's nothing for me to avoid here.
> I guess you didn't notice how when you mentioned something we can't both do, you started talking about rights to use the land, not the land itself.
Wait. So you're saying that we can use the land itself to build two houses on the same spot? That's beyond incoherent. Imagine there are no land rights whatsoever. How do we BOTH use the same land?
> Air to breath is there without being created by someone. Music to distribute is not.
You evaded that point nicely. The point was that we have little need for a distribution right when we have little need for distributors in the first place.
> Ah, so a right easily violated is no right at all. So for example, if your banker walks off with all your money, you won't complain. He doesn't physically need your permission, so your right to withold such permission is void.
No, an unenforceable right is not useful. I can most certainly go back to the banker with cops and take back whatever money he dares steal.
But you can't take an idea from someone's head. Or if you can, please make me forget the hex digits 09 F9 11 02 9D 41 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
> The ease of distribution is not a fundamental flaw in copyright. It is a fundamental flaw in the viability of the current music-industry business model, but that's a separate issue.
Ahh, so the law isn't flawed, the business model that relies on that law being enforced is! I'm sure the music industry will be thrilled with that useless distinction.
> You keep coming back to this, as though there were such a thing as a thing being rivalrous.
Ahh, so you mean that we can pretend a good isn't rivalrous so long as people don't use it?
That's like calling code thread-safe so long nobody uses, ever. Maybe we should coin that as "mea37's law" in computer science: "All dead code is thread safe." I'm sure the journals will be thrilled at the revelation, because that's essentially what you're asserting.
You're using some definitions you came up with a priori that simply aren't the least bit useful in the real world. We might as well discuss Plato's metaphysics at this point (and I'm not entirely sure that we're not already doing so, once we talk about things like songs existing without someone to sing them).
> And yet, take the example of land -- land being something you claim is an "inherently rivalrous". There exists land that is not property.
So, you think that something has to be owned as property before it's rivalrous? I believe I said it's the other way around.
Just because the land isn't marked as 'owned' on some deed doesn't mean that two people can build a house on the same spot (or whatever else). It wouldn't matter if we went out to Pluto or somewhere there's never been a deed, you still can't put two houses on the same spot, no matter how you try. Though with my luck, you'll try to play with what 'the same spot' means and point to multi-story buildings...
Before we can meaningfully treat something as property, there has to be some rivalry in its use to address! At least, ideally. Insofar as to say that the government can make ridiculous laws, I hope we don't disagree.
> So even if we accept your meaningless "distinction" between land and music, your definition of property is factually incorrect.
Ahh, yes, how could I miss the inherent similarity between land and music? How could I have been so blind?
I think I'll go search on the Pirate Bay for a nice 20-acre plot of land to download, now that I've seen the light...
Wait... why are there two lights with a license plate between them?