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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.
I'm starting to believe this lady was paid off by the RIAA to set an example by letting it go through the justice system with a bad defense and keep pushing their luck for the amounts awarded and setting precedents. In the back room she just gets paid everything back in double.
Really, how difficult is it to punch through the RIAA's statements? The average helpdesk technician would punch holes in their statements if called as an 'expert witness'. I'm really starting to doubt the value of lawyers in these type of cases. The Chewbacca defense might even stand.
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It looks like classic civil disobedience. Break am unjust law, get punished in the maximum extent possible and appeal at a superior court, all the way to the Supreme.
That, or massive incompetence of her defense.
Now that they've virtually guaranteed her bankruptcy, how else could they possibly punish her? Couldn't she just go on a sharing spree and drum up attention about it? Seems that once you ruin a person, they have no more motivation to do what you want as you've already leveled the most extreme punishment.
Wisest is he who knows he does not know.
Any goon sitting at a computer can cause millions of dollars in damages at the drop of a hat. The problem is that people have assigned value to information. Personally, while this may seem radical, I personally believe that distributing information should be entirely legal in any situation except where someone is personally threatened (say, giving out SSNs and Bank Account numbers.) This would instantly destroy a lot of business, but the matter of the fact is that these businesses should have never existed in the first place. If companies could charge people for using mathematical constants or specific words, we would be in the same situation. It is inheritly wrong to charge people for information. Piracy is not theft, it never has been and never will be -- piracy is a name given to steal inherit immutable social rights.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
While it seems absolutely insane that an individual can be sued for so much for something so inconsequential, I have to say that she really made it easy to side with the RIAA.
If it weren't for her destruction of evidence and blatant perjury, the courts might be likely to have some sympathy for her. Instead, she insulted the courts in a way that made Hans Reiser look well grounded. It was obvious to anyone following the trial that she was the one sharing the files, and while she didn't need to volunteer that information necessarily, the deliberate obfuscation (returned hard drives, etc.) put her on the wrong side of the line.
I think this is a terrible precedent that was set, but really, I'm not surprised. The RIAA, of course, will never see their money, but then Jammie Thomas will never own a material possession again, either, so I guess it's even.
Why work? Lay around on a street corner and let welfare take care of the kids..
It brings another question to my mind: Suppose she's forced to pay this. It will ruin her life. With her life in ruins and with no hope of recovery, what would stop her from using the last of her money to buy a gun, some bullets, and a map of RIAA execs' houses?
$2M for 24 songs? Sounds like jury tampering.
> 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
Ah, so in other words, society should let large corporations extort money from the public because, actually, it is hard for an average citizen to prove his innocence given any kind of evidence of wrongdoing. This is why, in my opinion, in criminal cases the trial is supposed to start out biased in the defendant's favor ("innocent until proven guilty", "beyond a reasonable doubt").
I prefer that our justice system actually serve, well, justice!
I hope that the third time around, either she gets off with a really small penalty, or that the absolute maximum penalty is awarded against her. In the second case, for all practical purposes, the exact sum won't greatly matter in how this affair affects her life, and the staggering amount should either start a media blitz over how ridiculous the state of copyright law has become, or at least some kind of reaction in the legal system. Or perhaps people will stop being interested in RIAA's clients product, since having it on your computer could end up becoming evidence of wrongdoing, even if it's just being shared out by your friendly bot-net controller rather than you (or your neighbor via your wireless router, or whatever)....
Let's assume 24 songs is about 2 CDs worth of music. What would happen if I stole 2 CDs from Wal-Mart? I'd get a slap on the wrist misdemeanor, and no more than a $1,000 fine. Probably I would get a whole lot less than that.
How is stealing that same content digitally somehow worse? If anything I can think of a few ways it's less harmful than shoplifting...
Porquoi?
All the RIAA did was cloud the identity of who the real pirates in this case was.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
...and I might agree with most of what you say if the content-creators (the Artists, not their representatives) were seeing this money directly.
As a recording and performing musician who is both excited by the limitless distribution and disgusted with their treatment of artists I find you personally offensive. Furthermore I also find you to be nothing more than a rhetoric spewing fool of the lowest order. I hope you choke on those party lines you parrot off mindlessly.
GTFO, troll.
Actually you can notice that the actual lawyers here like NYCL never, ever say things like "... couldn't possibly win". That's probably because they're quite familiar with the fact that the legal system often coughs up ridiculous outcomes (in their eyes).
In my eyes, these outcomes just show that even judges often don't actually understand what the law says. And juries for sure don't. It will be interesting to see if this decision will be thrown out again.
This is the first troll post that I can sympathize with. We all know it; we are breaking the law when we download music/videos. It's just that, unlike mugging someone in the street, no one really loses out. Maybe the music execs will have to buy fewer wraps of coke. Is that such a bad thing? I don't think so.
In the end, the only winners are lawyers.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I'll copy-paste one of my previous posts, setting the damages to about $500 total.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1272143&cid=28363955
Except that millions of people did not download from her. Most likely, two people downloaded off her and uploaded it themselves (she should not be responsible for these acts, which those people themselves are responsible for)
Now, let's do the math.
Assumptions:
- 1 download = 1 lost sale
- she uploaded 24 songs, each one worth 99 cents
- 2 people downloaded each song off her, and both uploaded it (as opposed to downloading copyrighted material and sharing open source stuff to avoid anti-leeching mechanisms)
- 10x damage multiplier, constitutional maximum
0.99*24*2*10 = $475.20
That's the cap.
This isn't a matter of law so much as it is a matter of jury behavior.
I wonder if Jamie had run over the plaintiffs with her car if that jury would be so generous.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sorry if I phrased the question trollishly. I think a better way of putting it is this: If I were accused by the RIAA, do you think you'd be a good lawyer to represent me at trial. If so, what are your qualifications? I don't do much infringing anymore, so I'm unlikely to need your services, but I'd be interested in knowing.
Its my impression that you're very knowledgeable, but since I'm not a legal expert, my impressions mean nothing. Sorry if you've already gone over this.
Judging by the summary (No, of course I didn't RTFA.) the only real incompetent in this case was the defense attorney. What is the point of getting an expert witness if you're not going to use their testimony? Why wasn't the technical evidence challenged? When does the legal malpractice suit get filed?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Based to this verdict, you should be able to look at all the music shared on filesharing websites, multiply by $80,000, and get the "real" value of the music industry.
According to this article, 5 billion songs were shared in 2006. That means that the music industry, if it weren't for those pesky pirates, would be raking in $400 trillion dollars more than they are right now.
I find that unlikely.
I think it's fairly clear she was guilty.
But is the law under which she is considered guilty reasonable? That's really the question at the heart of RIAA vs The Consumer. Sometimes I look at all the hard work and money that goes into making and marketing a recording artist, and think it IS wrong to acquire songs without payment. The music has value, otherwise we wouldn't buy it.
But then the Internet has drastically changed how fast music can be sent around the world -- I envision in the not too distant future wireless connectivity everywhere and you just have a music subscription to everything (or maybe, like TV, certain channels, etc). Wherever you are, you can turn on your car, your iPod, your stereo, and select any of numerous playlists you've saved in your online profile, and just listen. Nothing is stored locally -- it doesn't have to be. But you pay for access.
If what you said was true, then Ray would have been crowing about it, but he isn't.
Actually, if you look at the amicus briefs I filed in SONY v. Cloud and SONY v. Tenenbaum, you will see that the only argument I made was the 5th amendment argument, leaving the 8th amendment argument to others to make.
But one of the first reactions I had when I realized that $1.92 million wasn't a typo, was that perhaps I had made a mistake, and should have made the 8th amendment argument after all.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
....this woman's now on the hook for enough money...
What happens to this woman or someone like her who doesn't have a penny to her name and she simply doesn't pay? How can you squeeze blood out of a turnip? If the award had been 10 times or 100 times or 1000 times as much, what difference would it make? They might as well tell her that she must pay off the national debt. It will never get paid off either.
All theory is gray
so they delivered injustice, not as a result of ignorance (as is usually the case), but as some sort of personal vendetta?
FGD 135
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. But anonymous leaching, and I mean that not only in the p2p sense, but also in the "how is an artist supposed to make a living if everything can be had free" sense, isn't going to accomplish anything. Rather, it shows "file sharers" to be "what can I get for nothing" freeloaders rather than people interested in changing our corrupt government.
As for the issues in this case, the damages are clearly excessive. Although I do believe that Jamie did the deed so to speak, and that the regular retail cost of the songs is not enough (*), $2m is more than she'll make in a lifetime. Damages should be something like 20-30% of her income for a year. That would be substantial without being ridiculously high.
(*) If maximum damages = price of song, there is no incentive, aside from one's own moral compass, to pay for content.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I can almost guarantee that $80,000 is less than they've actually spent on those songs. So when does the 'right to sue for damages' turn into the 'right to sue for profit'?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The law exists to protect the distributors' monopolistic business practices, not the creators. And all work can be done as "work for hire". I can produce a little teaser, hook, whatever you want to call it, and if you want more, you can cough up the scratch. You can hire managers to do the leg work when the money starts coming in. But exclusivity is out the window. Don't like it? Go out and dig ditches. People who produce for the love of it will do just fine. Those who want to make that one big hit, and live off that for 100 years can take a hike. It can only lead to a better quality product. Copyright is responsible for most of today's crap. And it makes it difficult for real talent to reach a wide audience. Well, it did before the net.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Disregarding the merits or not of this specific case, I wonder how different people's attitude would be if the RIAA had taken all the money they've spent on investigation's, lawyers, lobbyists etc, and instead of suing people offered an "amnesty" where they subsidised subscriptions/purchases to DRM-free music to the first X (invent some very large number > 1M) of people. They could market this with the labels and come out looking like good guys.
Just a thought.
I always though that statutory damages are not meant as a punishment, but as a means to give the copyright holder fair compensation in situations where the actual damage is impossible to establish.
According to the CONTU report ("Committee On New Technological Uses", back when congress was working on extending copyright to software), and if I recall it correctly, the statutory damages are apparently intended to be both punitive and to allow the copyright holder to recover enough from the few moles he manages to whack to make up for the many he missed.
The precedent is a church choir director who purchased sheet music for a song that was scored out of the range of his choir (and most singers), did a transposition that made it singable, ran off a few copies for his choir, and offered the transposition back to the original author and publisher, gratis, for their next edition. Instead of "incorporating the patch", they sued for some large number of thousands of dollars (real money in those days, too) for the infringing copies of this derived work. And won.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What are the laws for this situation? If I had a diamond/gold bars potentially worth 2 million dollar, and I just gave it away to an employee for just a few dollars, will the USA govt. excuse the employee from paying income/gift tax for the full potential value of the item? Because this seems to be exactly the case with RIAA now. Each of their files are now potentially worth $80000, correct? And just because RIAA's founding companies gift it away to the public at a much lesser price, should be of no concern to the USA government in terms of tax.
If the IRS and government officials ignore this tax fraud, are they not guilty of cheating and defrauding the american public, since they are letting RIAA get away with billions of dollars in tax fraud, while expecting only the poorer american public to pay their taxes?
Why is RIAA being allowed to get away with two different evaluations of its income/wealth in terms of tax? Shouldn't this unpaid tax money be collected from them and used to create new jobs for American people? They are cheating the american public of valuable tax money, especially in this time of global recession. It is the duty of the government to ensure that corporations are taxed *at least* as much as a common man is.
One sentence- Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright!
Steamboat Willie is eight minutes of silent era sight gags linked by a thin narrative thread. Filmed on nitrate stock, it was projected with synchronized sound on a phonographic disk.
The copyright on Steamboat Willie protects that single incarnation of the Mouse. When it expires you get the right to distribute the short - if you can find unprotected primary sources. Try MoMA or The Library of Congress.
You get the right to produce derivatives based on Steamboat Willie - and only Steamboat Willie.
You do not get to use the trademarked character designs. You do not get the Phantom Blot - and the "steel-belted" Mouse of the comic pages.
MGM did rather well with Tom and Jerry. Paul Terry with Mighty Mouse. To be successful in this business, you had to find your own way.
You don't win cases by giving press conferences and bragging about what you're going to do to the other side. You win cases by staying up late, going through boxes of documents. I was truly surprised everyone was reading and writing all that nonsense and buying into that hype. You don't see that on my blog.
Yes I was "hoping for the best". And for all I know defendant's counsel did a great job. They certainly worked hard, and demonstrated intelligence and enthusiasm, at least in the earlier stages.
I'm not in a position to criticize her counsel because I don't know what went on, and I don't know what pressures they were under.
All I know is that, as an outside observer, I was disappointed at the absence of a number of things I would have expected to see. Whose fault that is, I don't know.
What's next is:
1.Defendant moves to set aside verdict and for new trial.
2.Motion granted, new trial scheduled.
3.New trial: defendant wins, plaintiffs appeal.
I would also not be surprised to see the RIAA aggressively seek to enter into a confidential settlement with her, even to the point of paying her attorneys fees, to avoid this getting set aside.
Those of us making the constitutional argument on excessiveness of the RIAA's statutory damages theory will be helped by this verdict.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Then let me help: Jammie, if you go nuts and commit an act of retribution against the RIAA and/or their lawyers, and I can scam my way onto the jury, I personally guarantee you a hung jury at worst. Seriously, I figure for $2 million you've pretty much bought the right to any form of revenge you can come up with.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Chances are, if you worked last year, you got paid for it last year. Copyrighted businesses don't work like that....
Right. What CorporateSuit is arguing is that "copyrighted businesses" should work like that--that artists should have to live by the same rules as the rest of us. That includes being paid for a month's work for doing a month's work (instead of being paid in perpetuity for it), having to keep working to keep getting paid (instead of resting on laurels), and, yes, having to do work that is "soul-sucking and demeaning."
That "copyrighted businesses" are based on the lottery model--many play but few win--is no defense. To the contrary, it's further evidence that "copyrighted businesses" are broken, and that copyright isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. Put it this way, how many wage workers would keep working if, rather randomly, 99.9% of them did not even make subsistence pay, yet 0.1% of them essentially made enough in one year to comfortably retire? Hardly anyone would bother working, then, right? So why is it that people think "copyrighted businesses," which set up exactly that system (i.e., with the overwhelming majority not making subsistence pay for their work), are encouraging more works to be made than a system more similar to wage work?
(As an aside, ever wonder why so many popular musicians are involved with drugs? Could it be because the lottery-style business model of "copyrighted businesses" tends to attract people highly susceptible to addiction? The pop music biz is basically gambling, after all.)
You have no idea what you are talking about, so listen, because I'll only explain once:
Ok. I'm interested.
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.
Sure, misrepresenting a situation with an improper sample set is a common mistake, and there were lots of unknown composers for every couple famous composers, just as today.
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.
Woah, wait a second. How is this any different than today? Now bands have to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what their corporate (who thinks of themselves as royal) sponsor demands of them for the album, who demands that their art be filled with things that makes them lots of money. At least in the old days the music was designed to be aesthetically pleasing to the person commissioning it rather than being this carefully measured, mathematically balanced formula geared toward the broadest demographic. Regarding the Royals changing songs around, I remember there was this XTC album that they remade to CD where they just dropped a bunch of shitty filler right in the middle of all the good songs. That's not a case of corporate drones changing individual songs, but it disrupts the overall flow of the music. (I'm sure that the band's members got nothing from that cd also...) For other instances of music designed to sell, see also: Anything done by Nickelback and Green Day's American Idiot. Indeed, it is even funnier to grab the copy that someone made where they take four or five modern songs and transpose them over one another. A good one was Wonderwall and Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I lost all respect for Oasis AND Green Day at that moment.
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.
At the risk of me being snarky, I'll say that you say all that as if its a bad thing. Furthermore, I contend that she had nothing except the ability to sing. The corporate marketing department gave her that finely honed, well measured, bland, "just provocative enough to be alluring, but not so much to alienate parents" touch.
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Exactly. I make a living from copyright. If copyright didn't exist, I there are a few other business models I could use relatively easily, but copyright is simpler. I don't expect to be making any money from anything I've created yet more than 10 years after I've written it, and in most cases I'd be very surprised if I'm still making money from it in five years. Copyrights of over 14 years are of no benefit to me at all, nor (as at least two studies that I've read have shown) to most people who produce creative works. The only people who benefit from it are publishers with large back-catalogues that they can keep milking. The only way I can think of that I might benefit from long copyrights is that it keeps the price of some good older material high or (more usefully) completely unavailable and stops it from competing with me, but I'd have a hard time arguing that that's in the best interests of society...
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