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RIAA Confusion In Tenenbaum & Thomas Cases?
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "There seems to be a bit of confusion in RIAA-land these days, caused by the only 2 cases that ever went to trial, Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset in Minnesota, and SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, in Boston. In both cases, the RIAA has recently asked for extensions of time. In Thomas-Rasset, they've asked for more time to make up their mind as to whether to accept the reduced verdict of $54,000 the judge has offered them, and in Tenenbaum they've twice asked for more time to prepare their papers opposing Tenenbaum's motion for remittitur. What is more, it has been reported that after the reduction of the verdict, the RIAA offered to settle with Ms. Thomas-Rasset for $25,000, but she turned them down."
"Lawyering is hard!"
Push the button on his back down to make him raise his hand to object! Push the same button up and he slides an affidavit full of unmarked bills across the judge's desk! Just like in real life!
Judge'sDeskAndNewYorkCountryLawyerVillainSoldSeparately. RIAADollVoidOutsideOfDesignatedUseAreasAndMayCausePermanentInjuryOr BankruptcyUponMissedPaymentInstallments.
My work here is dung.
Or do you suggest that you should be put out to pasture because every case is the same?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Requests for extension of time are very common, and there's nothing unusual about the reasons given by the RIAA lawyers in the motions or for the length of extension requested. This seems like little more than an attempt to drive more pageviews to Mr. Beckerman's ad-laden site.
I'm feeling pretty dense because I don't get why the headline says the RIAA is confusing these cases nor does it seem like the RIAA is confused about what to do -- indecisive maybe, but that is not the same thing as confusion.
I suspect Thomas will rue the day she turned down the $25k settlement. While whatever millions the jury awarded was obviously excessive, her lawyer's assertion that $1/song is appropriate is also excessive, but in the opposite direction. If the law's bite was no more than the cost of purchase for what you get caught illegally "sharing", there would be no incentive for people to be honest and pay for their music.
Anyway, $25k is not an enormous life ruining debt. Yes, it is not trivial, but it is surmountable.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Not settling will set the precedent for future RIAA damage?
54k seems excessive, but probably way less than what the RIAA lawyers would like to charge for their time.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I would like to see a definitive, ultimate outcome along the lines of the trend I'm seeing here -- reduction of Jammie's fine from the absurdly egregious down to a level she can afford without crippling her family financially for the rest of her life, over a few unlicensed uploads.
Yes she broke the law, there should be a penalty for the infraction, but all the settlements so far have been unjustly high. And yes, I'd like to see it played out to the point where a precedent will be set and honoured.
The RIAA are the worst of the world's ambulance chasers. They shouldn't be allowed to win these huge entitlements, simply because they can afford to make more noise.
Justice should be the outcome of rule by law, decent and upstanding law, not simply "rule by the loud".
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Estimated actual damages
24 songs with a $.99 retail value. Assume the $.99 is the damage per song that a sale was lost on. (That's not the case actually as the wholesale price is the damage amount.) Assume every song downloaded is an actual lost sale. (Again not true, but simple for this calculation.) Assume a seed ration of 5, so for every song 5 copies were made. (Again not true, 5 is an insanely high ratio on P2P networks as 1:1 is common.) 24*.99.*5 = $118.80 actual losses incurred. 10 times that is the constitutionally recognized limit.
$1188.0
That's why RIAA doesn't want the constitutionality of the damages award adjudicated.
I'm 6-1, 230 pounds. Is that fat? If I was only 180, would that be fat? How about 250? 350? 500? 800?
I don't know exactly where the line is, but I can distance it out a bit and make some definitive marks. At 6-1, Let's say anything under 140 is too skinny, and anything over 300 is fat. Those 2 numbers could probably legitimately slide closer together, but they are true where they are.
It's not that difficult of a concept. $24 is a joke. Just as silly would be anything over, idk, let's just say $3000. In all reality, those numbers should slide toward each other, but I think anyone with an IQ over 100 should be able to see that anything over 3 grand is retarded.
Shouldn't she settle for 25K and then ask for donations online to pay it off? That would show the RIAA what we think of them.
Sooner or later everyone in the world will have heard music that they weren't entitled to hear, or seem movies that they weren't entitled to see, or read books that they weren't entitled to read.
At that point, it's going to be hard to convince a jury people that a multimillion dollar corporation should be able to bankrupt a single mother with children because they liked music.
Is this anyway linked to Canada where the music industry has been underpaying artists for the last 20 some yrs?
The last line seems to me (as a non-lawyer, mind you) more fascinating than the headline. Offering a settlement looks like betting on a stock price: The RIAA was willing to sell its $54,000 judgement for less than HALF that amount. They must expect to ultimately get less than that.
And Ms. Thomas-Rasset (or rather her lawyer, since nobody would make a decision like that against their lawyer's advice) seems to share that view, since she refused the settlement. They must be confident that they'll pay less than $25,000, or even nothing.
I know I shouldn't feed you, but really:
> The fines per song really should be calculated based on production cost, plus promotion expenses
You forgot to divide by the total projected sales. So it's lucky that the media industry has done that for you: those costs are factored into the price on the legal market, which are less than or equal to $1 per song.
IMO, the real problem lies with the RIAAs approach. People are naturally going to get behind and support the little person here regardless of who is in the right. People like to cheer for the underdog and this is exactly what the RIAA tactics encourage. They will never win the battle against copyright infringement in the long run unless they get the support of the masses and change the current cultural perception that copying/downloading music/movies etc is acceptable. If the public were to see good artists struggling to survive, then peoples attitudes towards the subject would change. Instead we see mediocre performers living lavish and excessive lifestyles while the rest of the world struggles to just get by.
I want one!
Forget Luke. He'd go next to my Jung figure.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Just had to comment on this - quoting "I don't care a fat rat's ass about that track having some DRM on it. It plays ... on my iPod...) - so what happens when Company X puts out their iPod killer with all the features (patented and copyrighted of course) that you've GOT to have? You going to re-re-re-re-re-purchase all that music you have locked up in iTunes? When do you stop paying the distribution and racketeering arm to be able to play the same progression of tunes in slightly different formay Y?
Statutory damages are for counterfeiters. The big manufacturers that press thousands of copies a week and sells the CDs for less than full price and DEMONSTRABLY cost money: the money that they themselves were paid for the sale). And, after having sold the CD, you no longer have a CD to count for real actual damages.
IT IS NOT for people who aren't getting paid (P2P) and where there was never a chance of large-scale copying (leech rates at 10:1 are indicative of P2P failure: you usually only have 2-3:1).
From looking at the other posts you're thrown out in this discussion, including one where you tried to claim that since using P2P can give increased download speeds that's "profiting", I'm just waiting for you to pull the "think of the artists" line out of your posterior next.
Rules? In a knife fight ... ?
Check out my novel.
Some speeding is tolerated, but not much. 65 mph in a 60 zone, no one will pull you over. Try going 70 or 75, and it'll be much different.
One of the purposes of the speeding fine is to act as a deterrent against future speeding. If you set the fine at $20 because no actual damages were done, and it cost the officer 10 minutes of his time, this will not discourage speeding.
Likewise, setting damages for downloading at $500 is not a deterrent against illegal downloading. And face it, it is illegal. RIAA is interested not just in recovering lost sales, they are interested in recovering their litigation costs, AS WELL AS set a deterrent.
I guess you really have to begin producing the action figures mentioned in the previous post now.
Going to law school has made me hate slashdot so much more.
Don't worry we feel the same way about lawyers.
This is not about downloading at all. Actual damages depends on how many times she *uploaded* the songs, not downloaded. She was not authorized to copy these songs, yet did so as part of the workings of P2P. You can set files to be unshared once downloaded, but during the initial transfer it was (at the time she is accused of copyright infringement) difficult to configure any P2P software to download parts without uploading parts.
If she uploaded a song available as a single for $3 to 18,000 people, $54k is perfect. You're saying that it's impossible for one person to be responsible for thousands of lost sales, but I think it's impossible to support that assertion. A courtroom is the only place that can be proven, and that's what the RIAA is trying to do. If I download a song and leave it in my shared folder for 3 years, how many full and complete uploads did I make? You're saying you have an answer to that, and the answer is less than "thousands". I'm saying it depends on the evidence.
The defendant apparently replaced her hard drive, so we don't know how long the files were being shared, and whether they were moved out of the shared folder, because the evidence is gone. The plaintiff only confirmed that the files were being shared, not that the defendant was uploading full copies. So IN THIS CASE it will be difficult to prove damages. You are stating as if in every case it will be impossible to prove damages, which is certainly not true. Several P2P applications actually keep track of the number of bytes of a song uploaded, and some present the data in a way that you can make a reasonable inference of the number of complete copies uploaded by the client. Each complete copy is a plain-as-day copyright infringement.
How do you calculate damages based on the number of uploads? It would be difficult to argue in a courtroom that you can tell which uploads would have resulted in a sale, had the upload not happened. It would be *very* difficult to argue that someone else would have uploaded it if the defendant hadn't, and therefore the defendant is not liable, because court cases use actual evidence, not theories. If the other person had uploaded, the other person would be the defendant. The only obvious course of action is for the plaintiff to claim that every upload represents a person on the other side who downloaded something they would otherwise have had to pay for. Regardless of how many studies show p2p basically serving as free advertising, a substitute for payola, and a self-selected sub-population who wouldn't pay for things they couldn't download, you would have to find the identity of each person and prove whether they fit the criteria of being a potential consumer. That's the only fair way to calculate actual damages. Even if it weren't too completely ridiculous and onerous to ask a plaintiff to prove this, again the defendant destroyed the evidence needed to prove this.
If I print 50,000 copies of your latest novel and sell them to people, you wouldn't have to find every person and determine whether they would have bought a copy had I not provided it at significant discount, you'd rely on my records and any other witnesses you could find. Unfortunately, copyright in the digital age means that uploading a 3MB MP3 file is the same as printing and selling a book. It might not be right, and there are plenty of arguments against it, but none of that matters in a court trial. When considering copyright infringement, the commercial gain is one of 4 canonical evaluations, including how much of a work was copied and the intended use. You can't argue that because she didn't sell the copy, only give it away, that it doesn't qualify as infringement, because she probably did upload the entire work, and the potential audience was every p2p user at the time. Well you can argue anything you want but it won't get you anywhere.
Also, keep in mind the defendant was sharing many more songs - the 24 on the list is just the ones the RIAA knows for certain were b
Well, that's your opinion. I for one, am inclined to take the word of "trained professionals" over some random /. poster.
So instead, let's read Report FHWA-RD-92-084, by the Federal Highway Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel/index.html
From the summary:
- Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent.
- Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent.
Oh dear, they seem to agree with you...
They asked for a billion in fines... Retrial. Got $54,000 in fines. Offered $26,000. Thomas said No. I would have offered 2c a track and I would have asked them to pay me 10 X my legal bill. Fuck the RIAA.