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Tenise Barker Takes On RIAA Damages Theory
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Tenise Barker, the young social worker from the Bronx who took on the RIAA's 'making available' theory and won, has now launched a challenge to the constitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory. In her answer to the RIAA's amended complaint [PDF], she argues that recovering from 2,142 to 428,571 times the actual damages would be a violation of Due Process. She says that the Court could avoid having to find the statute unconstitutional by construing the RIAA's complaint as alleging a single copyright infringement — the use of an 'online media distribution system' — and limiting the total recovery to $750. In the alternative, she argues, if the Court feels it cannot avoid the question, it should simply limit the plaintiffs' damages to $3.50 per song file, since awarding more — against a single noncommercial user, for a single upload or download of an MP3 file for personal use — would be unconstitutional."
Neither do they, and it should be kept at a MANAGEABLE level. The thing is, even if a person does have evidence that they only distributed it *once* the RIAA still wants many times the damage they actually perceive.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
it's not about downloading a song. The price of downloaded music is well established at $0.99 (or less). DISTRIBUTING is the issue and unless she has logs which show exactly how many times she distributed it, she can fuck off.
Actually, if this case is like many of the others, and the RIAA has proof that she distributed the song to Media Sentry, then they have proof that she distributed the content to 1 other person, a single copy right violation.
It's just a civil case, so they don't have to prove absolutely that she distributed to hundreds of people, but they have to make some effort at showing that there were more distributions than just the single unauthorized distribution that they authorized...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
...I wonder how much pain it might become, to settle? After all, if the cost of settling my (alleged, unsubstantiated) piracy becomes a mere forty dollars per album, I might not be so disinclined to just sign a piece of paper and fork over a tiny bit of cash.
~ C.
I'm sure the RIAA will have some excuse as to why this isn't unconstitutional, and was in fact the idea the Founding Fathers had in mind when they set up copyright. Good arguments, but I'm a touch wary that the judge will just ignore any constitutional issue. And even if they do listen, the RIAA will try and get out of it so no precedent can be made.
Cynical Idealist
It'll be a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense when the RIAA realizes how stupid they're being...which will be when they're all dead.
An AC troll posted a nice line on an article yesterday I won't forget:
"You can stop eating to lose weight, but you'd have to stop breathing to lose stupid"
So true.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This would fit nicely with the puntative damages model that are currently used for financial, anti-trust, and counterfeit fraud called "Treble damages".
Since Itunes can show that the market value of a single MP3 is approximately $1, then a fraud penalty of $3 per song does not seem unreasonable, providing that the prosecution can show that the song was actually downloaded that is...
-- Scott
Imagine if megacorps only paid damages whenever they harmed someone.
Actually, if this case is like many of the others, and the RIAA has proof that she distributed the song to Media Sentry, then they have proof that she distributed the content to 1 other person, a single copy right violation.
Actually, my impression is that from a legal standpoint, the distribution to Media Sentry isn't a copyright violation because Media Sentry is the authorized agent of the copyright owner. And before everyone jumps in, remember that this is law we're talking about, so common sense doesn't necessarily apply (as we've seen in some of the other results of RIAA trials).
The only argument of which I'm currently aware is that they state the excessive damages are necessary to deter others.
It may be fortunate that this is the kind of rhetoric that sells to politicians moreso than courts. The extortionate damages that IP holders currently seek is clearly intended not to simply deter people from violating copyright, but from even putting up a fight in the first place--as demonstrated by the way the RIAA handles these cases by offering to settle for a few grand or face the threat of an exponential lawsuit.
Otherwise you're just stating the obvious: yes, the RIAA will find a way to fight this. And the sky is blue and birds chirp.
The damages owed by Exxon for the Valdez oil spill were recently limited and substantially reduced because the court found the original damages excessively punitive. So if it makes sense for Exxon perhaps it also makes sense to apply a similar theory of limitation of damages elsewhere.
That depends on the context.
Is the GPL violation some kid who is giving the software to a few of his friends, but not allowing them to see the source? That's what's most comparable to this case.
Or is something like a large router company using linux to power it's newest router, making a ton of money off it, and then not releasing the source? That's totally different from this case.
Nice straw man argument though.
So, because she can't show that she distributed a song exactly, say five, times, she should be charged an absurdly high amount for each infringement? What happened to proving damages?
I think the problem is that the statute is not designed in a manner than can handle Napster and beyond peer-to-peer distribution. It is designed for instances in which an entity is making money off someone else's copyrighted work. Read the notes to the statute. It's pretty clear that Congress did not have in mind the possibility of someone sharing his or her individual music/movie/whatever collection with others on the Internet. Even Congress would not saddle a $150,000 fine on a person for sharing a $0.99 song.
1) I can't remember anyone being sued for non-commercial distribution of GPL-ed software, and it's safe to assume that anyone distributing it commercially is trying to distribute it as much as possible, since every distribution is profitable.
2) The FSF, at least, will gladly settle for the distribution of the source code (in the case of GPL2 --- at least, this is what Eben Moglen claims were RMS's instructions to him while he was counsel to the FSF). This isn't "many times the damages they actually perceive".
So I'll just say it on behalf of (most of) the slashdot audience.
Thank you. Thank you for doing the work that we didn't, couldn't or were unwilling to do. Thank you for carrying a heavy, unwieldy torch. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
You would incur 1000 separate civil suits, each alleging the partial distribution of a copyrighted work.
Unable to go to each of the hearings, you would lose by default, and pay 1000*$3.50/1000 = $3.50...plus attorney's fees for 1000 separate lawsuits, totalling $3,000,003.50.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Forget about the number -- it's whether she distributed any at all.
The RIAA's claim is based on the idea that if you make a file available, you are distributing it, regardless of whether you actually distributed it anybody.
The problem with the RIAA's claim is that it make distributors out of everybody who happens to have a song on a shared folder, even if an official "p2p" network isn't involved. Consider Windows file sharing: if "My Documents" on your dorm computer is readable by the universe, congratulations -- you now owe the RIAA thousands of dollars. Remember, it isn't a question of whether anybody actually copied the song, or even of whether you intended to distribute it.
Consider this even more bizarre situation: Your kid installs p2p software on the family computer, sharing a directly called "music," that includes only songs he wrote & recorded. Later, you decide to rip your CD collection and, not knowing that there's p2p software, you stick it in "music." Now, you owe the RIAA a bunch of money.
The "distribution" right referred to in the US Copyright Act is a clearly delineated right "to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending". (See paragraph 2 of Ms. Barker's answer). I.e.,
-it has to be of actual copies
-they actually have to be disseminated
-the dissemination has to be to the public, and
-there has to be a sale or other transfer of ownership, or a license, a lease, or a lending.
In layman's terms, the RIAA's "distribution" claim is baloney.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
More interestingly, what if the pieces were small enough to fall under fair use standards (which is less than 20 seconds, IIRC)?
For example, 16 pieces of a 4 minute song from 16 different people, each piece containing 15 seconds of the song.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Even Congress would not saddle a $150,000 fine on a person for sharing a $0.99 song.
You mean until the members of Congress had lunch with their bribers, ahem, lobbyists ?
You mean I'm related to all the AC trolls around here?
Damn you, as if my self esteem wasn't low enough already.
I hate printers.
I hold you in the deepest regard, but it seems to me that you didn't answer the point in question, which is only whether agents of the copyright owner can be legally considered "the public". My understanding, from reading a lot of the material on your blog, is that they aren't.
(Your answer was equivalent to "for distribution to occur, A, B, C, and D must be all true, and they all aren't", whereas the question was whether C would be considered true for a download from Media Sentry. My apologies if you meant that none of A, B, C, and D were true.)
Do you feel the same when GPL software being illegally distributed?
The cases are exactly the opposite. In the case of a filesharer, the public (i.e. us) benefits at the "expense" of a company (and i quote it because it's not proven that the companies lose anything).
In the case of a GPL violation, a single company benefits at the expense of the whole public, who DO have to pay for some software that should be free.
That's the issue of what's being discussed here: actual damages vs. statutory damages. I may be oversimplifying, but statutory damages are values set by law and are often used when calculating the actual damages isn't feasible.
Statutory damages are tools of the law and aren't inherently good or evil. We may dislike them when bad people like record companies use them, but one day down the road, you might be involved in a civil case where statutory damages come to your aid and are instrumental in righting a wrong.
The law presently puts statutory damages at up to $750 per work. The young lady in question would like to see that number changed to $3.50.
$3.50 would be a huge boon to file sharing enthusiasts, as the law of averages would be on your side. Share as much as you want, and if you're caught, you'd pay only $3.50 per track, no matter how many times it's been downloaded from your computer. That's only 3.5X the going rate for the track, and you can look at it this way: the odds of your being caught are probably less than 1 in 3.5, so (again, looking at the averages), it's a pretty good incentive to step up your file sharing.
Not that you asked, but I think $3.50 is too low. Either torts are going to be enforced or not; if they are, then the statutory damages should provide some sort of incentive to respect others' rights. I also think $750 is too high.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Give the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding punitive damages and due process, she has a pretty strong argument.
In essence, the Supreme Court has held that awarding punitive damages that are more than 10x the amount of actual damages is out of line with the due process guarantees of the constitution. It follows that any mandatory award that is also grossly out of line with actual damages should be subject to similar constitutional problems. For those interested, check out Campbell v. State Farm, 538 U.S. 408 (2003). It was a 6-3 decision, with Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg as dissenters. Given the Roberts Court just gave a similar judgment in the Exxon case, it probably is still very good law. http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2002/2002_01_1289/
In other words, the only reason they've been getting away with this for so long is uninformed judiciary.
Not really. The only reason they've gotten this far is that there haven't been more defendants fighting back. Once properly briefed, the judges are getting wise to what is going on. E.g., compare this decision, against a litigant who had no representation, to the subsequent decision in the same case, rendered after the litigant and the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought some of the applicable authorities to the judge's attention, or take a look at Judge Davis's painful realization in Minnesota that he had been misled by the RIAA's lawyers into committing a "manifest error of law".
Probably, neither of the initial judicial errors would have occurred had the issue been properly briefed in the first place.
Ours is an adversary system of justice; only if defendants fight back will the truth come out.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful