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Jammie Thomas Hit With $1.5 Million Verdict
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who has been fighting the recording industry over 24 songs she illegally downloaded and shared online four years ago, has lost another round in court as a jury in Minneapolis decided today that she was liable for $1.5 million in copyright infringement damages to Capitol Records, for songs she illegally shared in April 2006. ... The trial is the third for Thomas-Rasset, after one jury found her liable for copyright infringement in 2007 and ordered her to pay $222,000, the judge in the case later ruled that he erred in instructing the jury and called for a retrial. In the second trial, which took place in 2009, a jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for $1.92 million. Thomas-Rasset subsequently asked the federal court for a new trial or a reduction in the amount of damages in July 2009. But earlier this year, the judge found that amount to be 'monstrous and shocking' and reduced the amount to $54,000."
Look at those dollar amounts. First trial: $220,000 Second: $1.92 million Third: $54,000 Fourth: $1.5 million
Something about the shear inconsistency of the outcomes tells me how broken this system of courts truly is. It's not based on anything real. It's based on appearances, fuzzy opinions, manipulated interpretations, etc. This woman shared some music over the internet, and they want to financially crucify her. $54,000 thousand would take a lot of people a long time to pay off, let alone $1.5 million. That amount would effectively end her financial life.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Many jurors go into the courtroom with the idea that their purpose is to convict criminals and make them pay, and that anybody who is a defendant must be a criminal. They think the defendants are not like themselves at all. The do not think they are peers.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
When you are in a hole, stop digging. This applies more to her "lawyers" than to herself though.
If the hole deeper than you can climb out of no matter what, why not keep digging and bring the asshole who tossed you in there down with you?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Dope-smoking MafiAA accountants. The same people who decide that a multiplatinum album grossing over a billion dollars in sales, for which the band was fronted $45k each in a year, studio time perhaps $500k, physical production run costs possibly $200k, and $200,000 in "tour support" can somehow lose money.
See also (though I usually hate linking to wikipoo-dia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
$54,000 is still a lot of money, but it's doable, over a good number of years.
For a native-American woman mother of four, with a job as a natural resource coordinator in Indian reservation? I might be wrong, but don't think $54,000 is doable either.
The most interesting part, for those of us who read the article, is:
But earlier this year, the judge found that amount to be "monstrous and shocking" and reduced the amount to $54,000. Following that, the RIAA informed Thomas-Rasset that it would accept $25,000--less than half of the court-reduced award--if she agreed to ask the judge to "vacate" his decision, which means removing his decision from the record. Thomas-Rasset rejected that offer almost immediately.
RIAA is scared their tactics will no longer work. When faced with more reasonable verdicts, their defendants are probably more likely to fight it out in court, making RIAA's whole business litigation plan useless.
Copyrights were never really meant to target individual citizens? Says who? I don't see any support for that claim in the Constitutional basis for copyright law; or in the first copyright act; or in any other subsequent copyright act that I've read...
In fact every copyright act I've read is explicitly not merely a regulation on business, as they specifically assign liability for infringement even if it isn't commercial in nature.
Perhaps you're mistaking how you'd like to see copyright used as somehow representing what it was "meant" to be used for?
Every last one of these acts will have a twitter / facebook / forum etc... at least a couple of them are going to be people who interact with their fans on there in person.
Do they know that this is being done in their name? We know that songs are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas#The_24_songs so let's start asking them the question...
No, they were smart enough to see a chance at free advertising and took it.
that if any of the jurors were 'investigated', you would find quite a bit of infringing material in their homes. I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't have a old cassette of songs dubbed from someone else, a CD of tunes made for a party or wedding, a photocopy of some book or newspaper, lyrics on their website or profile, etc. Even if they don't have these items currently, they've made infringing copies in the past.
Everyone in the US is guilty of copyright infringement at one time or another. Most people don't ever think about copyright, or if they do, it's to make up the rules as they go.
I wonder how the jury would react if they were sent invoices for damages for their past and current infringements, based on the ridiculous damages they approved for this woman.
Which is precisely why we need to redesign the entire copyright system, and rethink all the principles on which it was based. Copyrights were created at a time when only people who possessed specialized industrial equipment could produce copies efficiently; that age ended, and the only thing our elected representatives in congress could think to do about it was to strengthen copyright law.
Palm trees and 8
They keep buying the RIAA's line that she's somehow responsible for the tens of thousands of other people who partially or indirectly downloaded the songs from her. There are two ways to look at this:
100,000 people download a song. Each person is criminally liable for their own download. Fines should thus reflect people trying to be cheap and get a $1 product for free. Something on the order of $2-$20 per song would probably be the right amount.
100,000 people download a song. One person is determined to be the criminal mastermind and fined for the infringement of all of those people. So a fine on the order of $200k-$2 mil is probably the right amount here. But because you've made one person pay for everyone's infringement, that one fine indemnifies the 100,000 from any charges for the crime.
What the RIAA is trying to do is get a fine on this woman as if she were the criminal mastermind behind it all, and then apply the same fine to the other 100,000 people. It just doesn't work that way logically. Either each person is responsible for their own actions, or one person is responsible for everyone's actions. It's totally illogical to argue that each person is responsible for everyone's actions.
As has been pointed out, the real problem here is that the RIAA is taking copyright laws written to be used against commercial copyright infringement, and using them against individuals. Commercial copyright infringement (e.g. mass-producing bootleg CDs) fits the "criminal mastermind" model, and the fines were set up to reflect that. If a bootleg shop got caught, they'd be sued, fined, and the people who bought those bootleg CDs weren't liable for anything. Totally different situation, totally different penalties, which the RIAA is misusing (or abusing if you prefer) against individual infringers.
Economically speaking, you have profited from the copying.
Let's say a CD is set at a market value of $12 and you have $50.
Instead of buying that CD you instead download the songs from that CD.
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
If you bought the CD you would have $12 worth of music and $38 in cash for a total of $50 of value.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
>>>Dope-smoking MafiAA accountants.
I still think a bullet to the head of the RIAA CEO would do a world of good. And if he gets replaced, remove him too. And again and again until these idiots stop turning Our citizens into slaves via outrageous 1.5 million dollar/life sentences. Death to tyrants whether they be government leaders (Saddam) or corporate XOs.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The interesting bit here is the "redacted special jury verdict".
Page down through it, and you'll see that it's a simple set of questions, usually song-by-song. Near the end the jury is asked to set damages for each song. Each entry has $80,000 entered, which is pretty much half-way between the minimum ($750) and the maximum ($150,000).
Every song has the same damages assigned. Were all the songs downloaded the same number of times? We don't know...there is no evidence that the songs were ever downloaded by anyone else, as far as I can tell.
Are all these songs equal money-earners for the label? Who knows?
It's a remarkably lazy bit of life destruction from a senseless and cruel jury.
This is exactly why a judge revised the verdict, calling it "monstrous". He isn't name-calling the plaintiffs. It's directed squarely at an idiot jury.
Miss Bachmann, like her favorite founding father Thomas Jefferson, considers copyright a bad idea. He said: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
He also wrote to James Madison, author of the Constitution:
"I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes, but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose." Jefferson's preference for the term of copyright was submitted to Madison a few days afterward. The proposed term was that of 19 years, based on the average author's lifespan after publication. Today that length would be 35 years, and nowhere near the current 150 granted to Disney and others non-humans.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's much more important for her to force an unpayable multi million dollar judgment. It might actually open people's eyes that corporations have convinced the government to treat copyright infringement harsher than murder and rape.
A reasonable fine would be on the order of $50 to $100 per song.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Come back in 18 years or so when you have a firm grounding in the real world and how the legal system works.
The U.S. legal system can be described as many things, but certainly not as having a firm grounding in reality.
The entire point is to make it so painful, the party will not want to do so again.
I know its not popular here, but reality is far, far different than the pro-pirate crowd constantly attempts to censor and portray here.
If that's the point then it should be a criminal trial with all of the safeguards that implies (including, in particular, the higher standard of proof).
Tell me where I can get $12 - or indeed any money - for my pirated MP3s. If you can't relatively easily convert it to real money, then it's not "commercial gain" and speaking as if you had $62 is bullshit. Obviously you are getting some personal benefit from it - people rarely do things to harm themselves - but it doesn't practically have any value to sell. This is exactly what differentiates commercial and non-commercial activity. Actually it's probably even stricter than that, as things that do have a commercial value like a user dose of drugs can be considered to be for personal use, but being unsellable is quite definitive. Oddly enough the US decided to claim swapping one unsellable pirated copy for another unsellable pirated copy to be commercial gain, but in my book 0 + 0 still equals 0 real money.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You've got to hand it to the RIAA lawyers for truly excellent jury selection skills.
Sadly, I'm sure the penalty for murder would be less than the penalty for file sharing.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
And what exactly is wrong with that? I thought one of the wonders of capitalism was that although some people might have a smaller slice of the pie, the pie itself is always growing. Well, in your example, the pie has just grown by $12. Isn't that something we should be celebrating, not suing over?
Economically speaking, you have profited from the copying.
No, this is a make-belief. Alice buys the internet connection and pays a few cents for torrenting 4 albums. She then spends a few hours listening to them. This is all pure loss for Alice, in economic terms. Somehow this escaped your analysis.
Instead, you reason, if the copyright holder sets the price at $10 per album, then Alice's "gross profit" is $40. And if the copyright holder sets the price at $1000000 per album (which is entirely legit and practical the under current law), then, again, in line with what you are saying, Alice's "gross profit" is $4000000. So you are saying that her "profit" is whatever number the copyright holder says it is. This, of course, is just the kind of unadulterated bullshit that has NOTHING to do with economics or profit, as understood by anyone with a working brain.
Let's say a CD is set at a market value of $12 and you have $50.
Instead of buying that CD you instead download the songs from that CD.
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
Can I sell the files and get the $12? If not, then I do not "have $12 worth of music", just like my PC that I paid $2000 for is no longer worth $2000. Worth is determined by how much you can get by selling it and not by how much someone else asks for it (in this case, someone might pay $12 for the retail CD, but would not pay the same $12 for the same songs on a CD-R).
Also, you do not know if I would have bought the CD for $12 if the songs were not available for download. I could probably have taped the songs off the radio. Or borrowed the CD from a friend and copied it. Or downloaded some other songs.
No, that was the amount after the amount of damages was reduced after the second trial. This is the result of the third trial.
What I want to know is: is the RIAA stuffing the jury boxes or what? What kind of moron (much less twelve of them) could possibly turn out such a verdict? Don't they have computers? Don't they have Internet connections? Don't they have children? Do they not understand that they are targets just as much as Jammie Thomas? I sincerely hope that one of those fine, upstanding humanoid asses finds themselves on the receiving end of an RIAA "settlement offer." Poetic justice at its finest.
I just cannot understand how a jury of anyone's peers could think this rational, much less reasonable. I'm more than a little concerned for our future, if this is what our legal system has been reduced to delivering instead of justice. I don't know: maybe her lawyers were just less than competent, but even so this just seems way over the top.
Furthermore, how can a woman that downloaded a mere 26 music tracks be so demonized in court that such a travesty could result? Are the RIAA's attorneys gifted with Satanic powers? This just boggles the mind. Makes me want to run down to the local Best Buy and pocket a couple of CDs, just to demonstrate what stealing music actually means. "Yes, Your Honor, I stole that music. I didn't infringe anyone's copyright, however." Hell, a shoplifting charge wouldn't hold a candle to this "verdict".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.