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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
$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.
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...
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.