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Jammie Thomas To Appeal $1.9 Million RIAA Verdict
CNet reports that the lawyers representing Jammie Thomas-Rasset have confirmed she will be fighting the $1.9 million verdict handed down in her case against the RIAA.
"The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that it had made a phone call to Sibley and law partner Kiwi Camara last week to ask whether Thomas-Rasset wanted to discuss a settlement. An RIAA representative said that its lawyers were told by Sibley that Thomas-Rasset wasn't interested in discussing any deal that required her to admit guilt or pay any money. ... 'She's not interested in settling,' attorney Joe Sibley said in a brief phone interview. 'She wants to take the issue up on appeal on the constitutionality of the damages. That's one of the main arguments — that the damages are disproportionate to any actual harm.'"
How does Jammie Thomas stack up against the EXXON Valdez case? EXXON got its punitive damages reduced. Why won't the same arguments work for Ms. Thomas? Any lawyers with opinions out there?
Given the track record of her lawyers, she could end up with a life sentence.
Well she is clearly one of the biggest threats to this world. I think she's got off light. She should have had to pay infinity billion dollars and spend the rest of her life in Guantanamo Bay.
And when did deterrents ever stop murders or kids making copies of songs for their friends?
The big fines were intended to make professional copyright violations where some factory turns out hundreds or thousands of copies of fake product unprofitable. Using the same law to beat up some random person is disproportionate.
Which her lawyers believe is unconstitutional, hence the appeal. Making an example of one particular offender isn't the way the law is supposed to work. You transgress, you are punished appropriately. The problem is that the law, written in a different age, and with different parameters in mind, should not be applied in this fashion. Unfortunately, in this case, the defendant does not have the financial means to set this straight. The lawyers, with deep pockets and a public name to make for themselves, do have the means. There is no doubt in my mind that they are not doing this altruistically, but they happen to be fighting what many believe to be a poorly written statute and in that sense are fighting for the common good at the same time. I've got no problem with their desire to gain reputation in the process.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm worried that the Supreme Court, should it eventually take this case, might find a way to justify these hugely exorbitant awards on technically narrow and nit-picky grounds that nonetheless are broad enough in reality to make fighting the RIAA essentially a hopeless cause financially for most people. The Kelo decision shows the kind of sloppy reasoning that can lead to appalling results. It surely doesn't help that Jammie appears to be guilty of deliberate file-sharing and tampering with evidence after the fact. One could wish heartily for a much more sympathetic defendant.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
That's the whole point. The damages are meant to be a deterrent against future abuses. The RIAA is sticking her head on a pike as a warning to others.
Punitive damages can only be awarded in effort to deter the defendant from committing the same infringement again. It is expressly forbidden to make an example of a defendant by awarding a grossly high settlement for the purpose of making others think twice before doing the same thing. It is also expressly forbidden to award higher damages for acts that were not included in the trial. For example, in this case, there were 24 files in question. It's possible the jury said "I'm sure there were a lot more" and award damages with that in mind. They can't do that.
If either of those things occurred, the verdict is immediately nullified. I'm sure they will be raised on appeal, but they will be hard to prove. If you read the jury instructions on this case, it clearly explicates that they are to award damages ONLY for the files in question. There was even a neat little worksheet to help them with it.
Seriously, who could not have seen this coming.
This verdict had to have been the RIAA's worst nightmare. They had to know, as they left the courthouse that they had just snatched ultimate defeat from the jaws of temporal victory.
NOW it all comes into play again, out from under easily impressed small town judges and professionally packed juries.
The entire investigative tactic, the improper application of laws, (not to mention that little phrase containing the words "Cruel or Unusual Punishment") comes under high level review.
They can't have wanted this. They would have been happy with 100K verdict. This is their worst nightmare.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Am I alone in thinking this is exactly what the (pro bono) defense wanted? As I see it, wearing my tinfoil hat, they wanted an insane fine to be imposed so they could defeat it as unconstitutional. They would then establish the "right" fine appropriate with the offense (many opinions on this but most agree it should be in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands - these are songs that sell for 99 cents a piece, after all...). Once that's established, THEN they can fire up their class action suit which is where the real money is to be made. I know I'm being all conspiracy-theory with this but I think most of us agree that the defense didn't exactly do the best job possible and they are very intelligent people so I'm left wondering why - why didn't they do the best job possible? And the only answer I keep coming back to is because there's no money to be made winning _THIS_ case but there's truckloads to be made from winning the class action suit down the road.
If one does the math it is easy to see it was impossible for her to have caused $1.92 million damage. The offense occurred in 2004. Back then a typical cable modem had an upload speed of 256kbps shared with the neighbors. A typical song costs $0.99 on iTunes. An average MP3 is about 3MB. To upload 1.92 million songs would take 2,184.5 days (almost six years) with no protocol overhead, no downtime (infinite nines!), nobody using bandwidth to search for songs, no neighbors using any of the bandwidth, and no one in her house using the internet for anything but uploading files. Kazaa had only existed for three years at the time. She would have had to start before even Napster existed.
We already know the plantiffs were unsuccessful in several of their download attempts (this was brought up at trial). So it seems many attempts to upload files failed which means it would have taken even longer to cause $1.92 million in damages.
Oh yeah, also note today is Independence Day in the U.S. Four of the companies that sued her are headquartered outside the U.S. The one U.S. company has a CEO from Canada.
The deterrent is the chance of being caught. In Somalia, or any other country without an effective police force, the chance of being caught is zero, so there is no deterrent. The actual magnitude of the punishment has surprisingly little deterring effect, and in some cases can make crimes worse: back when capital punishment was applied to just about every crime, there was a big incentive to kill all witnesses to reduce the chance of getting caught, leading to many more murders than would otherwise have been the case.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Madoff - $60 billion, 150 years - $400 million per year Thomas - $2 million / $400 million = 0.005 years = 2 days in prison. It all works out nicely.
I always appreciate a good devil's advocate argument. But you don't have to work through any math to realize that $1.92 million is a ludicrous figure for this small number of non-commercial, personal acts of infringement. At her salary, it's more money than she'll make in a lifetime (ok, fine, I worked through some math there, so sue me). Blindly using these same formulas one would conclude that amount approaching and exceeding several billion in damages would be justified for common cases of infringement when an individual has been sharing hundreds or thousands of songs. If you're looking at this mathematically, this is the point where you step back and look for a sign error somewhere, because you know the result can't be correct.
And regarding your match analogy, IANAL either, but I think that yes, damages should be reduced if 100 others were involved. Why are you being held fully responsible for damages for which the responsibility demonstrably falls in the hands of others? Can your neighbor, after successfully suing you, go on to sue someone else for the same damages, thereby being allowed to receive 100 times the amount than if you alone had caused the damages? Yes, shared responsibility makes the logistics difficult, but avoiding difficulty is not an excuse for unjustly assigning the responsibility.
Furthermore, with multiplicative formulas such as yours, it can be very unreasonable to ballpark figures as you have. Small errors in these numbers result in large errors in the result. And when the difference is between a reasonable fine and ruining someone's life, surely you can agree that it is unacceptable to simply ballpark the figures.