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DoJ Defends $1.92 Million RIAA Verdict
Death Metal points out a CNet report saying that the Justice Department has come out in favor of the $1.92 million verdict awarded to the RIAA in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. Their support came in the form of a legal brief filed on Friday, which notes, "Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed." It also says, "The Copyright Act's statutory damages provision serves both to compensate and deter. Congress established a scheme to allow copyright holders to elect to receive statutory damages for copyright infringement instead of actual damages and profits because of the difficulty of calculating and proving actual damages."
I suppose this is what happens when you appoint a half-dozen ex-RIAA attorneys to top spots in the Justice Department. President Obama assured us that rules were put into place to prevent this sort of activity, but apparently that doesn't matter. Not that I'm the least bit surprised by that. Frankly, I think the Justice Department should have better things to occupy their time than civil lawsuits. That kind of bias ought to be considered malfeasance in office, or something else worthy of immediate dismissal.
1.92 million dollars for copyright violations by an individual? Now that's Justice for you. Personally, I've never believed that the law should be used to make examples out of people, no matter how distasteful their crimes. That simply breeds more disrespect for the law, which is something the RIAA is apparently unable to understand. They will continue to reap the rewards of that lack of understanding, regardless of what ultimately happens to Jammie Thomas.
Punishment should fit the crime: otherwise it is just government-sanctioned brutality.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This doesn't deter anybody, because the fine is only $5000 and you have the same odds of being sued whether you own a computer or not. What this does is deter people from FIGHTING the unjust $5000 fine, lest you have to pay .
But it'll make a great deterrent won't it? That's all the excuse we need right?
morons.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The 8th amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
To the extent that this verdict was punative, it is an UNCONSTITUTIONAL fine in violation of the Bill of Fucking Rights. The Congress and the Judiciary both lack the authority to impose excessive fines. This can only be changed by amending the Constitution which requires ratification from 3/4ths of the States. /Suck it Department of Justice!
How's that hope and change working out for you? This sounds like the exact same type of pro-corporate crap that went on under the Bush Administration.
Their reasoning is correct in that the only way to make any kind of difference is probably to make an example of a few people, but they are also basically admitting that this is not justice. Have they thought for a second of what would happen to the economy if these kinds of damages actually were to be forced from everyone who has downloaded?
It is sad to see the Departement of Justice agreeing with something like this.
So in your fantasy world, the penalty for shoplifting would be to ask the criminal to pay for the items he stole?
Let me just say (a) I wouldn't want to be a retailer/merchant in your world, and (b) I'm glad things don't work that way in the real world.
As an author, let me just say there should be a penalty -- a significant penalty -- for the wanton disregard for copyrights and intellectual property rights.
So in other words, the system is working as designed. If you have a problem with the laws, talk to Congress or the SCOTUS. It never fails to amaze me how our Congress escapes blame for the mess the US has become. Perhaps it's because the only check they have is for our nations one Chief of the Armed Forces (not busy at all . . .) has to proofread all the fine print that 535 corporate-influenced blowhards can vomit out, and decide if these expansive and pork-laden bills will do more good than harm.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
So in your fantasy world, the penalty for shoplifting would be beheading?
Let me just say (a) I wouldn't want to be a citizen in your world, and (b) fuck you.
In fact, the same stupid rationale for all draconian anti-drug laws: if you make the punishment really harsh, people won't do drugs. And just look how well it works! Everyone knows there aren't any junkies in New York!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Damages to WHAT, again? Cry me a fucking river, assholes. They make it sound like someone is actually stealing from someone else... and like copyright is actually a right. Well, no. Go check the US constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, aka "Copyright Clause". It says copyright exists to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
See? Copyright is not a right. It is not a property. It is not life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. It is a GOVERNMENT-GRANTED TEMPORARY MONOPOLY. It has a very specific purpose: an incentive to the creation of works of art and science, for the good of society as a whole; the welfare of copyright holders is not - AND SHOULD NOT BE - a concern at all.
Copyright was never "good" per se, more like a "necessary evil" - it is a temporary hindrance to everyone's access to a work of art or science, in exchange to the very existence of that given work. It is ludicrous to think a century-long copyright is an incentive to the creation of more works, therefore one must assume it must be reformed, reversed to a more sensible; but, frankly, I doubt it fulfills its supposed purpose at any length. Therefore it is simply "evil", and ought to be ABOLISHED.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Piracy should be dealt with in the same way ICAAN dealt with domain tasting. For individuals running a P2P program in which they gain no money from the distribution, $30 per song is plenty for compensation. $100 per song is perfectly fine for punitive damages. If that's not enough money to make up for legal fees, get together with law enforcement and legislators and create a system similar to parking or speeding tickets. That'll keep costs down.
If I got caught illegally distributing 10 songs and got slapped with a $1300 fine (enough to purchase 100x the number of songs I got for free), I'd think twice about piracy. And that's an amount I can pay off. I keep that much in reserve at all times for car repairs, emergencies, etc.
1.92 million dollars is some fucking criminal, life-ruining BULLSHIT. Bankruptcy and garnished wages for life is not an acceptable outcome for a truly petty crime.
Someone needs to get into the next town hall meeting Obama attends and ask this question. Someone needs to get the words in roughly the form I have written here to the president of the United States on a televised, public event.
I'm deterred as well. Deterred from ever buying movies and music again. I haven't in some time now - ever since this absurd crusade started - and I couldn't be happier. All one needs are public libraries and http://jamendo.com/ - there's much better music on here than any of the shit you're generally going to find on major record labels anyway. Why are people still donating money to these machines? You're subsidizing tyranny over your own population.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
<ianal>
I wish this were true. However, the Amendments to the United States Constitution limit the power of the State. The RIAA made a claim that the value of their foregone earnings is $1.92 million, and after that amount was deemed "accurate", the judge simply awarded that amount in accordance with the claim.
It's akin to this: Imagine I come up with some awesome, kickass software-product-to-end-all-software-products. This product is so awesome, I sell it for $1.92 million per license, and one of the terms of that license is that it only applies to the end user who purchased the product. Then, that user gives the bits to a friend, and that friend uses it. I now have a valid claim of $1.92 million against that other guy, and would expect a judge to award me no less than $1.92 million, assuming that I can prove somehow that the $1.92 million is the value of the software, probably by showing evidence that other customers are purchasing it at that price. A contrived example, but it should help to show why the Eighth Amendment does not apply to civil cases.
</ianal>
I think the point is that the Founding Fathers were prescient in many things. It's not about being reactionary. It's about realizing "hey, maybe there's a good reason excessive fines were explicitly made unconstitutional."
Enforcement of civil penalties lies with the government. How can they legally enforce a judgment which violates the 8th amendment? The fines are, after all, imposed by statute passed into law by Congress.
except for the claim that "it's stealing" part
you should really change your name to the Department of Injustice, because what you do has nothing to do with justice and all to do with propping up corporate greed, maybe the Department of Greedy CockSuckers would be a name that would suit you even better...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The story seems to suggest that the DOJ said that a $1.92 million was perfectly constitutional. My interpretation of the brief seems that the DOJ did not specifically say that. What the brief said was that DOJ considers statutory damages as envisioned by the Copyright Act as legal and that imposing statutory damages does not violate due process. The amount of the damage, however, is up to the trial court to decide and the DOJ was not going to second-guess the court on the amount. The DOJ only responded to Ms. Thomas' constitutional challenges not the actual award:
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Author to author, what would you propose? 20 years in prison? Significant enough? How about death? Still not enough? How about having the accused waterboarded to extract confessions, followed by months of really gruesome torture, then stoning them death? Maybe you'd just like to enslave them and use them as your personal chattel? Never mind, that's pretty close to what these "judgments" do.
Absurd bullcrap like this and the ongoing drive towards eternal copyright (why isn't 17 + 17 years enough?!) discredits copyright and, as someone further up observed, encourages a profound contempt for the law.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
If you like a particular artist, you have to buy that artist's work from their label. It's not like Walmart and Target where if you don't like the price of Coca-Cola at Walmart then you can just buy it at Target. If your favorite artist's work is locked up with DRM, which you want to avoid, your only choice is to violate the DMCA. Or you can violate copyright and download it for free. What other choice do you have? Download YouTube videos of someone doing a bad cover version of the songs you like? There is no other choice.
It's not the voice of reason any more than some Taliban Mullah is.
We don't cut people's hands off for stealing anymore.
In their zeal to help prop up corporations to the detriment of
real people, the armchair moralists like to gloss over this fact.
Apparently ideas embodied by "tort reform" are not for real people
but only for insurance companies and the lie.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just another reason to throw the whole establishment out -- Democrats and Republicans -- and elect an entirely new government that actually has a clue about how unreasonable this all is. And until that can happen, stop them from committing any more damage on the rest of us. All that never-actually-defined Hope and Change isn't working out at all well from my vantage point.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I was referring to coldwetdog's comment, not the verdict. It is possible to think that you should pay for music and still think that the RIAA is out of control.
So in your fantasy world, someone who shoplifts a point-and-shoot digital camera should face a multi-million-dollar fine. That's more than a significant penalty. That's downright criminal.
not only that, but this would also allow the gp "author" to profit greatly by leaving his cameras unattended and not even marked as belonging to anyone (among and indistinguishable by non-experts from other cameras that are free) - with potential multi-million-dollar profits awarded by a crooked judge to "punish" some one who (unwittingly?) used the camera.
why even bother trying to make and sell good cameras then?
That's not stealing. THIS is stealing. In that example hundreds of millions of people are actually deprived their intellectual property - not just a few songs either, but millions of audible and visual records of history and culture spanning the 75 years. And by stealing all history and culture for what is the lifespan of an average person they deprive us of the very continuity of culture we as humans require to remain oriented and purposeful. This is a very real harm.
Let's not lose our perspective on which is the greater wrong. It's actually comparing one person sharing a few songs to the literal Farenheit 451 theft of an entire culture.
Help stamp out iliturcy.