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Judge Lowers Jammie Thomas' Damages to $54,000
An anonymous reader writes "Judge Michael Davis has slashed the amount Jammie Thomas-Rassett is said to owe Big Music from almost $2,000,000 to $54,000. 'The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music. Moreover, although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damages.' The full decision (PDF) is also available."
Judge Davis also indicated that he found even the reduced amount to be "harsh" and that, were he -- rather than a jury -- deciding the appropriate measure of damages, the award would have been even lower than $54,000. But he felt that since the jury had determined the damages, it was his province to determine only the maximum amount a jury could reasonably award.
$54,000 is still a crazy amount all things considered, but hopefully this judgment can stand as a sort of benchmark for future ones, even if it's not setting a precedent.
The wholesale price of 24 songs is $16.80. $54,000 is over 3,000 times the maximum possible damages.
Everyone get vaccinated, this outbreak of common sense might be contagious!
Penalties that can actually be paid? Preposterous! My God man, next thing you know they'll say gay marriage is acceptable! Harumph!
'The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music.
I take issue with the language used. If I download and then upload a song, that's copyright infringement. If I walk into WalMart and shoplift a CD, that's stealing. WalMart has been deprived of their property. In neither case has the record company been deprived of anything. Plus, WalMart owns the CD, Warner does NOT own the music. In the US, this "property" belongs to all of us; the "content creator" has a limited time monopoly on its publication, not ownership.
If I steal a CD and get caught I have a misdemeanor criminal charge and a few hundred dollar fine, but if I infringe copyright and get caught it costs $50k. This is better than before, but still very bad.
Free Martian Whores!
It's not the downloading, it's the uploading.
The correct analogy would be:
What sort of punishment would you get is you printed off 3000 CDs of copy right protected music, and gave them away for free with out the permission of the copy right holders?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
...I think it is still a bit much, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was. I like that the judge acknowledged that he wasn't doing this because he sympathised with the defendant, but rather was disgusted with the punishment based on the crime. The reasons he gave for changing the amount are the way a judge SHOULD be.
Living With a Nerd
Devil's advocate: What's the labor involved in tracking down P2P users? They use some pretty sophisticated tech to catch people these days--someone had to pay to develop it--and they hire agencies for the specific purpose of tracking violators and even poisoning torrents in some cases. The cost of enforcement is pretty high, so actual damages might have to include those.
Yes the amount is still absurd, but at least the principle that the statutory damages must bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages has been invoked and vindicated. My blog post is here: Jammie Thomas verdict reduced from $1.92M to $54,000 and my Slasdhot submission is here.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I have a restaurant. You run around town telling people we spit in each and every plate that goes out. I've lost business because of it. Are you saying I'd have to go and find each and every person that didn't come to my restaurant because of your lies? Even if I could find them all, what possible way would I have to convince them to testify for me?
Any simple solution to a complex problem is wrong.
Well, "he" is a single mother of 4 who works w/ a Tribal Council, meaning she is probably paid a little better than a social worker. Considering the fact that you can buy a decent house in the boonies around Duluth for $60,000, I'd say that this will greatly cut into her kids' college fund.
RTFA
Well, I wouldn't think that for one the RIAA would want to bring these agencies to the light of law, a lot of times they use illegal methods to take down torrents and track people. Would a physical store want to hire thieves to break into homes to re-steal the items and then sue for them?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The maximum actual damages is ~35 cents per infringed work, since the wholesale price is ~70 cents and the expenses are around ~35 cents. Under constitutional principles, the statutory damages awarded should not have exceeded $1.40 per infringed work, or a total of $33.60. Even the reduced award is 6428 times the actual damages, a grossly excessive amount.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Ok, call me paranoid, but could this be an attempt to defuse the situation? $2M damages for 2 CDs worth of songs is outrageous enough to get the attention of even the most complacent. $54K, although a heavy burden, is significantly less so and (seems to me) much less likely to cause a general backlash.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sure, her kids should suffer a lower lifestyle to please the RIAA and "deter" file sharing. Your country is fsck'd.
I think you missed the part where distributing was never proved.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Depending on his salary and how much he wants to spend on living expenses, he can pay that off in a few years.
And if he didn't have to pay it off, he could, you know, spend the money on something that enriches society, like, say, purchasing a piece of real estate and thus maybe helping someone retire, purchasing a LOT of music legally and thus, compensating the artists justly, purchasing some new gizmos and gadgets that help sales rates and thus, help companies like Apple and Motorola and Google and so on continue to produce new, good products. In other words, he could spend that $54,000 on living and that money would get distributed throughout society. Now, instead, it will filter into the check books of record execs and lawyers and be spent in the brothels of hell, thus bringing nearer the inevitable hell on Earth apocalypse....or on hookers and coke.
1) It sets an example. Don't get caught
To which I respond:
Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all
-Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I assume you're proposing your idea of slander and damages, not trying to recite your current understanding of the law in this area.
IANAL, but a quick google turned up this interesting page about defamation and harm. Quoting (emphasis mine):
So, in your precise scenario, spreading lies (verbally or published) that damage my business reputation are automatically presumed to cause damage. According to this Wikipedia page, all states of the United States except Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee consider "allegations or imputations injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession" to be defamatory per se.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It's not the downloading, it's the sharing... and sharing... and sharing...
Still, I think $18,000 is a number that already more than took into effect the need for deterrence and costs of enforcement, since it's already massively higher than any actual damages or lost revenues, which are in the several hundreds of dollars.
I think the problem with the law is that there are two different things it is addressing. This case is about an individual who shared a handful of songs with a few people with no expectation of monetary gain. For that case, a few thousand dollars is a significant deterrent.
But there is also the case where someone decides to make a business out of selling illegally copied music. The statutory damages in the law are really meant to be a serious deterrent to this kind of business. Without being able to attach a really big number to each infringing activity, someone might decide that the risk of paying a few thousand dollars is offset by the big money you can make by selling music without having to pay any artists.
I think the law itself is reasonable, it just gets really ugly when it is applied to individuals. They probably need to expand the law to distinguish personal file sharing from commercial intent. That could result in reasonable penalties for infringement. It sounds like the judge was doing the best he could to provide justice while still following the law.
Minimum is $750, and that is tripled in case of willful infringement, which is what jury decided was the case.
As he said in his ruling, you can't only look at the actual damages, since this fine needs to serve as a deterrent, too. If you are only going to pay the value of the songs you downloaded when you get caught, then there would be no deterrent to downloading songs for free.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
The fine for running a red light is $351. The fine for sharing songs is, apparently, $2,250 per song.
Running a red light can kill someone.
Sharing an MP3 might cost the record company $1.
Since when did a record become 641% MORE valuable than a human life?
The damage is still $0
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I'm hoping that this is the death blow for the RIAA.
I'd really like it if it was, but I don't see how this could have that result.
It's not like they could have gotten the two million from this poor person anyways. About 50k is probably the limit they would have gotten from her anyways. She'll be in debt to the RIAA until she dies from old age, most likely. My college loan was less than that (about half actually) and I'm *still* paying on the bastard.
And a precedent in that court was set. Payoff is: $750 * 3 * [number of songs]. Wait until they catch some poor schmuck sharing his whole boot drive. It'll be back up in the millions pretty quick. 50k is what you get for sharing only 24 songs.
Nope, this doesn't go down in the win column for us I'm thinking.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
As has been pointed out, that's roughly the value of a house in the area of the country she lives in. She's married now so I'm guessing she'll quit her job (if she hasn't already), and never work for a wage again. Since she can't get rid of the judgment by declaring bankruptcy, she has no incentive to ever earn money that will only be taken away from her.
So the RIAA has only succeeded in removing one person from the labor pool. Congratulations.
Here's a spot of irony for you...
We used to say, "Dude, it's just infringement. It's not really theft."
Now we say, "Christ, it's just petty theft."
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The cost of enforcement is pretty high, so actual damages might have to include those.
This is totally absurd. If I steal a bread and the bakery develops their own hitech satellite surveillance system to catch me, they couldn't possible claim that they lost a billion dollars because I stole a bread.
If the cost of enforcement is more that the actual damages, it's a stupid business decision and clearly their problem that they chose to do it.
> Any simple solution to a complex problem is wrong.
Either false or a tautology. For example, if one runs a prison and has no money for more guards or walls or floodlights, so people keep cutting through the fence and coming in to break people out or smuggle drugs, a simple solution may prove very effective for the short-term: buy a couple of chickens and put them around the prison. They'll go crazy whenever anyone noses around, and you suddenly have a cheap alarm system. (True story.)
In the alternative, a complex problem may by definition be one that has no simple solution.
In this case, the simple solution to a complex problem is to have an option to pay for music using alternative methods--dollars (or pennies) to buy a song, dollars for a subscription service, time in the form of advertisements or saleable tasks. And songs released into the public domain once they're a certain number of years old or have earned a certain number of dollars.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The judgement is against Jammie Thomas, not the husband. They should probably take the precaution of making deposits to an account where he is the primary account owner, assuming she doesn't file for bankruptcy. Even if she doesn't file, the law will limit how much she has to pay per month on this judgement. The court does examine her income and living expenses and comes up with something "reasonable".
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
What kind of punishment would I get for shoplifting a $16 CD? Isn't petty theft like a $500 fine and community service?
Perhaps that's the lesson to be learned here. Don't pirate music, just go down to the local music store and steal it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Those kids were never going to college.
She's a single mother of 4, that means not only did she not have the sense to not get knocked up without proper support, she did it 4 times. There isn't a lot of common sense in that family so its highly unlikely any of her rugrats are going to do anything more than Janitorial service. Its possible, but its just not a realistic expectation.
Or, you know, it's possible that she was married and that her husband ran off with another man, or mysteriously disappeared from a bar one day, or was killed in an auto accident, or a million other things. But don't let facts like having no idea what her situation is get in the way of your right to sneer at her.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I'm a student-IT assistant at my university (it's like $40 a week, but I don't have to do anything). Part of this job is handing out infringement notices.
I've only done a few, but I have to say - they're doing these right. First of all, they are sending out DMCA C&Ds (which is an order to remove the infringing material i.e. delete it, and not get caught again), not lawsuits. Second, they have the list of the exact files, infringing products, dates and times, and checksums - all linked to the IP address which has been duly looked up by our IT department (we are, after all, an ISP and bound by the same rules). They actually send the whole thing along as an XML file, with a custom schema
Maybe they're just laying off a bit because it's college students. But they're really being quite reasonable IMHO - and this is coming from someone who did, and does, hate the MPAA/RIAA with the burning passion of a thousand firey suns. No lawsuits, and it effectively boils down to a warning. If it comes to it, they leave discipline to the university (who will cut of 'net access, or worse).
Big media is still a leech, contributing little of value to the creative process - but when they make an accusation, they at least aren't being dicks about it.
YMMV.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Slander per se != slander.
Their agents found out, that this is the maximum amount they can squeeze out of her, without her declaring bankruptcy, and them getting nothing.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No damages of any amount are appropriate when the "crime" in question is virtuous act of making recorded music available to all, thereby enriching the people as a whole.
Why should sharing be a crime at all? These laws were only set up to provide a means to promote the arts and sciences. They're not holy, they're just an attempt to implement a system. The Founding Fathers had many doubts about it. Was it a good idea? Would it work? Would it hurt more than help?
The Internet has shown us how very easy sharing is. We can easily see that forbidding it doesn't work. Sharing cannot be stopped. Technical means can't stop it, and neither can legal means. Prohibition was easier to enforce.
And who is really helped by trying to stop people from sharing? Society sure isn't helped. The fondly held notion is that it encourages art because artists benefit from it, and that is to society's benefit. No honest study I've seen on this subject bears that notion out. Instead, it often has the opposite effect! In short the only people who really benefit from this IP regime are the very few who've used their greater knowledge and leverage in financial and legal arenas to rob those who lack such advantages, namely the artists and the public.
And who suffered a loss? No one. Nothing was taken, no one lost anything. At worst, someone missed out on a gain, that's all. And it's not a positive sum gain, its zero sum-- the only way for a sale to be gained is for a buyer to lose money.
These laws don't work. They don't help. If we want to promote art and science, we should put together a system that accomplishes this, as the current system sure doesn't. This legal mugging, whether for $2 million or $54000, is just pure pointless brutality. It won't stop people from sharing, from loaning books and recordings to one another, from visiting libraries and used record stores. It won't make the system work. It didn't even provide any sort of reasonable compensation for any sort of real damage, but calculated a figure based on fantastical ideas that have not been researched. It is totally arbitrary and unfair, and it gives our justice and legislative system a black eye that such egregious unfairness can happen.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Look on the bright side: $54k isn't going to pay RIAA's fees, either.
The RIAA has probably spent a million dollars on this case.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful