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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.
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.
$2M for 24 songs? Sounds like jury tampering.
...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.
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.
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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.
Oh trust me, I have the highest contempt for the courts right now.
This verdict will be the cause of derision internationally, and will provide endless fodder for those who are fond of laughing in their beer at the USA. Unfortunately, they will have a pretty irrefutable point.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
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
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 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
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