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In Round 2, Jammie Thomas Jury Awards RIAA $1,920,000
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Well the price went up from $9250 per song file to $80,000 per song file, as the jury awarded the RIAA statutory damages of $1,920,000.00 for infringement of 24 MP3s, in Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset. In this trial, although the defendant had an expert witness of her own, she never called him to testify, and her attorneys never challenged the technical evidence offered by the RIAA's MediaSentry and Doug Jacobson. Also, neither the special verdict form nor the jury instructions spelled out what the elements of a 'distribution' are, or what needed to be established by the plaintiffs in order to recover statutory — as opposed to actual — damages. No doubt there will now have to be a third trial, and no doubt the unreasonableness of the verdict will lend support to those arguing that the RIAA's statutory damages theory is unconstitutional." Update: 06/19 01:39 GMT by T : Lots more detail at Ars Technica, too.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
I recall in the previous stories on this case, everyone kept say "Slam Dunk!". I thought that the defense lawyers where supposed to be a "crack team" and yet from the Slashdot write-up, it seems the defense left much to be desired. What happened?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
According to some wikipedia article the median American individual makes about $32,000/year (never mind the fact that women make $27K). Multiply that by a career lifespan of 45 years and you get $1.4 million.
They have just judged that she should pay 1/3 more than a typical American will make in their life.
What's wrong with this picture? Clearly she would have never spent that much on music...
Porquoi?
Artists are now forced to take time out of doing what they want to do.
Just like the rest of us who work for a living?
The damages are enormous, but the legal fees that the RIAA has amassed need to be recouped in some fashion.
The expenses can be recouped in the following manner: the RIAA pays the legal expenses they incurred. If we get into a fender bender, and I sue you for damages, that's okay. If I spend 3 million on my legal team over it, that's me spending money foolishly. You shouldn't have to pay for it.
I did say should... applying logic or "should" statements to legal proceedings is it's own type of illogical, I know...
Everyone likes to dogpile on the RIAA, but they are only defending the rights that the law has provided them.
To absurd degrees considering how trivial an offense it was. That's what makes them bad guys.
Moral of the story: don't break the law, and if you do, try to avoid lawyers, they are very expensive. It was foolish to reject the initial $5000 settlement. Any lawyer could have looked at the facts of the case and come to the conclusion that she didn't have sufficient evidence to prove her innocence, which is very important in civil trials.
I wouldn't call standing up to a bully "foolish" exactly.
She lied about her hard drive, thinking it would get her off. I don't like the RIAA, but she deserved this.
Um, no. For lying under oath she deserves to face perjury charges, not have her punishment be magnified 1000 times.
Because it's a valid perspective? I don't agree with it -- John Carmack already gets paid enough for his work to keep doing it (even with piracy possibly sapping the numbers), and for being accused of downloading a couple CDs worth of songs this woman's now on the hook for enough money to record, publish and promote two platinum-level albums -- but if you're trying to figure out the jury this perspective is probably where you should start.
> Moral of the story: don't break the law
In my eyes the moral is: don't let large corporations twist the law into an distorted abomination....
The most ironic part of this whole mess is that the jury system was designed to exactly defend against this kind of abuse of the legal system, but because big government and big corporations have gotten so good at controlling the public's behavior, it is actually working out in reverse....
I don't much care for the RIAA, but everything brought in as evidence was against her, and she couldn't come up with shit-all that might even bring a shred of reasonable doubt (let alone the much greater amount that they'd need to win a civil case).
If you actually think she's innocent, you're out of your mind. She did it. Is the punishment just? Hell, no. But I don't see how any intellectually honest person can take her defense as anything but the most pathetic thing around.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
As a lawyer, I'm not surprised by this outcome. I admit to not closely following this case. But from what I've read, her defense arguments were really weak. Oddly enough, Ars Technica says it best:
I really can't emphasize that last part enough. Winning a civil trial isn't about being "right" in any objective sense. It's about convincing normal people. If your explanations (technical or otherwise) go over their heads or seem implausible, you will lose. If the jury senses any sort of deception or dishonesty, you will lose. Sometimes if they just plain don't like you, you will lose. Clearly erroneous results can get overturned on appeal, but may cases are close enough calls that an appeal won't help.
On the facts above, I'd have found her liable too. It was clearly her computer with a username she commonly used. That creates a reasonable inference that she used Kazaa on it. While there are many ways for her to rebut this presumption, the flimsy conjecture offered doesn't cut it. Especially if she seemed less than forthright.
That said, the damages award is completely insane. I'd have given nominal damages, enough to hurt but not crippling (on the order of $100-500 per song - yes, below the statutory minimum of $750). It will get reduced on appeal, but not to that level. Maybe something on the order of a few thousand per song. My guess is that the jury really disliked her dishonesty and smacked her for it with huge damages.
I won't criticize her lawyers since I don't know all the details. Maybe these were the best arguments they had. Maybe their client chose to use this defense against their recommendations. Undoubtedly the news reports distorted the story. Whatever the case, the defense was really weak. This verdict was predictable.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
No distribution was ever shown. The RIAA Plaintiffs even said that they wouldn't show it because it's impossible to show. THIS IS INSANE!!!
I, for one, cannot wait to see the entire music industry implode in favor of artists who record at home with the low-priced equipment available, and who market through cooperatives over the Internet. Let Big Music Die Now Please!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Where are they finding these jurors at? Where is the constitution on this one? I just recently served as a juror and I was told to look at the evidence and testimony presented then come to a conclusion based on this without bias. How could anyone come to a verdict like this given the evidence from both sides? Do these people not realize at any time they could be a victim just as the defendant, open Wi-Fi anyone? This has to be a blatant violation of her 8th Amendment rights, this is wrong on so many levels it makes my head hurt.
On the bright side, sometimes when something so stupid happens, it forces a change in the law. And certainly, this verdict (a) will itself be set aside, and (b) gives added ammunition to the lawyers like myself who are arguing that the RIAA's statutory damages theory is unconstitutional.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
All they had to do was find 12 citizens just like themselves.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Didn't the artists CHOOSE to make these arrangements? If they had a hope in hell of making money on their own selling their recording on the internet without their stuff getting stolen, don't you think they would? So you are some kind of moralizing god that can tell the Artists how to run their affairs? if the money is going through a 3rd party, then it is OK to steal it, but if it goes directly to the Artist, better to pay them? I bet most people check carefully to see where their money would go before they decide to steal content, right? Let's look at a quote from a REAL artist, the fabulous guitarist Andy McKee, posting on piratebay: âoeYeah thanks a lot for uploading! It's not like I need to make a living with my music or anything. 8,676 thieves. If you really appreciate what I am doing, buy my CD legitimately so I can continue to compose music rather than work at K-Mart. I'm not Metallica. I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars, much less millions.â So even though he is signed with Candyrat, it sounds a little like he would prefer that you BUY his music, doesn't it? Have you ever tried to make a living by driving around the country doing shows? It is, after a short time, soul sucking and demeaning. But that is the only way even a great artist with fairly broad appeal can make a living in this day and age, because of morons like you.
Probably because the realization that the expert witness (I read the written testimony, and I know Yongdae Kim as a colleague: he is an excellent and honest researcher and professor) can't really contribute to the defense.
This is a civil trial, in terms of probabilities. The probability of misidentification of the computer goes way down when you remove the wireless, password protect the computer, and go from there.
The problem is, Media Sentry's evidence is pretty compelling: Identify her IP, identify her commonly used username, identify the songs, and she wasn't offering up a defense of being a poisoner/spreading bogus files.
As much as you'd like to believe it is nonsense, an honest expert witness for the defense would be forced to acknowledge all of this.
Yongdae Kim's written testimony mostly covered cases which could not have occured (no wireless, etc) and which were specifically ruled out by the judge for being irrelevant possibilities, or which would be exceedingly unlikely (a trojan on the system soley for KaZaA, IP address hijacking which, if Ms Thomas's computer was on, might result in RST storms from unexpected data, dropping the hijacker, by a hijacker who anyway was trying specifically to frame Ms Thomas), and on the stand he'd have to say so.
This is likely why Dr Kim was not put on the stand: during mock cross examination, Ms Thomas's laywer realized just how damaging Dr Kim's testimony would be in the hands of a plantiff's attorney.
Test your net with Netalyzr
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." One line says it all. I can't see this standing when it is appealed. Twenty-four music files being available for download, whether it's wrong or not, does not warrant what is effectually a life-sentence worth of money.
Have you ever tried to make a living by driving around the country doing shows? It is, after a short time, soul sucking and demeaning. But that is the only way even a great artist with fairly broad appeal can make a living in this day and age, because of morons like you.
Since when have musicians EVER made any significant living off of derivative works OTHER than performing live? Mozart did it, Elvis did it, Metallica did it. Artists have never been able to make a substantial income from record (or sheet music) sales. It wasn't until Beethoven that the idea of making money off of copies of musical works even really took off.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
But it's NOT a valid perspective. I know of nobody here that says people shouldn't get paid to perform work. But that's the troll/flame that he keeps on pimping until somebody actually starts believing it. He's full of it. It is those who advocate strong copyright who want to sit on their butts and collect the rent. They are the true pirates who use guns to lock down ideas. We must not allow this to continue.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Nothing "valid" about it. He is lying when he says that we think people shouldn't get paid for working. What I demand is that they actually work for their money the same way I do. I have no divine providence over my finished work, nor should anybody else.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Because it's a valid perspective?
You can say that again. Seriously, $2M for 24 files? WHAT THE FUCK?
Yes. The artist chose to make these arrangements. They signed up to be screwed over by a morally corrupt organisation. Voluntarily. Perhaps they weren't familiar with how these companies operate. Perhaps, as an artist, they were merely ignorant to the fact that they could have sold their wares themselves and kept all the money. Perhaps They felt they needed big-dollar representation for something or other.
...and if they were directly awarded that, do you think they would be able to sleep at night?
If that's the case they were wrong. Given the compensation typical for a struggling artist (or even a minor-league success story) signed to an RIAA label. Selling his CD's himself, even with a signifigantly lower volume I have a hard time believing they would have trouble being just as broke as they already are.
Ignorance may explain the situation, but it does not excuse it.
How about this, if these artists were doing the suing themselves do you think they would ask for $1,920,000 in damages?
There is no "realistic" value for lost sales here. Because no sales were lost. Except maybe to the negative publicity from this. In fact more sales were probably gained by sharing. The whole thing is completely bogus. And it's little more than a racket to protect the middlemen and gatekeepers. We should be hammering them on the head with the RICO statutes.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Or there's another way to look at it. Thomas was caught with her pants down, she's clearly guilty, and she did everything she could to antagonize the system.
Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever likely to be the outcome of this case? Short of a jury of 12 Slashdot copyright infringement advocates advocating jury nullification, I can't see how any other result was ever possible.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It is, after a short time, soul sucking and demeaning
So you mean... it's like... HAVING A JOB?!?!?!?!?
"Artists" who think that one weekend's work and a year or two of sacrifices and chances should allow them to live luxuriously for years after get no sympathy for me. Buck up and welcome to reality. This recession's full of it.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
One: Jealousy is not a valid reason why copyright is wrong.
Two: If you wire up someone's house, that person pays for all the materials, labor, and profit it takes for you to have your own house and food. $1 will barely buy a single outlet, let alone the box, wire, circuit breakers, or labor to install it. So a person who lets people have songs for $1 but keeps copyright, is hoping to put food on the table through volume sales. If it was required that the first sale cover all costs and some profit -- albums might cost $100,000. Everyone else gets the song free after the first sale, but if nobody bought the album in the first place, nobody would have the song at all. That's part of the social contract behind copyright -- the creator can let people have access to the work at an affordable price, but keeps enough control over the work that he/she can try to sell it to many people. That benefits society because instead of waiting for a patron to pay for the whole enchilada, we all get the work for a modest price while the artist takes the risk making or losing money on his/her efforts.
Three: A smart electrician (gets paid upfront) has almost no risk -- the job is simple profit. For an artist, there is an enormous risk of getting nothing after working very hard. If you don't like that some artists in essence win the lottery, then ensure that all artists get to earn a living wage. Society gets a lot of low cost high quality art from artists who do not win the publicity lottery, so it might actually cost more if artists got paid like electricians.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I know that not paying someone for their work is wrong
You don't pay people for there work every day. There are thousands of artists out there right now whose work you are not paying for. Artists you've never heard of.
Why does it make a difference if you see their work or not? It doesn't affect them.
Based on this decision, my music folder is worth almost $5 billion. How come I have to work for a living, then?
Oh, right, that's not real money, and copyright infringement does not mean actual loss of money for the RIAA. Not to mention I live in Hungary, where fair use covers this. To the guy that got slapped with the $2M, however, is fucked.
Now, who's the bad guy again?
In all honesty, I don't think we want to go back to the way things were in Mozart's time, which was largely a system of patronage. It sucked. Reasonable copyright is better.
Qxe4
The US copyright system, which is being forced down the throats of more and more nations, was a CONTRACT, nothing more. In return for a LIMITED monopoly in the form of government imposed copyrights We, The People got in return a richer and more diverse Public Domain for all of us.
Somehow this is what seems to get lost in a lot of copyright discussions. Not to give a complete history of the copyright, but there was a time when we had no copyright, and people wrote books, painted, composed music, and performed it because they wanted to, and often they found ways to get paid for their expertise and talent. One common way was to do work that someone else wanted them to do on commission, whether they wanted to do it or not. Though many artists wished to have control over their own work, it was just silly to expect as much. Another artist would copy your painting, or another author might rewrite your story, and that's how culture developed.
And basically all that was fine until the the printing press arrived, and book publishers started making a fortune from printing books, neglecting to pay the authors. People recognized this as unfair and discouraging to those who might want to write a book, so they invented the idea of the copyright. The idea wasn't to ensure profitability for publishers by forcing readers to pay for the right to read a book, nor was it meant to allow authors to control the destiny of their work, but it was solely a way to help authors get a share of the huge profits publishers were already making.
Flash forward to the present, and now copyrights are being manipulated in such a way as to have almost the opposite effect that was intended. Copyrights are being used to guarantee profits for the publishers, while the artists are being denied their fair share of the profits. If anything, the Internet should allow us to go back to pre-copyright days, since distribution doesn't really require a "publisher" in the same way.
Now I'm not saying we actually should drop copyrights, but only that convention has twisted the purpose of the copyright and given bad expectations about what copyrights will accomplish. Now we think that people own, buy, and sell ideas. Further, that if you own an idea, you should retain ownership and complete control forever. That's just an unsustainable situation.
No, wrong. Each song is worth like $2 with statutory damages of HOLY FUCK BANKRUPTCY.
I can't say I agree with the size of the damages, but that's no excuse to completely misrepresent the issue.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
She is in essence, incapable of escaping poverty for her entire life. Every extra nickel she gets will be taken.
You know, taking every last thing a person has leaves you with someone who has nothing to lose. One of these days the RIAA's laywers are going to win a punitive suit against the wrong person, and I just hope that I am nowhere near the building the lawfirm is in when it happens.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You have no idea what you are talking about, so listen, because I'll only explain once:
You've made the statistical mistake of comparing one artist in a generation to every artist of our day. How many composers do you know from the classical period? Have you ever heard of Andrea Luchesi? Probably not. For every Mozart, there are hundreds of Andrea Luchesis. Just as now there are hundreds of artists like Brittany Spears.
Patronage was horrible. You had to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what your royal sponsor demanded of the evening. You art would be filled with things only to please your king. See the music of Haydn for an example of this. In some cases, a patron would even modify the work of art however he desired. It sucks.
Besides, there was no one like Brittany: no one had her mix of innocence and sexual confidence. She was popular for a reason. If you don't understand why, it just shows that you are also out of touch with the tastes of modern culture.
Qxe4
You failed to comprehend. I didn't say violent revolution is better. What I said was that trying to hide and slip under the radar while doing what one wants, does not change government in the least. There are ways to change law ranging from civil disobedience at one end of the spectrum, to taking up arms on the other. I did not indicate where in that spectrum I believe action should be taken. It should also be clear from my post and somewhat derogatory depiction of "file sharing", that I don't have a huge amount of sympathy with those who would deprive people of their living, while at the same time thinking that the punishment in this case was excessive. Jamie is wrong. File sharers are wrong. The RIAA is wrong. And the Government is wrong. I'm waiting for someone to be reasonable.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Patronage was horrible. You had to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what your royal sponsor demanded of the evening. You art would be filled with things only to please your king. See the music of Haydn for an example of this. In some cases, a patron would even modify the work of art however he desired. It sucks.
I realize that you were trying to contrast patronage with what we've got now, but I don't see the real difference between what you've described and being under contract to a major label.
Put identity in the browser.
If you feel that you have no voice in the government, the way to change the government is not through anonymous piracy. Engage in civil protest or violent revolution -- whatever works for you.
I'm starting to be sick of this idea you and others repeat over and over again.
If I feel I have no voice in the government, I will do exactly as I please, just like everyone else.
For example, I can decide that I'll only follow laws to the extent I can be forced to. Thus, I might break any and all unenforceable laws, just for the sake of it.
And I don't really care if it's "the way" as you say.
Creating a government that doesn't represent the people can obviously be great for its members and the people powerful enough to manipulate them (and so, it).
Expecting everyone else to follow the rules because it's the right thing to do...
--Most of us here are for fair copyright--
Or even -minimum- copyright. The purpose of having it at all, is to encourage the creation of works. So it follows that the length of protesction, and the strength of protection should be the minimum required to stimulate such creation.
What length that is, and what strength that is, is offcourse debatable, but I haven't seen any coherent argument that todays rules aren't MASSIVE giveaways.
Does -anyone- honestly believe that there'd be less music released if copyright was for 28 years (the original terms in USA) rather than life-of-author plus 70 years ? Would *any* musicians go "Screw that, if I can only profit for the next 28 years, I'm not gonna bother!" -- does that sound plausible to you ?
Does anyone write computer-games, expecting to earn significantly from them for a period LONGER than 28 years ? I seriously doubt it, and I don't think it'll be easy to find anyone who -does- believe that.
In economic terms, 28 years is (more than!) two thirds of forever anyway. If you assume 4% deprecation pro year (i.e. that given a choice between $100 now or $104 one year from now, you consider both offers similarily attractive) then a fixed income-stream has 70% of it's value in the first 28 years.
And -that- is assuming the income-stream is fixed, which is HIGHLY unrealistic, to the contrary, I would guess that most copyrighted works have 90% of their sales in the first 5 years after release. For some classes of works, such as computergames even this is understating it, I bet most computer-games have 95% of their dollar-value in sales inside of the first 3 years after release.
As a small voice of support for your position, this is more or less how Prohibition got repealed. The cumulative affect of a very significant portion of the population simply ignoring the law until it could no longer stand. I'm not saying it can or will work for copyright, there were additional factors in Prohibition relating to the public health risks posed both by the smugglers and dangerously unregulated booze production that just don't exist in this case, but it is an analogous if not identical situation.
Having said that, I definitely feel that most of the parties involved in this dispute are being unreasonable. Content creators (or rather the huge companies that "represent" them) are clearly overreaching what they can reasonably claim both in terms of length of copyright and what rights are granted. The Government is clearly giving more weight to the rights of content companies than to rights of consumers, which is both unfair and a violation of its mandate. Many if not most of the "information wants to be free" crowd seem perfectly content to drive the people who create content completely out of business. This is doubly foolish since it both hurts the content creators, in the end, the consumers themselves. Rather like "fishing out" an area, many of these voracious consumers of content may find that should they ever succeed in in their quest they will have no content to consume.
It seems to me that while the concept of copyright is sound, its terms and duration are currently excessive. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to "unmake" regulation. I am not really sure what the answer is.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
internationally, this success creates a major problem for the RIAA's efforts to get draconian IP laws passed by foreign governments.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is very damaging to the RIAA. That's another example of the point I've been making that they have the dumbest lawyers working for them. They don't know when to stop being greedy; they could easily have asked for a lesser amount, but chose to ask for anything up to the maximum. Now look how much good they have done for their clients.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
There is a well-documented psychological phenomenon where people who can't do something believe it is easy for the people who can do it.
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