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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.
$1.92M for 24 songs is unreasonable? What makes you say that?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
speechless.
Something definitely doesn't sound right. Given that the making available argument was already shown to be bad, how can they still get her? And what the hell was the jury thinking?
Absolutely unbelievable.... F!@# it...why not go for a full million per track...
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.
This is obviously unreasonable, I don't understand how a dozen juries find that it is not absolutely insane to order the defendant to pay that amount.
However from point of view of RIAA it is obviously necessary to make the fines so obscene, that from now on every single person charged just settles for the few grand (what is it, 5K nowadays?)
In any case, at this point it could be a bajjjillion dollars (with a pinky near near the corner of a mouth), there is no way that the defendant can ever pay this out, so why not add another 20 zeros at the end of the fine? Shit, they could argue that taxes from this fine alone will fix the US economy for the next 50 years!
You can't handle the truth.
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.
CDs are $10 at Wal-Mart...
In the beginning, there was null.
If we end up with a string of verdicts like this I have two things to say:
1. I, for one, welcome our new RIAA overlords
2. I think we finally have step 3!
1. Produce easily copied item no one wants to pay for
2. Let people get used to getting it for free
3. Sue your customers for millions of dollars
4. Profit!
This space for rent...
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?
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.
I sell a mp3 for $2 and I'm damn sure there are 10 million people out there just dying to buy it, trust me on that one.
So far I only sold 10k mp3s so you must be stealing my loyal customer base that I was supposed to be selling to...
There, you owe me $19.9M. That simply. Can't argue here.
none
Assuming a price of $15 per album, the defendant could have stolen 128,000 CDs and resold them and it would have been less damage than what they are collecting for two dozen songs.
$2M for 24 songs? Sounds like jury tampering.
So all I have to do is, twice a year write an awful song, then get someone to put it up on a torrent and that's worth $160,000 right? That's a freaking awesome alternate reality! I can live like a king for playing guitar badly a couple of times a year!
By that kind of accounting, I'm worth billions. Boat salesmen will knock. Bikini clad women will swoon. I can have any car I like!
Tell the truth now, you're just trying to outdo the British, aren't you? They only used to send their convicts to Australia for a dozen years for stealing a loaf of bread. You'd ruin people's whole lives over copying a song.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
> 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)....
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.
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?
But you know, "campaigns can change hearts and minds... If you do them right you can make a material impact on people's behaviour.'" Well, here's a campaign killer.
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.
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."
From the jury instruction: "The law demands of you a just verdict, unaffected by anything except the evidence, your common sense, and the law as I give it to you." And what, if the law as given by the judge obliterates common sense?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Wow, you feel guilt? Girls feel guilt. Pirates don't feel guilt. We feel rum. And freeeeeeeee yaaarr
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
It's always the stupid and careless pirates that get caught in the harbor. It's natural evolution at work, a culling of the weak and unfit from the pirate fleet. Feel sad if you must for Thomas, but also feel comfort that evolution has done its job: the pirates that remain are the cream of the crop. They will bear an even more naturally skilled crew to man the next fleet of sloops and schooners.
It wasn't an appeal, it was a retrial.
...
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."
$250 million dollars (one quarter trillion dollars)...
you're out by a factor of 1000 there. :)
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.
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.
this kind of idiocy pops up and sets me straight.
They'll never get a dime from me.
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
This is rather a bitter pill to swallow, however it is a travesty of justice. The awards in no way represent compensation or fair justice. I find it appauling to the extreme. When is someone going to stand up to the RIAA, legally and disband this corrupt organisation? They are just as bad as if not worst than what happened at Enron, which was the start of the economic downturn in reality and because people have no money, we are hitting an all time high of lawsuits of compensation. May the .ogg be with you!
All cows eat grass!
"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.
The $1.9M judgment wasn't the product of an appeal. Judge Davis ordered a new trial after the first verdict came in because he believed that the jury instructions in the first trial were erroneous.
This sort of obvious bullshit trials, bad defense lawyers withstanding, topped with ridiculous legislation really pushes the younger part of society, not yet indoctrinated, into anarchism. I usually state that I'm Swedish - we recently saw a "spectrial" (as The Pirate Bay called it) unfold, too.
Combine this with deaf politicians who refuse to listen to the (quite large) opposition and what do you have? You've got people contempt of law. I realize you need to build your own case and defend yourself, but even if you do, the playing field is uneven. I personally question the correctness of being able to monetize an idea/creative work for a life time. Most people outside of showbiz offers hard working labor - be it welding or consulting - for clients. We cannot profit from our monday 12'o'clock service for the rest of our lives. What's so got damn special with music or film?
I think, imagine at least, that people are growing more and more contemptuous to the powers that be. This is one failed business model - people recognize the absurdity of the situation. But when will this bullshit stop?
I'd had wished it'd be just like with SCO - touch and hard spirit then die a slow death in the media. Unfortunately, they have support from the government, who refuses to see the illogical conclusion that they need to work for their money (not just sell copies). //S
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
> And just how many lawyers are there in the USA?
>Where are they?
Absolutely fucking everywhere.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
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
Jesus Fucking Christ!
What the hell is going on in this country?!
Since I'm sure that Kazaa doesn't exchange entire files but rather does it in small blocks, when Kazaa is actively sharing a file under copyright it must be distributing blocks of copyrighted information hundreds of thousands of times per minute.
Now award $150K for each block distributed....
Good point, however even if NYCL was the worst trial lawyer, his knowledge about the RIAA, copyright, etc is amazing. Include that from all I've been able to gather, he does seem competent as a trial lawyer (few lawyers are really any good at being a trial lawyer).
Perhaps NYCL will correct me on this, I've seen great litigators who never step foot in a courtroom and would be a disaster at trial. On the other hand I've seen great trial lawyers - both criminal and civil - who don't have the finesse to be a great litigator.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
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?
Well,its my impression that he is skilled. At the very lest he seems knowledgeable. So I agree with you there. But I'm not a lawyer, so my feelings aren't very valid as evidence.
I was fishing for evidence that he's actually done some work in this area that would prove his competency. I realize my post came off as trollish, but I couldn't really find a less-blunt way of putting it.
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.
Here's a hint: $5,000 is still inappropriate for the crime.
There has been a time where in Britain it wouldn't be surprising if in a similar case the defendant would have been ordered to pay £2,000,000, payable at one pound a month for the rest of her life, and plaintiff pays all the cost.
What I would really like to know, was the jury made up of people who actually think that almost two million dollars for copying two CDs worth of music is correct, or did they intend to set a judgement that just _has_ to be overturned?
From the summary:
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
I have my doubts. Isn't an accepted definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
the issue of this submission is not a question of whether p2p if copywrited works was right or wrong, it is the absurdity of the compensation, $1.920,000 is just too rediculous, i could understand something less than $1,000.00 as being a realistic compensation as the value of the music sales lost were not that much, this judge needs to lose his (or hers) career, disbared for life!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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?
> And what, if the law as given by the judge obliterates common sense?
The whole point of jury trials, when they were established after independence, was to prevent a corrupt legal system or judge from victimizing an innocent public. They were a reaction by the Founding Fathers against Americans having been jailed by British courts with no posibility of defense.
It's a pity that that isn't the first instruction which is given a jury in every trial --- a reminder of the real reason for their being the last word, and the information that, yes, they can totally ignore the letter of the law if they so desire. Or at least, they used to be able to do it. The legal system has been eroding that power slowly but surely, as we get further and further removed from the spirit which freed all Americans from tyranny, more than 200 years ago.
IANAL. I don't even want to be one.
but I wonder - suppose they get the 'guilty' stuff RIGHT out of the way. don't even deny that. you get some goodwill that way (apparently) and then just TALK to the jury about what is fair punishment.
let 'fair punishment' be on trail. that's the elephant in the room.
now, perhaps this IS the way to get that to be the foremost issue - by making it so high even an extremely well-off person could not, in their lifetime, pay this 'fine'.
but the fact that the jury gave this kind of figure away means, to me, that either they didn't realize what they were really assigning (hard to believe) or that they were simply correct and somehow paid-off.
it does not pass the smell test.
I hope this is not the last word. else, well, time for an iranian style revolt right here.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
can someone comment on the leagility of doing something like this?
How do you even find 12 average people who can justify in their little brains that nearly $2 million is reasonable for 24 freaking songs?? Not much surprises me anymore but come on! WTF???? Most likely just another case of selecting a jury with a bunch of people dead set from the start on making the defendant pay and pay as much as possible regardless of guilt or innocence. The verdict was probably in before the opening statement was made. The RIAA's dream jury
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
Well done, RIAA, and a hearty thank you to your minions at MediaSentry.
I now feel that I am REALLY getting my monies worth from my Internet connection. Just downloaded 1,000 songs in a collection "Best Rock Songs Ever".
Used Bittorrent, so I figure that, at 80,000 per song, I just copped 80 MILLION DOLLARS last month!That theft took just 5% of my transfer cap, so I *could* go for 1.6 BILLION if I really got cracking!
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.
I'd love to agree with you, but at this point it seems like the only thing that's certain is stupidity during these trials.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
At the latest, since Sgt Pepper's.
Ethics are made-up, feel-good guidelines that have no legal standing.
Oaths?
What kind of crack are you on, Anonymous Cowardon?
It's all about the money.
The theory is that yes, you do. Perhaps not divine. It's a social contract where we all agree that in return for making something, we'll give you a bit of say in what happens to your work. If we like it enough, we play along. Otherwise, we go find someone who either makes something good enough that we're willing to put up with them or they're open enough that we'll put up with slightly lesser quality.
If you don't like the terms, you can "go" somewhere else.
That said, there's really no excuse for the RIAA. There is no way that a song is worth that much. I might could understand $100 or so as a deterrent, but nearly two million is insane.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
....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
I'm wondering if the award will cover the loss as people start to refuse to do business with the music business. Some have already started. The ball is rolling a picking up speed. The industry is doing nothing to stop it.
The truth shall set you free!
It certainly falls at least under contempt of court and probably some kind of fraud, even if there's nothing specifically against it.
There's never the widow of a Nigerian prince around when you need one.
Remember RFC 873!
....Just like the rest of us who work for a living?...
Without the existence of copyright, all human creativity would cease. Oh wait... that is how it was for thousands of years before the modern age. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians had a copyright on the design plans of the pyramids.
All theory is gray
She lied about her hard drive, thinking it would get her off. I don't like the RIAA, but she deserved this.
You're also assuming that the RIAA's case didn't contain greater legal dishonesty, even if they didn't get held responsible for it.
One sentence- Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright! The man has been pushing up the daisies (or sitting in the freezer, whichever you prefer) for over half a fricking century, yet his FIRST work, one made when planes were made out of cloth and antibiotics were just a dream, is STILL under copyright.
Most of us here are for fair copyright. Of course most of us would consider the outright bribery of our elected officials by multinational corporations to be treasonous. 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.
But we have been robbed, and the contract broken. We, The People are no longer represented anymore, because we can't cut individual checks to bribe our own elected officials like the multinationals can. Until We, The People are once again represented at the bargaining table then ALL copyrights should be considered by the people of this country and all those who have American copyrights forced upon them null and void and completely ignored. Crooked laws created by bribed officials should be looked upon as the illegal acts that they are. Period.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
It's not legal.
If we can find another way to distribute support for creative work, we don't need to lock up creations. Until we do, we do, because that's how they are supported. Solve the problem.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
it is because of the RIAA's heavy hand in sueing p2p file sharers that i dont buy music anymore, i refuse to support such behaviour.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
The plaintiff has taken this case twice to a jury on essentially the same set of facts - and each time the defendant has been pounded into the ground.
It is no longer a theory when statutory damages are written into the law.
The trial court or the court of appeal can reduce the damages without ever touching the constitutional question. The chances that the case will reach any higher are about the same as winning the weekly Jackpot Lotto.
...But that is the only way even a great artist with fairly broad appeal can make a living ...
That is the way artists made a living before recordings and copyright were invented. They would to go from village to village, town to town and perform for who would ever listen and give them some money.
All theory is gray
As instructed, my children know....swap hard drives of music. Rip discs to your heart's content. Don't upload to the internet, ever, ever, ever. Then they told me that they could swap songs via Chat. I went back to my Victrola and listened to some Perry Como.
For most people there is absolutely no benefit received from work that is already completed and sold. If as an electrician I design and wire someone's electrical system I get paid once, there are no future payments if the house is sold or if guests come use the system I installed.
Her lawyers invested all their time preparing the Chewbacca defense, and when at the court they realized that Lucas will sue them for 2M for using it, they picked the cheaper alternative.
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 don't know how it works in the US judicial system, but here in the UK the default position is usually "loser pays all costs". Judges are free to split the costs differently if they see fit (as they probably would if one side has paid a disproportionately large amount), but they'll still try to weight it an appropriate amount in the winners favour, with the loser paying as much of their opponents costs as is reasonable.
Well, anything she currently has could be seized and sold off, within some limits of bankruptcy protection. If she ever does earn money, her wages can be garnished to some extent. No matter how much ever earns, she's not going to get keep but a fraction. She is in essence, incapable of escaping poverty for her entire life. Every extra nickel she gets will be taken. Her only hope is to live off the grid now, but that has its own drawbacks.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Arr! I'm a pirate on the high seas
It is impossible to know if any sales were actually lost or even gained for that matter. It just depends on who downloaded the content. Demanding damages for infringement is fair. The real problem here is that the damages being sought are an outright violation of due process. It is in no way reasonable to suggest that $80,000 were lost per song. It's not even reasonable to suggest that $1000 were lost per song. Depending on the situation and how many times she did upload the song, $100/file MIGHT be reasonable. That would indicate that she uploaded each song to a bare minimum of 100 people.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The problem is, our current system of selling music as a commodity is illogical. Music has existed, still exists and will still continue to exist in a for hire mode. How do you think most artists of the past made their living? Oh wait, working for hire. How do you think most bands make money? Oh wait, in concerts which are essentially for-hire performances? Who is going to do the hiring? A bunch of people, music fans buy tickets for a concert and go to the concert, if a movie or TV show is released that needs a good theme contact an artist and have them do it. If an artist gave away all their CDs for free and still performed live I highly doubt their bottom line would be affected. How to get the capital to get all of it? Simple, loans. The same way that a home builder is able to (or at least was before Obama screwed the nation) get a loan to build a house that they don't have the capital to do right that second. Similarly, an artist can pool together enough cash with other bands to make a down payment to rent out a larger arena, make money on tickets to keep making money and so on.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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
I'm sure you all know the defendant's next stop will be on the very long line outside the Bankruptcy Court, where the Trustee will do a double-take at the Petition, and then approve it, as no normal person could pay that back. Once the Chapter 7 is behind the defendant, they can go on with their lives, with only a smoking crater where the credit rating used to be.....
Chances are, if there is an appeal, she'll get the death penalty. Three times.
At least she can have all the music she wants.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Um, no. If you had tried with the soap box and the ballot box (and I mean actually tried and not just whining on slashdot), then you could say that. But, you haven't tried really tried, because if you did, then I wouldn't be reading on slashdot about how there is no use in trying.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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 $100,000. Everyone else gets the song free after the first sale, but if nobody bought the album in the first place, nobody would have the song at all. That's part of the social contract behind copyright -- the creator can let people have access to the work at an affordable price, but keeps enough control over the work that he/she can try to sell it to many people. That benefits society because instead of waiting for a patron to pay for the whole enchilada, we all get the work for a modest price while the artist takes the risk making or losing money on his/her efforts.
Three: A smart electrician (gets paid upfront) has almost no risk -- the job is simple profit. For an artist, there is an enormous risk of getting nothing after working very hard. If you don't like that some artists in essence win the lottery, then ensure that all artists get to earn a living wage. Society gets a lot of low cost high quality art from artists who do not win the publicity lottery, so it might actually cost more if artists got paid like electricians.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The Disney version of the history of animation in the United States is pure mythology.
Walt had actually been making animation for 8 years before Mickey came along, some of them quite popular the Alice comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. In addition, Steamboat Willie was actually the third Mickey Mouse cartoon. It was just the first with synchronised sound (the earlier two later had sound added).
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Did it occur to you that they could have intentionally allowed such an obscene judgement to happen so that they'd have grounds to attack the RIAA in a retrial?
Now, not only can they argue that the trial is a mistrial due to failing to instruct the jury properly, they can argue that the RIAA's campaign is asking for unconstitutional damages against people, and treads a very thin line when it comes to RICO.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
....Her only hope is to live off the grid now, but that has its own drawbacks....
I assume that you mean by living off the grid that this has nothing to do with electrical supply but instead of keeping her money in a mattress or some other place that the lawyers cannot find it.
All theory is gray
It isn't a judges job, at that judges level, to decide if laws are just, but to simply apply the law blindly. The people you want to kick out of office are the politicians that passed the law allowing such ridiculous penalties.
Anarchists never rule
Lets presume each of the 24 songs in question (of the 1702 songs being shared by that IP) is available on itunes with a price of 99 cents. Lets also presume that statutory damages were actually limited to the revenue lost by the company (which they apparently aren't). And finally that the 24 songs were each 5MB and the cable modem had an upload speed of 256kbps.
For the 24 songs in question to incur $80,000 in damages each, therefore, they would have had to be downloaded a total of 1939394 times, for 9696970MB of downloads. This would, at 256kbps, take 3507 days (about 9 and a half years). Kazaa had only existed for about three years at the point of infringement. Also, for that matter, that ignores the remaining 1678 songs.
Going the other direction, if all 1702 songs were saturating the upload speed of the modem for the history of Kazaa (call it 3 years even to make things easier) you'd have been able to upload 1009152MB, or about 201830 songs, divided evenly over all 1702 songs that's about 118 times each. At 99 cents each that's $2803.68 in statutory damages.
All they had to do was find 12 citizens just like themselves.
The federal jury is essentially creation of the federal courts.
You do not get to handcraft your own:
In civil cases, each party shall be entitled to three peremptory challenges. ... All challenges for cause or favor, whether to the array or panel or to individual jurors, shall be determined by the court. 1870. Challenges
The federal juror is 18 or over, a US citizen resident in the district for at least one year, writes and speaks English with reasonable proficiency and is physically and mentally fit for service. 1865. Qualifications for jury service
You could make a persuasive case for the geek being the idiot in court - to the despair of his consul and the joy of his opponent -
and the most common mistake he is likely to make is to show contempt for the jury.
The music industry has gotten into a state where a few big companies control the market. They don't need to control the artists, because they control the customers.
Distribution isn't the primary issue. It's easy enough to sell music over the internet, etc.
The problem is exposure. Most people don't really get a song into their head until they've heard it a couple times. Your average casual music buyer doesn't go through the trouble of searching for music they like, but just buys (or steals) music that they've heard somewhere, and enjoyed.
Because most of the channels of passive exposure are so controlled, the vast majority of customers are really only available to those who sign onto a big label.
This control of the market allows them to charge ridiculous prices, and pass on a very small amount to the artist.
All this doesn't make piracy right, but it does make it understandable.
How is a person even supposed to even find bands that they like? I haven't heard a song on the radio or television which interests me in years.
I still buy a lot of CDs, and go to a lot of live shows, but most of them I learned about by downloading from the internet.
The current system will fall at some point unless it adapts. The large record companies made some very smart moves which made them a lot of money. Now the world is changing, and instead of looking for new ways to make more money, they're trying to use their money/power to stop things from changing through fear of litigation.
Convince people that they have to play by your rules, or you'll sue them into the ground. The only problem is that a lot of them will just give you the finger.
On the Andy McKee thing: 8,676 thieves? I've never heard of the guy. I could go download his album, making the number 8,677. Maybe I'd like it, and go buy it. Maybe I'd listen once and decide I don't like it. In either case, Andy doesn't really know. Maybe a bunch of those people he's ranting to DID go and buy his CD legitimately. Maybe they hated it, and the download saved them from spending a bunch of money on something they don't like. The only ones who are stealing, at least morally, are the ones who like the music, keep it, and don't buy the CD.
Have it your way Andy. I won't download your album.
psst.. You might have just lost some sales.
Right, under the table shady employment. Of course she'll have a hard time with healthcare. She'll have a hard time with the IRS if she gets caught. If she gets hurt at work, no workers' comp. If she gets laid off, no unemployment. Her SS is going to be reduced. And I'm sure there are many other disadvantages I'm not thinking of.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It's time to change the law. Copyrights should be shortened to the lifetime of the author and intellectual property should be taxed in order to claim a copyright claim. If I can pay property taxes on my land, I can pay it on my IP.
This is my sig.
We need laws that match the new technological reality. Updated business models too. Those who figure out the new business reality are gonna run circles around the old-school whiners.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
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.
I have way more than 24 songs and I will even take 1/4 price of what they think they are worth, $20000 per song. With the money I plan to pay off Jamie's Judgment and buy a beer for $1.2 million (that is what they should be worth in the RIAA's world).
It gets better...
My collection would be worth $421,200,000 dollars.
And that's just from what I have ripped myself, doesn't count downloads...
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
Actually, technically speaking, Steamboat Willie is in the public domain due to errors in how they did the nameplates. The copyright act of 1909 was very stringent in that regard.
The problem is that the terms were never fairly negotiated. Those who benefit from extended monopolies manipulate the public through their control of the media and influence politicians through "lobbying". The imbalance of power is such that the goal has changed from benefiting society as a whole to consolidating the power of a small elite. This is true wherever there is government able to enforce artificial scarcity, so there is no somewhere else to go.
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 read it as a prediction, based on certain things happening, which didn't happen.
Thing is, I made no such prediction. The GP is fond of attributing things to me which I never said.
What I predicted was that, based upon defendant's lawyers having filed the appropriate evidentiary objections to the MediaSentry printouts, the trial should be "interesting". I was wrong about that prediction, because the defense lawyers did not "voir dire" MediaSentry or Doug Jacobson, did not object to the admissibility of their testimony, and did not rigorously cross examine them. So it was not "interesting" at all; the RIAA was given the free pass I thought it was going to be denied on the technical. I made a prediction that it would be "interesting", and my prediction turned out to be wrong.
But I made no prediction whatsoever about winning or losing.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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?
It's worse than that. The people advocating the strong copyrights also have never created any copyrighted material in their lives. They instead take it from others and give them a tiniest pittance and collect all money earned for themselves in addition to owning the person who really created it. A similar situation would be a letting agent who collected rent on behalf of a landlord but only gave the landlord about 3% of the rent and kept the rest for himself and also had a contract where if landlord wants to rent out any other properties that they must do so through the letting agent.
Artist's deserve to get paid. Maybe their contract with the label suck. But damn it they should get paid for every song they put out "there" in the world.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
How about we start with the fact that OurFavoriteCountryLawyer would have called his team's technical witness to challenge something?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
if one steals a physical cd from a brick & mortar store, would the damages be $80,000 per song? why the special treatment for download theft?
Don't you think it is time to face up to the fact that this is what the US Government wants, this is what big media wants, it is the rule of the land and this is the way it is going to be in the US. This is the way it is going to be and telling people other wise is just doing them a disservice. If you listen to all the politicians down there it is obvious that if any judge gets in the way of these types of punishments there will be a new law passed same day to close any possible defence. Face up to the facts.
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
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
Ray,
Weren't we all hoping for the best when her counsel changed and she got a "young bright newcomer"?
Typical article among many:
http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2009/05/jammie-thomas-gets-new-counsel-kiwi.html?showComment=1242855147496
But given the apparently uneven performance of her counsel, what now?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
How does a "-1, Insightful" happen?
As far as I know, these file sharing programs require that you distribute about the same amount of songs that you download yourself.
Not even close.
Kazaa and its ilk do not require any upload:download ratio.
You don't even have to share anything at all to download.
The only P2P networks that (might) require ratios are private bittorrent trackers, e-mule which is based on your upload speed, and FTP/variants (like Direct Connect, etc)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why did the expert not get called?
Why was no objection made?
Remember, anything you don't move or object at trial is forever barred at appeal.
The most major example - The Beatles.
The Beatles never toured after their fourth album - partly because of the bigger than Jesus thing and the assassinations in the US of MLK and the Kennedys, and partly because they didn't believe people came to their concerts to listen to their music - they were marketed as boy bands of their day and age.
Anyhow, all the best Beatles records were made without touring. It is because of the royalties of these albums that all the Beatles led comfortable lives after the Beatles broke up.
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.
i don't need to justify my piracy because...(drumroll please) i don't need to justify myself. I don't have any guilt. Whatsoever. None. Starving artists? There's starving people all over the globe, and yet i somehow manage to find 8+ hours a day to play eve-online. /yawn Next, please.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Well, If you price the songs at $1. That would mean that each song was uploaded 80,000 times. Assume 5 MB for the song, you get 400GB. Multiply that by 24 and you get 9.6 TB. Upload. No protocol.
I hope that the RIAA feel real good.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
It wasn't until Beethoven that the idea of making money off of copies of musical works even really took off.
[citation needed]
Seriously, it seems to be a very popular meme on /. that copyright is somehow a very recent invention, and that in some mythical past the only way people made money from music and other performance arts was by performing live. In reality, copyright is almost as old as the industry that prompted its invention, namely, printing and publishing. Also, the advent of digital media, which has made it possible to create lossless copies ad infinitum and at negligible cost, makes copyright more important, not less, despite what /. naysayers may feel about the publishing industry's "outdated business model".
*dons asbestos underwear*
If as an electrician I design and wire someone's electrical system I get paid once, there are no future payments if the house is sold or if guests come use the system I installed.
Something like that is a poor analogy, because no matter how many electrical systems you do, it requires the same amount of time and resources to do the next system as it did to do the last system. Once someone writes a book or releases a song, though, other people can duplicate them easily (and almost for free these days). Copyright was meant to ensure that artists had a fair chance to make enough money to live on so that they would be able to continue to create art, which greatly benefits society. Obviously, the copyright laws in many countries have been perverted to greatly favor publishers (not even the artists, which makes it even worse). Hopefully it isn't too late to restore the laws to a sane level.
Perhaps it did suck, but explain to me how it is that during that time we see works such as Mozart popularized but in the modern age when we have this "wonderful" copyright system (Yes, I know you said "reasonable".), we end up being subjected to such artists as Britney Spears and her ilk?
I think the patronage system seemed to work better. At the very least, if you were untalented no one would front the kind of money necessary to support you. You either got a normal job, or you worked to improve your art. More importantly, like any other job, you only got paid while you were producing art. Under that system an artist was paid to produce works of art, not sell them repeatedly for years at a time. Novel concept isn't it?
Um, no. For lying under oath she deserves to face perjury charges, not have her punishment be magnified 1000 times.
I don't know. I think I'd rather just file for bankruptcy and move on than be brought up on criminal charges.
$400 trillion dollars more is unlikely? What makes you say that?
Anyway, I say we give that to them. Think of how much it will benefit the economy! In this time of economic downturn, since we have given up on any kind of manufacturing, we should be giving as much money as possible to the companies that are still afloat. How could that fail to work?
...what?
....Just like the rest of us who work for a living?...
Without the existence of copyright, all human creativity would cease. Oh wait... that is how it was for thousands of years before the modern age. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians had a copyright on the design plans of the pyramids.
Copying in almost any practical form has only existed for about 500 years, with copying on what today would be called even a moderate scale existing for less than 100 years. In addition, today's society has an unfortunate tendency to focus on short-term profit, so people willing to sponsor artistic work purely for the bragging rights are few and far between.
Note that I am in no way arguing about the insanely absurd 150-year copyright period or the life-destroying penalties being given out in court.
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.
They're not mutually exclusive, y'know.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Why attack a user with a different opinion?
I assume they'll stop as soon as they don't have to hide in the shadows for using rational thought.
I'm sure a statistician who browses /. could run some numbers of pirated downloads in 2008 as they relate to prosecutions, maybe even with a comparison to winning the lottery or being struck by lightning.
It's hard as a middle class american to justify a cable bill and an internet bill when I can watch HDTV from any country, and have what I want when I want it all on my PC. If I want, I can even take it on laptop or USB stick and watch it anywhere humans can conceive of going. I know it sounds absurd, but it's true.
Let's face it, American culture has two things that will not make this go away any time soon:
1) A hungry addiction which can only be fed by consuming huge amounts of visual media.
2) An Ever increasing ease to get that media via the internet.
Right now, the piracy movement of the internet has the best distribution of visual media on the globe today.
You'd think, with all the money the other side of the argument has, they would be able to come up with a viable alternative. Instead, it seems like they're grasping at straws at the end of an era in which they reigned. Almost like they're being left behind for new technology, and feel sore.
Just as Video Killed The Radio Star, the internet is doing to TV and CD. It's time to re-invent or die.
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.
No, what is foolish is knowing you were guilty, challenging them (so far, it can still be construed as civil disobedience or standing up to a bully), then putting on a show, committing perjury and trying to pull a fast one on the jurors - which in a jury trial is suicidal if they realize it. Its no wonder she got spanked in court.
That is true, although I think it would be easy to justify lying under oath to fight back against people who were clearly abusing the system.
Easy to justify, not actually justified. And the lies weren't the best thought out either.
Anyway, I was responding to the bit about it being foolish to try to fight it in the first place.
Trials like this is exactly one part of what caused the credit crunch.
.
That $1,920,000 never existed!! Your $421,200,000 never existed either. We are talking about monies that never existed. Nobody's see the 2 mil she supposedly owe, not her, not the record company, not the retailer, in fact, not anybody. But all of a sudden, someone is 2 mil richer and someone is 2 mil poorer. But nobody has seen or touched that 2 mil.
.
These RIAA trial figures drives me nuts, argh, I need a shower.
A huge jury award such as this one virtually assures that the RIAA will never get paid. In addition to grounds for appeal it also
would cause almost all normal people into bankruptcy or simply moving to an area such as Florida where the debt would be next to impossible to collect.
Perhaps the RIAA values the publicity generated by such an award but it sure is the wrong way to try to get paid.
Artists have never been able to make a substantial income from record (or sheet music) sales.
I like to see some proof of that.
There are - realistically - only so many dates you can play, only so many venues that will yield a significant return
The small jazz ensemble needs an intimate club to play in - not Yankee Stadium. But recording these sessions means that you can still reach a global audience.
Artists like Bing Crosby were essentially a studio product.
The microphone dramatically extended their careers and created a sense of intimacy that is difficult to capture on stage.
It can be hard to picture the geek as an adult - because his world view still seems framed by adolescence.
The grace and maturity of an aging artist is often a more than fair exchange for a sometimes flawed performance
That does not mean he can bear the rigors of a concert tour that would be hell on a kid just out of school.
It is simply damned wasteful to lose talent at that level.
Downloading been called no different than shoplifting by members of the music industry - why is it not prosecuted accordingly? This woman lifted $23.76 worth of music. If those were candy bars she'd be slapped on the wrist with a small fine or light jail time.
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
It's all about the money.
And just how many millions has Mr. Ray Beckerman made? Are you privy to information that we are not? Although it's a common Slashdot meme to think of all lawyers as money-whoring ambulance chasers, NYCL has been utterly and undeniably passionate about the cases that the RIAA has been bringing against the people. But then again, after reading a few of your posts in this story, it sounds like you've already made up your mind or have a strong bias.
Fair enough.
Best "String" Ever!
If 1000 SlashDotters download one song every 2 minutes, then they will download 262,800 songs over the course of one year. If the RIAA collects $80,000 per song, they will collect $21 Trillion Dollars. At 10% income tax, this will raise an extra $2 trillion for the U.S. budget, and wipe out the nations deficit.
As such, every /. reader should download as many songs as possible. Save the nation from deficit! Fix the housing crisis! Save the stock market! Be a national hero!
My classics prof said the Inquisition only paradigm-shifted when the church started trying to torture and burn the kids of the nobles.
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".
What are the laws for this situation?
For this situation, or for the one you describe?
For this situation, nothing, because no one (but you) has said their songs are worth $80000 in value.
All the jury said was each infringement is worth $80000 in damages.
It's a fine, not a repayment.
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!
Then she's equally as crazy. I'm sorry, as much as I'd love to "stick it to big media" and/or fight against the RIAA, I'm not willing to settle for blowing a case in order to incur potentially life-ruining expenses. While it's just my personal opinion, it goes beyond "gutsy" to the realm of "crazy"
You speak as if you're targeting me, just one person. No, the boxes are for the people, the masses. Like it or not, slashdot *is* a soap box with over one million voices. Also, we have managed to vote politicians into power that have their hands in the entertainment industry's pockets and now have appointed former RIAA lawyers to the DOJ, so there's your "ballot box." Now we've had a second trial with bad lawyering on both sides ending in a jury deciding a ridiculous and impossible punishment. Soap, ballot, jury.
"Maybe the thing they created is lousy, no-one ever buys a copy, and the make no money. Maybe it is great and they make a fortune."
One problem with the current system, however, is the absence of accountability for the industry. If a movie or music studio puts out a quality product and people purchase the music or pay to see the movie in one form or another, everything works out well for everyone. The media pipeline from the artists/actors to the distributors make their money and the customer feels fulfilled that they received a quality product.
Now, what if the product they produce is a "one-hit wonder" or a movie like Gigli? The consumer pays for the music or to see the movie and is dissatisfied with the product. There is no recourse. You cannot return the CD or DVD to the store, nor get a refund from the theater. You, as the consumer, just have to suck it up. The media pipeline may not make the same profits as before. They may even take a production loss, but it is not a total loss. Why? Because they leverage that loss across all the media they produce. They charge a high enough amount so that the quality products cover the losses of the crappy work and still net them a handsome profit.
On top of this, they utilize the copyright laws to extend their profits from the quality works "indefinitely". This allows the continuation of the endless stream of crap shoot producing that takes place. Let's find one musician or movie that sells and flood the market with anything that comes along that remotely resembles the original.
There has to be some accountability. One result of the ease of "piracy" is that consumers don't have to participate in this blind taste test anymore hoping that they get a steak this time and not a c*ck like the last time. I don't know how many times I regretted buying an album from hearing a song on the radio only to find out that was the only decent song on the whole album. It is the classic bait and switch, but it has been the accepted way of doing things for years.
When the media corporations stop playing a shell game with their product and quit trying to charge me for the same product every time a new medium comes out, maybe I'll start respecting their copyrights. Frankly, if they have to tighten their belts a little, maybe they will become more selective in the product they produce and re-design their business model to catch up with current technology and consumer demand. We can only hope.
You are right it is as old as the printing and publishing industry, and even at the beginning it was meant not to proteect the interests of the artists, but to protect the interests of the publishers. Pirate publishers were only part of the problem, copyright was also useful in protecting the interests of the publishers from the greedy writers.
Remember, a creator doesn't need copyright, it is something granted to a second party, literally the right to make/distribute copies. It's value has always been greater to the industry rather than the individual artists.
I have. A fine of $10,000 to a person who makes $20k per year is huge. A fine of $10k to Bill Gates is something he probably never even hears about, it being taken care of lackeys making $150k per year. This is why in suits against big companies, the damages are calculated as a percentage of net profit.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I find your ideas intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
Metamoderation (take a look at the new version sometime) or Overrated (which doesn't show in the score text).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I haven't read through the whole transcript, and I'm certainly not a lawyer, but as a technical person I wonder about this point:
"The evidence clearly pointed to her machine, even correctly identifying the MAC address of both her cable modem and her computer's Ethernet port
How the heck would they have gotten the MAC of the modem and/or her computer, unless such details were provided by the ISP or sniffed by some form of internally invasive software? A MAC should only be available to a machine within the same network segment, so - assumedly - her modem could ready the MAC on her PC, and I suppose the ISP's next upstream router could read the MAC of the modem, but without the ISP's assistance I realyl don't see any other way this information could have been attained. Even then - depending on configuration - you'd need some pretty stiff logging to tie continual traffic from a given IP to a MAC.
That being said, the common username was a fairly damaging point aside from this all.
The ARS article pretty much repeats these same tidbits without fleshing out the how. Any answers?
Point one is true. There is a lot jealousy of lottery winners. As for point two, while my favorite public radio show can be had free as a podcast, and I download it weekly religiously (This American Life), I did kick in $30 recently to help defray those bandwidth costs. The thing is, the people who make TAL have decided to let me have it free. They don't have to, but I'm glad that they do. If they chose to charge for each episode, that is also their right.
I challenge you to find one instance of where I said wiring a house did not require creativity. I was talking merely about how the two groups, electricians and artists, tend to get paid. As for electricians getting stiffed, if they don't get paid up front, that's on them. Of course, they can always file a "mechanic's lien" or whatever the similar is called in the construction trades against the house. Chances are the homeowner is going to cough up the money rather than have the house sold at auction.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
>pay tax to the United States Government accordingly
You don't pay tax on fixed assets.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
It's a fine, not a repayment.
The state gets the money?
If not, that is a repayment, with an interest rate resembling the Zimbabwean inflation.
Emigrate to a country that does not recognize United States civil asset forfeiture.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
I believe anonymous violation of a law you believe to be unjust can be a valid form of protest. If enough people started flaunting copyright laws (or whatever other law) it would bring the issue to a head and cause a response or change.
Clearly the fact that upsets the RIAA etc isn't that downloaders are anonymous, it's that they're losing money. File sharing will have "won" when enough people do it, even if they don't have an ideology to back it up. Casual human behavior changes the world all the time. I don't know if it's good or not, but it does seem to be happening.
"Ruthlessly pursuing the idea that the accordion is just another instrument."
The RIAA does not produce music. Artists produce music. the RIAA simply acts as a middleman for distribution and publicity(and covering the initial costs of the sound rooms)
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
If a landlord signed up for such a deal, why should I have any sympathy. The landlord made the choice. Besides, it is now trivial and cheap for indy artists to get their work on iTunes or Emusic or probably dozens of other places. If a musical artist wants to sign with a label -- why should I care? That's the artist's choice.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The solution to this is not private piracy. The solution is to change the government. I am fairly confident that a corrupt government is not going to be made good by a citizenry acting corruptly.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
> We all know it; we are breaking the law when we download music/videos Perhaps where you live. Here in Switzerland, downloading music and videos remains legal. Sharing (read: copying) pieces of music, art, etc (not computer programs) with family and close friends is stated quite explicitiy as legal in the swiss equivalent of copyright law.
But it's NOT a valid perspective. I know of nobody here that says people shouldn't get paid to perform work.
Yes, it is a valid perspective -- it's satire. It takes a lot of pieces from what different people write and takes it to the extreme to make a point. People have written that musicians should only get paid to perform work in concerts and get paid for merchandise, rather than for sitting on their butts for example. So the poster used satire to apply that to John Carmack, saying that he should only get paid for the act of programming and not for the end product. I see a lot of different Slashdot posts in that one post and that's no doubt by accident. Its likely intent is to provoke discussion, which it appears to be successful at doing.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The reason there are two different valuations for these items are because of the statutory damages portion of current copyright law. It is a backwards way of making compensatory damages effectively a punitive damage award. You can see the applicable law here: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#504 The crux of the matter is they get to pick, and of course they will pick statatory damages, as they will read a MUCH higher result, as in this case. It's part of the problem with modern day copyright law (U.S.)
Bankruptcy doesn't work like that.
If she qualifies to file for chapter 7, anything she earns after the bankruptcy discharge is hers to keep. If she doesn't qualify, anything she earns after about three years is safe.
Both state and federal laws come into play with regard to bankruptcy exemptions, and there's an amazing amount of exemptions in some states that allow the complainant to keep things. Thousands of dollars in real assets are untouchable in bankruptcy, and in fact most bankruptcy trustees won't touch non-exempt assets (too much trouble for them) if it's pretty clear that a complainant's assets only exceed their debts by a few thousand dollars.
If she loses appeals, she will probably do better living on the grid and filing bankruptcy than living off the grid, but I understand why you espouse that way of life. A misunderstanding of the law is usually what drives people off the grid.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
This is the law. If you don't like it then abolish copyright. Do that, and all these problems go away.
Until then if your teen downloads a song from pirate internet radio and the RIAA takes your house because of it, I don't care. If someone jacks your Internet and downloads a song, they'll bankrupt you and I don't care. If they make a mistake and try to pin this rap on you when you're completely innocent, I care a little but it won't save you. You didn't speak up when it was your turn. Some people are going to live under a bridge. Is it you? Are you sure?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Except that the copyright system in the U.S. wasn't created as a social welfare system for artist: it was created to encourage production which would enter the public domain soon enough.
Imagine if the estate of William Shakespeare still got a cut of every print and performance of his works. Would we every see them in high schools? How about Dickens or Twain? What if literature coursebooks had to pay huge sums of money for the right to republish thousand-year-old manuscripts?
Think I'm being disingenuous? I'm not. I should be able to freely use, remake, dramatize for the theater, and cut up over half of the movies on this list, but I couldn't find any listed as public domain in my ten-minute attempt. The Presley estate shouldn't still be making money off of music written and recorded fifty years ago, if indeed the estate is the entity holding the rights. Automatic extension has made it virtually impossible to know who actually holds the rights when you care enough to license that seventy-year-old movie for inclusion in your film.
The original Copyright Act offered protection for fourteen years, with an optional extension of another fourteen years. I don't see the problem with that or why it needed to be changed.
Put identity in the browser.
> The justice system did serve justice. Twice.
Ah, so the next time you break any law whatsoever, you think it would be perfectly OK that you should pay arbitrarily large sums of money? Either you are very, very rich (so the penalty wouldn't affect you), or very, very, very careful about never breaking any laws, nor even being put in a position where it even appears that you have broken the law.
> The RIAA lawyers were able to convince two juries that she was distributing
> 24 unauthorized mp3 files.
And they were also able to convince most reasonable people that copyright law is in a terrible state, currently.
> How would she (or anyone) be better off if her lawyer told her that they had a
> strong case, that she had a weak defense, and that it would be cheaper to settle?
It's not exactly clear what you mean here, but I will assume your question is against my position, that it was good she didn't settle. Let me clear it up for you: I obviously didn't mean it was personally good for her. But it is obviously good for society in general to be shown the consequences of the bad laws which are currently in place, so that there is some small chance they will be changed (or overruled, or something).
Sometimes, the best lawyer you can hope for is the one who tells you that your case sucks. People hate to hear this however, and I'm sure NYCL, as with any lawyer, has had plenty of experience disappointing people who equate the statement that heir case blows, with thinking that the lawyer sucks or is a wuss or something like that. People love to hear hopeful things, and really hate reality checks.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As noted below this, was a retrial. As an aside, when a decision is appeled, it is not final. That means it can change in your favor, and it can change in a way that is not in your favor. There is no rule that the appealing party should get a better deal.
As this case proves, Jamie would be better off today if she had lost her request for a new trial. Moral: be careful what you ask for.
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.
Courts should rule on fact, not morality.
But then again, I am European and have no clue for how the US system works... is it ok if a jury rules on morality and other unrelated issues to the case being handled? That seem somewhat scary to me.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
"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.
and in the next sentence the geek will complain that a pointy-haired bastard thought his code was worthless because he made it look so easy.
but if it is the geek owns the code - what then?
in the right moment, that could make him the author of MBASIC and Bill Gates.
the engineer working for Pixar will live to see his name in the end credits - he may even have a cameo on the extras DVD or Blu-Ray disk.
perhaps his grandchildren will be around to greet Nemo or WALL-E on their centennial, be invited to the Smithsonian or Lincoln Center.
when the geek looks at Steamboat Willie - his imagination dead-ends at the thought of producing a sequel.
it is envy that drives him. not talent.
Ratatouille lies beyond him.
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...
Labels can hire someone who does music better than you do. :)
Qxe4
A judgment of this type is not necessarily dischargeable in bankruptcy court.
The law in question is still developing and varies a lot by jurisdiction, but:
http://www.pepperlaw.com/publications_update.aspx?ArticleKey=1505
--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.
...a corrupt government is not going to be made good by a citizenry acting corruptly.
Ooooff!! Hammer meet nail...
But...I don't feel that violating a corrupt law is corrupt. I don't consider a marijuana smoker corrupt. And for good reason you don't see them smoking in public, unless they have sufficient numbers to overcome the police(which of course is impossible, they just hold back). And I feel the same about copyright violations. To me the law is little more than this.. with every barricade being fully intentional. But yes, ultimately it is our responsibility to seek out and elect a legislature that will rewrite the law.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
That $1,920,000 never existed!! Your $421,200,000 never existed either.
Problem 1: the $1,920,000 DOES exist, and the poor fella will have to pay.
Problem 2: the $421 million does not exist, but the RIAA will be talking about it like it does. And it seems like there are judges who believe them.
Piracy has been around for so long, in a dream land if no sales were made, people would still make art/etc for simply the love of art itself. I have some photography for sale and wouldn't really care too much if people wanted to use it for private reasons, long as I am credited but I'd draw the line at making a profit from it. If something is good, throw em a dime and give them incentive to create more. If you're poor, then tell your friends, family, get it some much needed airtime as word of mouth is the best advertising. Then the profits may roll in for whatever art you do.
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
The damages are intended to punish the defendent, not to model the actual amount of lost profit for the RIAA (which is probably zero or very close.)
Le français vous intéresse?
Rather, it shows "file sharers" to be "what can I get for nothing" freeloaders rather than people interested in changing our corrupt government.
But...but... I'm a "what can I get for nothing" freeloader and also someone who wants to change politics. What can I say? I'm a complex individual.
I find 'artists' who think they are entitled to money from every person who sees/hears their work to be offensive too.....
Good-bye
I hear you, but the problem is she cannot pay off 2 mil in her life time. Meanwhile RIAA treats their books as though they have a 2 mil asset and go buy something with 2 mil out of their 4 mil pocket.
Hypothetical I know, but generally that's how the housing loans came crushing down. People spending money that doesn't exist (yet).
If you think about it it's really nutty, we are 1 Earth right? Now some dude build 10 houses, costs 100k per, sells those house for 300k per, so he gets 3 mil. Where does the 3 mil come from? It's a collective of people making that 3 mil right? But where did that 3 mil come from? Nobody has seen that 3 mil in cash, solid 3d paper, ever.
I agree to a poster here that said to charge her 40% of her income, that's fine and it's payable and workable for whoever is going to spend that 40%. But 2 mil is just nuts.
Copying has happened for as long as there is life on this planet. Even animals do it! Birds are copying songs all the time, and sing 'em in public, but for some reason I am not allowed to just sing certain songs in public??
"0, Troll" -- that's sad. Disagreeing with parent is fine (likely even) but by silenting his dissent the mods essentially prove his point.
Actually, the giver pays gift tax in the US. It's not part of the income tax code, it's part of the estate tax code to close a loophole where people would give away their belongings before they died to avoid paying estate taxes.
And there are yearly and lifetime exemptions that are high enough to make the question of gift taxes irrelevant for most people.
We are the 198 proof..
Same as in the Netherlands - completely legal here. Although the ruling party that's in bed with the local RIAA wants to change the law now. They want to abolish the 'home-copy tax' (a few cents on each blank DVD or CD) and in return install a 3-year prison sentence for downloaders. That sounds like the type of fair deal we're used to from the RIAA (or Brein, as they call the local equivalent).
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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.)
Actually, monks copying books was what arguably underpinned the development of science - the printing press just increased the speed of propagation of ideas.
You're correct on the copyright though. Copyright laws were a variation on the theme of the "patent" and were around not much later than when the first books started to appear in print. The first copyright or privilege was granted to Aldus Manutius, for this manuscript 'Aristoteles', in 1495. However, these privileges were NOT granted to the author (who expected to be paid as any other worker), but to the publisher - to protect their investment. Only in the 18th century these privileges or patents were granted to authors. Before that time, they were exclusively granted to publishers and not automatic for every work but you had to apply to the King or Queen for every book you wanted to protect.
The funny thing is that the transfer of copyright from publisher to author started when there were huge fights over the publishing rights. Around the end of the 17th century the London and Paris publishers had a total monopoly, that ended in the UK in 1694, after which the publishers outside London started to publish all the books in a massive burst. The attempt to re-monopolize the market led to the Copyright Act of 1709, granting rights to the author for 14 years after publication, with an extension possible for another 14 years if the author was still alive then. The same thing happened in France, resulting in the notion that both the publisher and author needed some protection.
Now, noone I know has any problem with paying the author or publisher for work well done. But the perpetual copyright we have now means I no longer take it seriously.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I have no words for the award amount, the jury, the MPAA. But there is something I will do and if every slashreader on this list does the same, we can make a noticeable dent. I refuse to buy another new CD/DVD/AA3... from any company which is a member of the RIAA cartel. I don't advocate stealing, I advocate buying directly from the artist or independent labels. There is plenty of good music out there. I won't suffer, but this cartel will.
You can't control the flow of information. People will download what they want. Is anyone really sympathizing with the corrupt organizations who steal millions, if not billions of dollars from the United States and the people?
They steal from us because they can with relatively little repercussions, and without anyone significantly noticing.
We steal from them because we can with relatively little repercussions, and without anyone significantly noticing.
The difference is, they have billions of dollars and the most disgustingly immoral and unethical teams of lawyers that money can buy.
We don't. And even if we did, they still have more powerful friends.
Fuck the RIAA. Downloading songs isn't unethical, its a legitimate fucking financial strategy. These corps can teach us one thing - The law only applies if you get caught.
So the great guitarist Andy McKee, chooses to insult and rant at 8,676 potential customers. Does that make him stupid or insightful ? How do I know he is a great guitarist without a)knowing who the fuck he is, b)risking my hard earned money in a crap shoot down at the record store, c)downloading a track or an album and deciding for myself ?
He sounds like he feels he has a right to make as much money as he can from people who haven't even heard his work yet. I've never heard him on the radio or seen his name before today. He obviously records music to make money, not to enjoy being creative. How would he have felt if there were NO leechers ?
I would argue that I would definitely steal from a store, but to save the cost of having to reproduce another CD to replace the "lost sale" I decided to download it instead and save them money.
Pirates are doing music stores a favour!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
From TFA:
"Spokesperson Cara Duckworth of the RIAA, who attended the trial, told reporters afterwards, "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case... and we remain willing to do so." The industry appears to be doing everything it can not to appear vindictive in these cases..."
The RIAA says, vindictive, pretty old me? No, no, we are bending over backwards to take as little as possible of this poor native American mom's scant resources and transfer it to the billionaires we protect. Look, we kept it under $2 million, that's fair isn't it?
Use the above resources, don't buy anything which pays into the RIAA coffers. Let them see a $5 million negative blip that makes them wish they hadn't racketeered against their consumers including this midwestern mom.
And plumbers.
And electricians, piano teachers, karate instructors, roofing contractors, IT consultants, project managers...
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
you dont really understand the history of copyright. its the IP clause of the constitution that provides for copyright, so, we as a nation have had it for, well a while. like the whole while that we have been a nation under the constitution. and also, 'People recognized (the situation) as being unfair so they invented the idea of (insert law here)' isnt exactly a recipe for evil subjugation of the people. there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of copyrights any more than there is anything inherently wrong with the idea of imposing any other laws on society. the application of the idea is totally fucked, and is having totally fucked repercussions in society, *that* is the problem. see pretty much any other area of constitutional interpretation for other examples of fucked up application of constitutional clauses that seem innocuous or even well-meaning. its not uncommon. so why don't you keep the history lecture for a subject on which you are actually mildly informed
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
it does amaze me that people think that the whole of modern culture is frozen and unable to proceed because we cant do remixes of a black and white mickey mouse cartoon.
Wouldn't it be a disaster if we were encouraged to produce new content rather than remix old stuff?
oh noes...!
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I find it amusing that she could walk out of the courtroom, stab the RIAA lawyer in the neck with a pen, therefore killing him, and live out the rest of her life getting free board and accommodation, free access to exercise facilities, and not have to pay for a single cent of this ludicrous fine.
Talk about a screwed up system.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
So you're saying that producing art should be a hobby and not a career?
No shit.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I guarantee that as a humble poverty-stricken electrician you get paid way more per hour over the year than I as an evil copyright-owning royalty hoarding content creator do.
If its such a gravy train to make content instead of rewire houses, why the hell don't you change jobs?
Could it be you prefer the security of a pension scheme and steady salary?
If not, switch careers.
If so, stop whining.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
And they say that people with religious faith are illogical...
In the US, we have this thing called a "representative democracy": If enough people cared about the issue to take the time to participate, it would bring the issue to a head and cause a response or change.
Apparently you missed the memo: The official stance here on Slashdot is that nobody loses money - it's all just ones and zeroes, after all. And, we wouldn't have bought it in the first place, so obtaining it through copyright infringement doesn't count as a lost sale. Also, "teh MAFIAA" are evil, greedy corporations depriving us of our God-given right to be entertained for free. Also, they have abused the principle of copyright, and so, we're entitled to any copyrighted material for free, to punish them. It's like Rosa Parks, dontcha know? Civil disobedience, only without so much risk.
Please, try to get with the program.
If I recollect correctly, this girl was depressed and suffered from some incurable disease. Add this to her (already big) list of problems, and she's ready to commit suicide.
This isn't justice anymore, this is extortion. The lawyers of the RIAA know damn well of this girl's state, and they just press on.
What kind monsters are they? When will the state step in and start kicking the RIAA around over this? Must this girl be turned into a martyr to convince the justice department to prosecute the RIAA?
Do bankruptcies in the US not have fixed terms? In the UK, when one is declared insolvent, it is usually for a term (which up until recently has been three years, but now can be as short as one). This can be extended in certain circumstances, but that's not the norm.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Tax law is an excellent way to go after the RIAA in response to these kinds of cases. Some RIAA activities could fall into the category of racketeering. They have certainly committed violations of anti-trust laws. (price fixing...) I can even imagine cases where an individual is hurt on a shattered legally purchased CD, forcing the RIAA to decide whether the consumer buys the content (in which case, fair use laws apply), or whether the consumer purchased the media (in which case the record companies should be liable for damages caused by defective, dangerous products.) If the RIAA says, 'we own both' then consumers should be able to sue upwards of $2 million for damages arising from the content as well as any possibility the media itself is unsafe. Are they willing to take back millions of CDs worth trillions of dollars (using their math) if it is found, for example, that the aluminum and plasticizers in the CDs are found to be hazardous to human health? This sounds far fetched, but anyone who understands CPSIA, the typical badger-brained congressional response to the issue of chemicals in imported children's toys, this may be a possibility. From the CPSIA FAQ:
Does the new requirement for total lead on children's products apply to children's books, cassettes and CD's, printed game boards, posters and other printed goods used for children's education?
In general, yes. CPSIA defines children's products as those products intended primarily for use by children 12 and under.
wow.
everyone in any creative industry throughout the globe does one weekends work and then retires?
This is news to me, as someone in that industry. But thanks for your dismissive, insulting abuse. Its what reminds us never to make music, games, movies or any other content aimed at people with your attitude. You may think content sucks. It doesn't, its just made for people who don't hate and loathe the content creators, and for those who are happy to pay others for entertaining them.
BTW if you REALLY believe your post, why the hell are you sat here, instead of on your private island after last weeks pop recording session? It's easy right? so why are you not giving up your career to do it?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
so what happens to the store, the musicians and the recoding engineers when everyone acts like you?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Sorry, but once "your" ideas enter the public, they're not yours anymore. We may graciously allow you to make a profit from them for a few years, but after that, tough.
Don't like it? Keep those ideas bottled up. If 28 years isn't enough for you to make it with your while, chances are overwhelmingly good they never will be. Or maybe you just need to kill yourself to put your ideas/works in stark relief. That's seemed to work for other "artists".
I'm sorry you feel like you own an idea that, as soon as someone hears it, becomes *theirs*, as they, too, now have the idea, but that's how it fucking works. That's the problem with ideas - they're not ACTUALLY property.
....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.
What this means is that the RIAA got exactly what they want. They have the nuclear option for downloading .mp3's - if you share files we'll bankrupt you. Pretty effective deterrent. I don't think they really give a crap about collecting the money for the sake of the cash itself.
If this had been me, I'd be out buying fetilizer and diesel fuel with what little money I had left over. ;)
This is how I saw the trial from what I read. I am not a lawyer, but my best friend is and I know a decent amount about the law thanks to him. This is just how I see it and in my non-lawyer viewpoint, I could be wrong about things.
It seemed to me that she pulled a fast one on her attorneys. They seemed caught off guard with the revelation that her disk drive was changed by Best Buy after the date she had specified in her previous trial. Oops! I think it was pretty much "game over" at that point. Her attorneys now had to improvise a defense on the spot and you saw how well that worked.
The defendant seems to project a real aura of arrogance and dishonesty. This is twice now that juries have bitch slapped her with huge compensatory damages. I'm sure if we met her in person that we would think that she is a master manipulator and she has twice convinced attorneys that some great wrong has been done to her and yet both times in trial she looked completely guilty when her web of lies fell down. Now all we can hope for is a 3rd trial based on technicalities, but at this point I think it's pretty hopeless. Her case is pathetic and she's not going to win. It really hurts those who have been wronged by the RIAA that this delusional and manipulative woman has been a test case for fighting back.
This pretty much proves what I thought all along of the RIAA - they abandonned their goal of making music years ago, now they plan to making lawsuits their SOLE source of income.
I was on a jury a few years ago and I have to say I agree I'm not sure how the jury came up with the 80,000 per song if that would send her in to bankrupcy. I'm not sure what the family does for a living but something tells me this verdict will bankrupt them. It also seems excesive for the crime committed.
I say this because when I was on the jury in a fraud case we had specific instructions to fine the guilty party as much as we thought necessary but we could not try to send them into bankrupcy. I believe we came up with 800,000.
If I had mod points I would mod you up. Musicians should expect to make their money off performing live. And if they can't make it financially doing that? Get a day job. Its not like music is going to disappear if all the "artists" have to hold day jobs as well. People have been making music a long time before the concept of a "40 hour work week" and "vacation" ever existed.
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
I want to make sure I have this right. She was accused not merely of downloading for her own use 24 songs, but of distributing the songs to others, and this was the reason for the high damages. Is this correct?
I didn't gather from his post that he meant the US. The printing press was long before that. So before you go off on another rant. Read and comprehend what was written. 'We' could have meant meant western civilization when talking about the time scale involved. The printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. The United States Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention (or Constitutional Congress) in Philadelphia. So over 300 years later copyright was established here in the US. I suggest you watch reruns of Saturday Night Live, the one with Gilda Radner playing 'Rossana Rosanna Dana'. She would go of on a flawed premise and then when corrected sheepishly say "Never Mind!"
If like me you think this is absurd, let me suggest you join the Pirate Party in your country. We recently got 7.1% of the vote in Sweden, and it's likely that soon we'll be achieving this and more throughout the developed world.
In the UK, join Pirate Party UK; elsewhere look at Pirate Party International to find your national Pirate Party.
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.
You, as in the collective group, as well as you personally. You do not represent "the people", you represent a small minority of people who think they are entitled to have their way.
One million people, not all of which are American, most of which agree with you are hear on slashdot. That is what you consider using the soap box? Meanwhile, the RIAA is using musicians, lawyer, lobbyists, radio, TV, magazines, and the internet to reach the other 299 million people in the U.S. You are too busy preaching to the choir to reach out to the people, you know, the general public. You don't even know what a soap box is, and have failed to use it properly.
Yes, you did manage to do that didn't you. You did it. The RIAA didn't put them in power, your did. Looks like you didn't do a very good job at the ballot box, eh? That is your responsibility, so try again.
Let's see. Two trials, two decisions you don't like, so it must be "bad lawyering". That means the system is broken because she, and by extension you, didn't get your way. It couldn't possibly be that she did it, right? Because that would mean you are wrong and aren't entitled to violate other people's copyright.
Learn to use the soap box and the ballot box and the jury box properly and then actually use them, then, maybe, if you can get a majority of the population to agree that it should be used, you can use the ammo box.
Otherwise, you are just another selfish, self-centered, arrogant, extremist thug who is willing to resort to violence and murder to get his way.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
And it's unlikely anyone is going to want to marry her and inherit her 2 million dollars of debt so she'll most likely be paying that off on her own.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Wouldn't it be a disaster if we were encouraged to produce new content rather than remix old stuff? oh noes...!
So how exactly does being able to generate money from work created 75 years ago encourage artists or publishers to create new work?!
Wouldn't it be a disaster if we were encouraged to produce new content rather than remix old stuff? oh noes...!
Except that all new content is a remix of old stuff.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What I want to know, NYCL, is why the judge didn't bar the RIAA witness from testifying about all that "evidence" that was collected with no safeguards, no peer review, and no anything?
Because the defense lawyers didn't challenge it.
Why, from what I've heard, was only the defendant's expert witness barred from testifying about things?
I've read the judge's decision and I feel that he erred.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
"and if they were directly awarded that, do you think they would be able to sleep at night?"
I'm pretty sure the ones of Linkin Park would manage to quietly cry themselves to sleep.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
I know a guy like this. He's a very talented musician that can play the guitar like no one else I've seen, plus many other instruments. But he has no desire to go the way of the unstable income of a starving artist, so he works as an EE Tech and does shows on weekends.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
But when the government realises that a very significant fraction of its population is breaking the law, they might want to look at it. This will take excessive lawsuits first, though, to bring it under their attention.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
you dont really understand the history of copyright. its the IP clause of the constitution that provides for copyright, so, we as a nation have had it for, well a while.
Yeah, you did notice the part where I said, "not to give a complete history of the copyright"? I was talking about the origin of the idea of "copyright", which started before the US Constitution. Still, that was only a few hundred years ago, and we had lots of great artistic works before that.
However, if you want to talk about the Constitutional clause, which is potentially relevant to the conversation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
So there are lots of interesting things about this clause, one being this *only* gives Congress the power to grant copyrights "for limited times" and only for the sake of promoting "progress of science and useful arts." Congress does not constitutionally have the power to grant unlimited copyrights, nor do they have the power to do it for any reason other than "promoting useful arts". Insofar as copyrights are not promoting the arts, they are unconstitutional.
Another noteworthy aspect of the clause is that it appears in the portion of the constitution where the people are granting powers to the government, and not in the portion where the people are reserving rights for themselves. That is fairly important evidence in that it shows the founders did not view the copyright as anything like an inalienable right of individuals. The copyright is merely a tool that Congress may employ for the purpose of promoting the arts, but it's also a tool that Congress can choose not to employ (in fact, is not empowered to employ) whenever it's not serving that purpose.
Actually that debt doesn't carry over in marriage. I know someone who received a similar judgement. He is married, he does speaking tours and has all proceeds from his speaking engagements payed to his wife. He can never earn income, but his wife is immune from the government seizure. He doesn't have a penny to his name, nor can he ever, but through his wife they have a fairly normal life.
What the hell are you talking about? If you believe that, you'd better inform the creators of your very 1337 handle that they should go get day jobs, and that what they do is just a hobby.
Or how about you just admit that you're jealous that some people get to make money making art/music/films/books and stop trying to instigate.
i have been downloading mp3s for free since 1999. i have never spent a single dime on music since 1999. i currently have about 20,000 songs. poorly sorted and duplicates (which actually is an argument for buying songs: good organization), but i guess that means my hard drive has a greater value than the GNP of some smaller countries
or maybe NOT, and this whole notion of economic damage is BULLSHIT. maybe its time to rethink your business model, you assholes, or better yet: GO OUT OF FUCKING BUSINESS. artists distribute directly to fans, making their money from concerts, advertising, etc. NO MIDDLE MAN NEEDED. NO MORE FUCKING DISTRIBUTORS. the motherfucking INTERNET is the distributor. you are an expensive redundant alternative. UNDERSTAND YOU ASSHOLES?
just DIE already you useless pieces of shit, your entire reason for existing HAS BEEN RENDERED EXTINCT
fucking deal with it and die already, like the blacksmiths, chimney sweeps, and manual scribes that have been rendered extinct due to technological progress as well
HISTORY HAS SPOKEN. YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS DEAD. RETAIN SOME DIGNITY AND FUCKING DIE ALREADY
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
.... And I'm sure there are many other disadvantages I'm not thinking of...
It sounds to me like that is how people used to live all the centuries before these socialistic concepts and the income tax were invented. If a socialistic society imposes such a fine, then that same socialistic society may find itself in a position to take care of the person it has imposed a fine upon. It is highly likely that unless she appeals and wins in the end, she will either end up in prison or a welfare case on the public pocketbook. There has to be a better way. Right now as things stand, it would probably be cheaper for the taxpayer to pay the fine, than to take care of this person the rest of her life.
All theory is gray
Are these the same Minnesotans, who think "carnally knowing any person by the anus or by or with the mouth." is "Sodomy", and recognize that whoever "voluntarily engages in or submits to an act of sodomy with another" is wrong and merits a severe sanction of "imprisonment for not more than one year or to payment of a fine of not more than $3,000, or both" ? https://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/statutes/?id=609.293 at least we now have a price: 1 song equals 27 bjs. can any grupie/musician on /. confirm this?
Most bands I know only sold their CDs when they perform until very recently when they could start putting their music on iTunes. The majority of their money came from the gig.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Can a presidential pardon work for statutory damages?
How Scotus determined it's a Constitutional infraction for a person to receive punitive damages from a company in excess of 10 times actual damages, but thousands of dollars per song is hunky dory?
Oh, sorry, I forgot, those original meaning purists in the Supreme Court know that the original meaning of the Constitution was equal rights to the wealthy. God save us from jurists that complain about citing the logic in a foreign court case while citing Blackstone.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Note that modern international copyright law also incorporates a some concepts from the French droits d'auteur, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon concept of copyright. A lot of the things the RIAA and MPAA are proposing related to incorporating more of these ideas into copyright law.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Jammie Thomas is an Ojibwa woman living in a state where 89.3% of the population is Caucasian. Yes, there is racism in Minnesota -- not overt, cross-burning, KKK-style racism; but a kind of smug, condescending relegation of non-white people to second-class citizenship; people to be tolerated with feigned PC magnanimity, while hinting that life would be better if they would just all go away, "back to where they came from."
Against this backdrop of white Minnesota popular culture, it only stands to reason that Jammie Thomas could not have gotten a fair trial from an all-white jury. For justice to be served, the jury should have included at least a few Native Americans, if only to remind the other jurors that Ms. Thomas was not some abstract cultural archtype that they could direct their fears and frustrations at, but that she was a real human being like they were.
Were there any Native Americans on the jury? In a comment on NewYorkCountryLawyer's blog, I politely asked what the gender and racial composition of the jury were. He rejected this question, characterizing it as "offensive." "People's lives are at stake in these cases," he offered in self-justification.
Oh really? Let's set aside, for the moment, that the notion of a trial by a jury of her peers is somehow offensive. How does suppressing information about whether there were Native Americans on the jury actually HELP Jammie Thomas? I think suppressing this information actually hurt her, and continues to hurt her.
Racism hurts people in the justice system. Not acknowledging it hurts people even more.
Or how about download stuff, get caught, and then make your case to the Supreme Court?
Reading this case, it looks like they intentionally threw this one. Probably didn't, but it reads that way. This gives an opportunity to fight the unreasonable awards. Plus, depending on how old the songs are she downloaded, it might make the case for lowering copyright lengths. This might not be the best case to show it, but that's not my point.
My point is, the only way to change the law is either get Congress on your side, or get Judiciary to tell Congress to buzz off. The only way to get the Judicial system is to get caught doing something.
Do it until you get caught, then stand up for yourself. If you're downloading tomorrow's #1 hits, perhaps you deserve to lose. If you're doing something you think should be legal, carry on. Either it's de facto legal because you never get caught or it's potentially going to get a law struck down.
You wouldn't protest elections in Iran by following the law would you? You'd never get anywhere! Neither will we get anywhere with copyright.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While someone who thinks the government is that corrupt certainly has reason to take direct actions to change it, consider that if he believes that, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" as our founding fathers did, then he may reasonably conclude that the law has no moral authority, and morally it need not be followed. Indeed, I think you'd find that many of our founders adopted a similar attitude in the face of a government in which they believed they had no representation. Your apparent sanctimony here is misplaced.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How many artists have made it big totally on their own? The record companies made a system where artists need to go to them in order to make it big.
There are many artists who now have recording studios in their own homes, but when they first started out, they needed the record companies.
Personally I feel that if a song cost $1, then 50 cents goes to the artist while the rest is split up among the recording people and everyone else. Too bad it is more like 90 cents to the record company, 1/4 cent to the artist and the rest to everyone else.
With this verdict, the RIAA will go after more people. Imagine if the porn companies see this as a way to get more money. If they go after p2p users...
More likely, the RIAA will write off the $2m as a loss, and therefore not pay tax on $2m of their income. The rest of you tax-paying Americans will make up the shortfall.
American Socialism: Because corporations are people too!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Cause there is no possible way this could be legit. I mean in America, with our uncorrupted legal system.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Disclaimer: I am a Dream Theater fan.
Dream Theater had some leeway on what they could do with their music- their album A Change of Seasons had a 23 minute song. For the following album the label wanted to force them to write more mainstream, and even had someone 'help' write some of the songs; Dream Theater wanted to write an epic 2-disc album, but no they had to conform to the label. The result was Falling into Infinity, the worst-selling and most hated Dream Theater album. After that, they had no trouble doing what they wanted (as far as I know), including the next album being that 2-disc set they were looking to do.
Moral of the story: the label may have an influence, but in the end fans decide what goes and what doesn't.
My webcomic
Why would I care about how much money a random lawyer has made?
Anonymous Cowardon asked why there are so few lawyers fighting against the RIAA.
I said ethics don't mean shit, and that it's all about the money. If you have a problem with that, that's fine, but it's the truth.
And most lawyers who do pro-bono work do it to get recognition so they can charge more later.
Lawyers who actually care are few and far between, and they usually don't last long, and they rarely win.
From the US Declaration of Independence:
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
You claim
> You have jury trials because we already had them.
which is partially correct, but you also seem to have been missing some historical significance, eh? The significance here is the enshrinement of the right to a trial by jury in the Bill of Rights. Not whether we "created it by ourselves". And it's really not clear to me, based on the long and varied history of the function of the jury trial in British law, that it had the same significance in the British legal system around the time of US independence as it took on in the US legal system during the same period.
Wow I get modded troll while the moron above me gets modded insightful?
Everything I said is factually correct.
Much of what the moron above me said is factually incorrect.
Oh slashdot, you piece of shit.
The law exists to reward the people responsible (well, current laws exist to reward some thoroughly irresponsible people, but I digress).
Nor do you demonstrate a valid business model. Some author may take a year or several to write a novel I thoroughly enjoy, but I'm not about to pay that person a decent salary for a year. Nor do I want to have to cough up money just from a teaser: I want to be able to buy a book based on reviews of the whole thing, both from professional book reviewers and from friends whose tastes I know. Stephen King tried that sort of thing, as I remember, and found it unsatisfactory. If he can't get away with it, I certainly can't.
And I do want there to be a valid business model here. There are authors that I want to be full-time authors. I want them producing good books as fast as possible for my enjoyment, and I'm willing to pay for that. I don't want to wait extra time because the author needs a day job. I don't want one of my favorites to quit because it's just another hobby, and lifestyle changes make it necessary to jettison a hobby.
So, if there's millions of people like me, who want to give individually small amounts of money to somebody in exchange for that somebody writing a good book, reasonable copyright laws make a great deal of sense. (The danger right now, of course, is that unreasonable copyright laws will lead to the downfall of copyright.)
Lastly, you're wrong about reaching a wide audience. That is not and never was the fault of copyright, it was the fact that it took a large organization to make creative works widely available, and therefore the limited number of large organizations could only distribute a limited number of works. Now that it's far easier for an individual to distribute music or books or whatever, and also easier for a large organization to distribute a very large number of them, there's a lot less filtering, and creative people with real talent have a better chance of success.
As long, of course, as they can get paid for their effort (not only writing or singing or whatever, but distributing their stuff), and that takes copyright.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"One sentence- Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright!"
Hugely ridiculous, to be sure, but not germane to the discussion. Jammie Thomas wasn't downloading 80-year-old stuff that should be in the public domain. Most slashdotters aren't pirating the old stuff, and surveys like BigChampagne's make it clear that the top most pirated music matches very closely with the top legally downloaded tracks on iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store.
If copyright limits were rescinded to the original period of (if I recall) 18 years, Mrs. Thomas would still be in violation of the law.
Big media keeps getting the law changed to push out the term length. I hold that this is effectively perpetuity, and bordering on unconstitutional. But I don't believe for a SECOND that any of us are pirating in protest of this fact, nor would we be consuming lots of 80-year-old media. Pirates want the same stuff that people are buying, and they pirate because they simply would rather not pay for it. Let's acknowledge that and move on.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I have a great deal of sympathy for artists who think that a years' work should potentially offer them a comfortable years' living. Not to mention that most of them had to gain experience, sort of like going to med school to become a successful doctor. Shouldn't they have some way to make money off that?
Besides, very, very few people can retire for life after a few big hits. It's actually cheaper for society that they can: we entice a large number of people into being creative for us for cheap, and they'll do it with the hope of hitting it really big. If there was no chance of real wealth and fame, we'd have to pay all of them more to keep them performing or writing or whatever, and the net result would be that we'd pay more for art.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I suppose in your world, it costs nothing to make a song. That's what you are charged for -- the creation. Duplication is the method by which the creation is delivered to you. Art is not free just because duplication is. At the most basic level, if the artist has no food (i.e., money to buy food), the artist dies and no art is made. Just because duplication is cheap doesn't mean art is cost-free.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sure, Ray. Whatever. BTW, it WAS an all white jury, according to Ars Technica. In Minnesota, for a Native American, that's a hanging jury.
And when she leaves him, so goes all his money. Living off the grid like this has its own problems.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
John Hancock. Point out how he tried to hide even though the consequence for his actions meant death if the British picked him up in a traffic stop while speeding in his buggy.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Making music for the sheer joy of it, not for the money???
ABSURD!
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
He seems to have bad karma (i.e. Starting score of -1), gotten an "Insightful" (bringing him to 0) and an "Overrated" (Not displayed; not affecting karma; not in meta-moderation) bringing that back to -1 again.
Besides, there was no one like Brittany: no one had her mix of innocence and sexual confidence. She was popular for a reason. So she was popular because she was sexually appealing to pedophiles? Speaking strictly for myself, I'd prefer that musicians become popular based on their singing abilities, not their booty-shaking abilities. Brittany made a great stripper, but a lousy singer.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Part of the damages implicated here, which the jury had to decide, was punitive damages. This necessarily includes morality, as punitive damages are calculated by how much someone "deserves" to be punished.
BTW if you REALLY believe your post, why the hell are you sat here, instead of on your private island after last weeks pop recording session? It's easy right? so why are you not giving up your career to do it?
Because I'm not a hypocrite.
/entitled/ to over $14 million (1/7th of $100M) from our federal government that they probably never intend to pay, and I never intend to collect (because I'm entitled to it does not mean I think I deserve it). You unknowingly use my family's inventions every day, at low cost, because my grandfather never enforced his patents, and now they're public domain, as far as I know/care.
You direct your question to a very interesting case study. I pursue art, in many different mediums, as a hobby. Legally, I am
I was born (or indoctrinated) with a very strong work ethic, and I feel a great sense of satisfaction by using it.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Funny how people that are so ready to believe that the RIAA can buy whatever laws it needs to support it's flawed business model can't conceive of the notion that it might also pay someone to "throw" a court case in order to set a favorable legal precedent. I'm pretty sure file sharers are a lot easier to bribe than congressmen. Unlike congress-critters there are a lot more of them, and most of them don't already have a lot of money. If I had a plan for profiting from copyright, I would make buying a patsy to argue badly and lose all the way up to the supreme court to set a legal precedent #2 on my list:
1. Buy draconian laws protecting my "intellectual property".
2. People people to fight those new laws and lose badly, thus establishing legal precedent.
3. Sue everyone.
4. Profit!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Your line of argument is totally irrelevant. What I'm arguing is that the logic that American colonists used to justify breaking British laws and eventually to justify outright revolution can be applied here (under the assumption of a similar lack of representation). The fact that some of those colonists also had a commitment to liberty and the courage to stand up for it is a separate issue. I am certainly not trying to argue that copyright infringement is a particularly brave or revolutionary act (even under the aforementioned assumption), only that under this view they can be seen as doing nothing wrong.
I also should say what while I believe the RIAA/MPAA have had a very corrupting influence on Washington, I don't personally accept that we are effectively unrepresented as the OP does. I think there just isn't a big enough copyright reform movement yet to be heard over their influence, but if more of our society cared, we would be heard.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Remember that until very recently the big labels had a stranglehold on the industry. They controlled the manufacturing, they controlled the distribution, they controlled the radio stations, the venues, etc.. There was no easy way for artists to do anything themselves on any sort of scale that could generate a decent income. "Don't want to sign with us? Fine. You won't be in any stores, you won't be on any radios, you won't play in any venues. Good luck." Does it sound like racketeering? Yes it does, because that's exactly what it is. It's all starting to crumble now with the internet and all, but it will be a long time still before there is a level playing field..
From Wikipedia's article on Andrea Luchesi:
By 1757[2] he moved to Venice. The protection of the nobleman Jseppo Morosini enabled him to study with eminent musicians: Gioacchino Cocchi, Padre Paolucci, Giuseppe Saratelli, Domenico Gallo, Ferdinando Bertoni and (the best-known of them) Baldassare Galuppi. His career in Venice developed quickly: examiner of the organists commission in 1761, then organist at San Salvatore (1764), composer of works for "organ or cembalo", instrumental, sacred and theatre music. He composed for official celebrations, the last (1771) being the solemn funeral of the Duke of Montealegre, Spanish ambassador to Venice. As a famous virtuoso he was invited to play organ in and outside Venice, e.g. was in charge of inaugurating the new organ of the basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua.[3]
Yep, sounds like if he were female, he'd be EXACTLY like Britney Spears!
Just like speed limits, alcohol prohibition, and the current drug war, most people alter their preferred behavior to comply with the law only to the minimum level required, or to a degree that "aligns with the herd". If the RIAA and other copyright enforcement bodies could consistently enforce penalties like the one leveled against Jammie Thomas, it might alter the broad public's behavior, but that's essentially untenable. Like it or not, I think that's the pragmatic reality, however, widespread enforcement is NOT tenable because the broader public outcry would almost certainly result in Congressional scrutiny. I'm pretty sure the copyright cartels wouldn't like that. I think that most Americans would say that copyrights are too long if relevant examples were given to them (how many people realize that restaurants who sing "Happy Birthday" are breaking the law?).
Thanshin argues the "layman" argument pretty well: saying that the way to respond to unjust or corrupt laws is to patiently work your way through our representational legal system means implies that you should put aside your ethics in the face of Justice! While it's important to make sure that you're aware of and embrace the potential consequences, I wish I could fully endorse Thorough's argument to Civil Disobedience but the engine of our democracy is the blood of the just... And as much as I value our culture and entertainment, I value my personal freedom more. The end result is a gestalt of civil disobedience, ass-covering, and lobbying for change. What I endorse is the following:
massive and willful civil disobedience, active (if anonymous) involvement in any surveys/polling of the degree of compliance, and *finally*, communicating with your legislative representation.
'the Internet is right.'
As of 2009-06-19, he's been deed for 42+ years and not 50 per hairyfeet's post.
Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 - December 15, 1966)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney
Walt Disney
Date of Birth:
5 December 1901, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Date of Death:
15 December 1966, Los Angeles, California, USA
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000370/
However, I agree that copyright is broken in the USA which is likely why infringement is so rampant of creative works created by big American media companies -- it's tit for tat and a form of 'civil disobedience' done by the masses who are tired and fed up with 'forever minus a day'( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti ) copyright terms and respond the only way they know how to try to cripple such companies by simply watching/using their works without paying for them.
He said it suggested that jurors didn't believe Thomas-Rasset's denials of illegal file-sharing, and that they were angry with her.
The prosecution successfully created personal feelings towards the defendant in the jury?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The answer you're seeking: may shock you.
Yeah, right.
Wow... looking at how the responses to this post are rated, I've gotta get in on the action. +5 insightful/interesting coming my way! Oh yeah! (who knew it was as easy as responding to a troll?)
And, um... EULA... pirates... NYCL will save us (no offense to NYCL intended, keep fighting the good fight)... copyright... hypocrisy... $2M for 24?... Disney... public domain... MAFIAA
And just for good measure... FSM (blessed be his noodly appendages)... creationists... evolution... Godwin'd... RTFA!... In Soviet Russia, Slashdot "FIRST POST!"'s you!... Get off my lawn...
There goes my karma....
"One million people, not all of which are American"
I'm guessing this includes you.
"the RIAA is using musicians, lawyer, lobbyists, radio, TV, magazines"
Let's see, lawyers, lobbyists, radio, TV, magazines are all things that the general public either don't have access to or can't afford to use to go on crusades. The soap box goes wherever you can put it; historically those who wanted to speak out did so by first speaking out on the streets. The general public doesn't have access to the things you mention.
"Yes, you did manage to do that didn't you. You did it. The RIAA didn't put them in power, your did. Looks like you didn't do a very good job at the ballot box, eh? That is your responsibility, so try again."
Unless you don't or can't vote its your responsibility too. Regardless of who gets elected, if the ballot box doesn't work out, then on to the next.
"Let's see. Two trials, two decisions you don't like, so it must be "bad lawyering"."
No, I call it "bad lawyering" because I have legal experience and have been in plenty of courtrooms, and there are several attorneys who currently practice law (and likely are better versed in the law than both of us) who have called it bad lawyering.
"if you can get a majority of the population to agree that it should be used, you can use the ammo box."
All it takes is one average or impoverished everyman to get hit with a ridiculous multimillion dollar verdict like the one here to feel like his life is being taken from him (and who wouldn't feel like that?) and he'd decide to use the ammo box for revenge. Its not that uncommon.
"Otherwise, you are just another selfish, self-centered, arrogant, extremist thug who is willing to resort to violence and murder to get his way."
No, I'm a realist. There are lot of people who feel like they have exhausted every avenue of hope and resort to the ammo box in all kinds of situations. What I'm saying is that I'd be willing to bet that people are going to start resorting to the ammo box soon if decisions like the one in this trial are held up. For better or worse, fear is a powerful tool. What fear does a record company executive have of the people whose lives they fight to ruin? Currently, its none. I've got a bad feeling that is going to change if things keep going in the direction they are.
Additionally, I didn't attack anyone, I simply stated where we stood. You made a conscious choice to personally attack me. If you want to see an "arrogant...thug" look in the mirror. Have a great evening.
Really? You are the one suggesting that the proper way to impose your will on the rest of the nation and world is to take up arms against your government.
Or did you think that "ammo box" meant something else?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There is a complete lack of common sense & decency on display here. Makes me worry for America.
You have expressed it very well. Thank you.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I'll just live life how I want to regardless of any unjust laws, which includes downloading and uploading whatever the hell I want. Enjoying life, without preventing others from enjoying their lives, is #1.
I know this. I was merely pointing out that the parents post could have been worded better, "i don't buy music anymore, i refuse to support such behaviour" and that not *all* music goes through the slimy RIAA.
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Sometimes I type too fast for my own good.
Porquoi?
http://forum.thedailyshow.com/tds/board/message?board.id=story_suggestions&thread.id=9642
Why not computer programs?
Pass her the KY, I am sure that her butt hurts!
Seriously, the judge has no real world knowledge of what songs cost, because if he did, he would have laughed at this, the fact he ruled in favor shows the judges need to be replaced with younger ones, because they are still old school, not even aware what mp3s stand for let alone what they should cost!
Well-written. Not a "Troll", but one who's simply laying the truth on the line.
Sorry, Overly Critical Guy... your well-crafted prose is going to land you a slam from /. because it hits a bit too close to home.
Good point about the GPL. If copyright laws were stricken today, our GPL would suffer as well. Too bad your post was carelessly labeled "Troll".
Although your item #3 is above is technically correct, it distorts the story badly:
Yes, she could and did appeal the penalty.
The word "instead" here is incorrect or misleading.
You call it a "dubious technicality," referring I assume to the making-available legal theory. However, the making-available argument was the linchpin of the RIAA's argument in the first trial, and the subject of fairly heated debate. Personally I consider this argument to be bunkum and balderdash, but federal judges have weighed in on both sides. It's no technicality, it is a live wire of case law.
It was not a pointless retrial -- when the judge gives the jury rotten instructions, a citizen damn well deserves a new trial.
No, the law says penalties range from $750 to $150k per offense, so the median there is $75375, and so a per-offense fine of almost-$80k is on the higher end of possible outcomes (exceeding the median, to be precise). Moreover, the real story here is that the penalty wasn't just "high," it was stratospheric compared to the worth of the items in question.
I agree with you on the facts of the case though -- the evidence was squarely against her, she (IMO) lied to the jury, and deserves some penalty. The important question is how much, and that is where the debate should lie. Pretending this punishment is anything but manifest injustice and a cruel absurdity is, I think, misinformed or disingenuous.
$META_SIG_JOKE