Slashdot Mirror
$1.9 Million Award In Thomas Case Raises Constitutional Questions
Techdirt points out that the EFF is examining the constitutionality of the recent $1.9 million verdict awarded in favor of the RIAA against Jammie Thomas. While on the surface it may seem that this excessive award should be easy to overturn since grossly excessive punitive damage awards are considered to violate the Due Process clause of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court seems to have been ignoring precedent and upholding copyright's importance at any cost. "Given the size of the statutory damages award, Ms. Thomas-Rasset's legal team will likely be seriously considering a constitutional challenge to the verdict. A large and disproportionate damage award like this raises at least two potential constitutional concerns. First, the Supreme Court has made it clear that 'grossly excessive' punitive damage awards (e.g., $2 million award against BMW for selling a repainted BMW as 'new') violate the Due Process clause of the US Constitution. In evaluating whether an award 'grossly excessive,' courts evaluate three criteria: 1) the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant's actions, 2) the disparity between the harm to the plaintiff and the punitive award, and 3) the similarity or difference between the punitive award and civil penalties authorized or imposed in comparable situations. Does a $1.92 million award for sharing 24 songs cross the line into 'grossly excessive?' And do these Due Process limitations apply differently to statutory damages than to punitive damages? These are questions that the court will have to decide if the issue is raised by Ms. Thomas-Rasset's attorneys."
Depressing as hell, but the system is bought, paid for, and bent beyond repair.
The RIAA has been making very telling statements after the verdict. They realize that with a judgment like this public reaction is more than just turning on them. The fact that it is also hurting their brands (Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner Bros) is also worrying them. Eventually they will cave or lose.
When it's large damages against a company the Supremes know it's not good. But statutory damages to an individual that lines the pockets of business, that's great! (For 5 of 9 anyways). Summary: businesses good, people bad.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
The RIAA always talks about how they are just protecting the interests of the artists. It stands to reason that this is a reflexive property.
If that is valid (and I certainly believe the first part of the supposition above is highly questionable), then here are the people you should hold accountable for this travesty of justice; the artists on her list:
I have a Green Day album and a couple Aerosmith albums. I figure to send it back with a suitably sardonic letter referencing the fact that I no longer want their music, and if they are in such financial hardship, they can re-sell it to help them put food on the table.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The question is not whether or not she downloaded the songs, it should be whether or not she did it with the intent of providing the same to others. I could support damages equal to the market value (plus reasonable punitive damages) of what she obtained iff (sic) she didn't upload anything but to suggest that this woman is even in the same league as someone who sells thousands of copied CDs is just silly. A common belief here is that the jury came down hard on her because she lied in court, but isn't perjury a criminal matter and shouldn't it have no bearing on the damages levied against her for a few dozen MP3s?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I wonder myself whether the defense DELIBERATELY anticipated a huge defeat in not refuting evidence or calling expert witnesses,
all in an attempt to "shoot the moon" and get unreasonably high damages awarded which would, as it happened, stir controversy and
undermine the RIAA in future venues up the court chain. Thomas was certainly painted as a victim in media coverage, (rightly so, yes)
and the idea that ANY song is worth 80,000$ for being stolen in ANY form is pretty ludicrous and now widely acknowledged as such.
Perhaps all those artists could do a benefit concert for Ms. Thomas and raise enough money to pay off the RIAA.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Seems like a pretty huge gamble to not only saddle your client with a huge unpayable debt but also set precedence for future cases just on the hope that it would stir public opinion enough to overcome the powerful RIAA lobby and get favorable legislative action on the issue, meanwhile hoping you can somehow get the ruling reversed on appeal (maybe due to ineffective counsel?) If my lawyer tried a tactic like that, they would be fired well before the trial.
I'm perplexed by the statement about the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court's jurisprudence in the area of knocking down excessive "punitive awards" is well established, and would most assuredly lead to the RIAA's statutory damages theory being crushed. See amicus curiae brief, which summarizes and discusses the applicable authorities.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I'd say the defense should get shit for legal malpractice.
What happened to infringement needing to have some sort of commercial or otherwise monetary gain? P2P sharing is (generally) not for monetary gain. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong to do so, the intent of large damages is to discourage commercial copyright infringement, not to pick on the little people.
From the sounds of it, the client was unable to pay their initial settlement offer of a few thousand.
If thats the case then is there much different between being bankrupt and unable to pay say $50,000 or $5,000,000?
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I am a lawyer.
The EFF is going to run out of rope really fast. BMW v. Gore said it was about factors, but it was really about notice. Could BMW really expect such a dramatically large punitive-damages award? Maybe not, for the conduct alleged. Here, legally speaking, Jammie had notice: there was a statute putting her on notice of the fact that a jury could award these damages if it wanted.
Anyway, with the Court's current composition, arguing that BMW v. Gore should be expanded to statutory damages is a non-starter. That opinion barely made it through as it was. Just look at the dissents--Ginsberg, joined by Rehnquist? The Court's only gotten more government-friendly since then.
I don't know much adjudicatory criminal procedure; maybe the 8th Amendment is the way to go.
When you realise that the minimum statutory penalty for copying a CD is higher than the maximum penalty for stealing the CD, you see quite how messed up copyright law has become.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Don't you USians have that little clause that prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment"? 1.9M for an average person is their whole life earnings. She could have stole a CD from a store with 24 songs on it and got a slap on the wrist. What makes it so different that it is done on a computer? This cruel punishment should also apply to the people down there who take a pee in the bushes on their way home from the bar and are branded "sex-offenders" for the rest of their life. The US is hysterical and real people are being burnt as witches.
Shh.
This verdict is a simple reflection of the fact that the jury has no
sense of perspective on this matter. They probably just pulled a number
out of their collective posteriors. You probably had some crying for
blood advocating the full amount and others advocating the minimum
amount. The foreman probably split down the middle and probably didn't
even bother to AVERAGE the proposed amounts.
Can you relate to 2 million dollars? Do you think the average jurist can?
Do you think the average American can?
So, Minnesotans think that running a P2P app with some music on it rates 50% the maximum penalty.
It makes you wonder what they think merits the minimum or the maximum.
Mebbe the 200x range of damages spelled out in the law just demonstrates how bogus it is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Jabari, a 300-pound gorilla, escaped from his enclosure and went on an angry rampage through the zoo. Police shot and killed him on the zoo grounds, but not before he seriously injured Reichert, Heard and 3-year-old Rivers Heard.
The Dallas City Council, which oversees the zoo, is scheduled to approve a $500,000 financial settlement with Heard and Reichert during a special meeting Friday at City Hall. The money is meant to compensate the women and their children for their physical injuries and emotional trauma.
State law caps civil damage awards against a city government at $500,000.
So the RIAA gets nearly $2 Million, while these people with real physical and emotional injuries get 25% of that.
Yeah, read the McDonald's case.
They consistantly brewed their coffee at 180F. Industry standard is 140F or so. There were multiple complains their coffee was too hot, dating back years. They were warned repeatedly about this. There was a paper trail. There were prior cases of 3rd degree burns.
Furthermore, the victim wasn't driving at the time. In the car, yes, but not driving. In fact, she was a passenger and the car was in park.
So when this case ended, McDonald's was slapped not only for this incident, but for their apathy for ignoring the problem for so long (which is what punitive damages are for: to finally get you to stop ignoring the complains and industry regulations.)
And sometimes lawsuits are the only ways to get companies to straighten up. Simple calls to Customer Service does nothing. If you want nutritional (heh) info on that chocolate shake, you'll likely have to sue them to actually get the attention of a corporation. Course, that's slightly different than suing them because apparently the fast food place tied you to a chair and force fed you burgers and fries a la the gluttony victim in Se7en... ...Not touching the cat one.
The courts are really the only route individuals have to get a company to pay attention about an issue. Furthermore, one of the GOOD things about our system is anyone CAN sue anyone else. It's just you've got the burden of actually having to prove your case when it goes to trial.
Indeed, but its that way for a reason.
The original intent of statutory damages was 2 fold:
1. To ensure that the infringer does not do it again, and to send a message to other potential infringers, that this behaviour will not be tolerated.
2. To punish commercial infringers for any infringements they may have done that could not be accounted for through actual losses.
It's obvious from the plain evidence in this case that she is not a commercial infringer, and never intended to re-sell the 24 songs, which leaves the other option: To send a message.
I'm pretty sure everyone can agree that $80,000 is insane damages for a single song. So then, in a range of $750 to $150,000, what *IS* fair?
The evidence seems to say that she is guilty, and thus should be held accountable. Actual damages would not send the message that the industry wants to send, but at the same time, ridiculously high damages seems to have the same effect.
Is $750 acceptible? For a total damage award of $18,000? The question is not "Could she reasonably pay the damages?", because the law doesn't care if you can pay it. The question is "How much would make a reasonable deterrent for future infringers?".
Unfortunately, these days, I believe the problem is already out of control, and no amount of damages, reasonable or not, would serve to deter future infringement. Indeed, the same person, after resolving all these issues, being left penniless and bankrupt, is likely to learn from these mistakes and use an encrypted client in the future, and simply download all their music in the future.
Punishing an avid music collector (it's reported that she actually *owns* 200+ cd's) over 24 downloaded songs seems to me to betray all of your future customers.
I don't honestly think theres any way the recording industry can drive this mess for a positive outcome for them. They'll never get the money from *any* damage award, and they're reputation is irreversibly and forever scarred by this lawsuit campaign.
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
$1.00 a month seems reasonable to me. At that rate she might even finish paying before the copyrights expire.
Rosa Parks intentionally broke the law because she was tired and didn't want to walk to the back of the bus. I don't mean to play down the significance of what she did, I'm just saying that court was the farthest thing from her mind at the time.
"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." -- Rosa Parks
Please at least try to learn something about what you're talking about before you say something foolish.
The case is not a criminal case. The award is not a punishment. The case does not a class action suit with hundreds of injured participants. The award is recovery. The highest price of the 24 items on sites offering them for download should be considered as the "loss". Court and legal costs should be added. The total should then be the amount of the reward.
I find it interesting how folks in the government complain how class action lawsuits have unjust awards that are destroying corporations but seem fine with individuals getting raped by a corporation.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I get tired of saying this, but the penalty for distributing a CD should have nothing to do with the cost of buying a CD or MP3. This would be appropriate if she was accused of downloading one copy, but she is accused of uploading. The issue is she assuming the right to distribute a CD or MP3, so the penalty should be based upon what the RIAA would charge to gain the rights to distribute the songs. I have no idea what songs were distributed, so I can't say whether the award is excessive (my gut feeling is yes, but if it was 24 of the most popular songs at the time, maybe not).
The penalty should be based on what it would cost me to gain the rights to distribute those 24 songs to anyone I wanted from my web site. So if I called the RIAA (at the time it happened) and said "I'm interested in putting these 24 songs on my web site for anyone who visits to download, what would that cost me?", whatever the answer would be would be a fair basis for the judgment. Obviously, the price they quote for the trial would have to backed up by facts (what have they actually charged for these or similar songs for instance) so they aren't able to just make up ridiculous amounts. Will it be a lot? Yes, it most likely will if they were popular songs (I;m sure 24 covers of Achy Breaky Heart wouldn't cost that much though), but it would be a fair way to estimate what the actual damage was.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"