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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."
No, her lawyers were dumb enough to work pro bono.
What free advertising? The only thing they are advertising is they can't win a case.
This tripe is informative? Obviously you've never served on a Jury. I have, and let me tell you that those random people were the most professional people I've ever met. They cared deeply, and made sure to be as objective as possible. We were asked to basically decide people's financial fate and none of us took that lightly. This is the most overrated piece of garbage I've read in a long while.
Not so.
The law, as originally written, was entirely based on what a person made. And it followed the longstanding legal precedent used in most other laws of this sort, also known as "treble damages."
If you were out selling bootlegs at $5/cd, your "treble damages" would be $15/cd. Enough to take away all your profits, any equipment, and make it absolutely clear that you were being punished.
The first fraud that has been perpetrated in respect to copyright law is the removal of that phrase, which is what allows subhuman MafiAA snakes to put the dumbest shits on a jury that they can and then try to convince them that there were billions of dollars worth of "damages" done by someone. The second fraud is the ridiculous notion of a 1:1 correlation between a shared file and a "lost sale."
Numerous studies have shown that far from being damaging, so-called "piracy" actually is a net benefit to the industry as a whole: the only "artists" who get burned are the talentless, overproduced hacks like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus who really shouldn't be on top anyways.
I still think a bullet to the head of the RIAA CEO would do a world of good.
Yes, because supporting criminals by means of an even worse crime always makes absolute sense.
If that's the point
Then you need to learn about our entire legal system, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, so on and so on. When you've finished with that, you'll absolutely understand why what you just said is nonsenses.
The logic works like this.
You obviously failed logic, if they even taught it in what was most probably laughably called "school" if you even graduated.
The logic is rather as follows: 90% or more of the population has $x per month in income. Of that, a very minor amount is disposable income. The rest goes into food, rent, transportation, and other daily necessities.
So, they have money. They have the option of spending money on various amenities or saving it.
After individual choices are averaged out (remember, you can't deal with the decision of each individual to purchase or not-purchase, you have to look at the societal average), it turns out that the music and entertainment industries benefit from file sharing. Which is to say that as a whole, industry-wide profits went UP and down as people chose to spend more money on them than they otherwise would have absent filesharing.
The reason for this is simple: more people were exposed to things they wanted to own legitimate copies of than they would have been absent file sharing.
Who loses in this scenario? The industries where file sharing can't push as much exposure. Booksellers haven't been doing nearly as well recently, because less people are reading newspapers (so no book reviews), using public libraries, and are spending their time (also a limited quantity) consuming other products.
But what the studies have shown, consistently, is that the industries with filesharing have done just fine. Individual actors within have fallen, but individual actors within those industries are always rising and falling, whether "filesharing" is a concern or not.
In a world where "filesharing" is hyped as being the death of everyone, it is an oddity that (a) software, (b) music, and (c) movies are doing just fine (when you go through the honest accounting, rather than the dishonest Hollywood Accounting method designed mostly to hide their profits from the tax man). (D) books, (E) restaurants, and (F) Miscellaneous other entertainments are not doing so hot. Hell, even (G) the brothels aren't doing so well out in Reno.
In the ongoing struggle between A,B,C,D,E,F and G for disposable income, A,B, and C, which are the industries claiming to be "hardest hit" by "piracy", actually are doing quite nicely, and the research proves it. Filesharing isn't harming them, it's keeping people exposed to their products.
As for (H) saving the money for later? The average USA consumer hasn't done that in decades.
You might want to actually get back on topic. The topic was about this being changed from tort to criminal. Since you now know the topic, you should absolutely understand out Founding Fathers, and many, many others, are absolutely endlessly on record covering exactly this type thing - which addresses why its tort.
Why do you bother when you only want to ignorantly troll?
You're an idiot.
You start your comment with this.
As such, a vacated ruling cannot be cited as precedent, whether binding or persuasive.
Then quote wikipedia.
Now please run along, little child. The grownups are trying to have a grown-up discussion of important things.
Then try to claim this?
Come on mods. What is a troll if not somebody that begins and ends a comment with insults?
Grow up.
I'd still say that's approximately 50-100x actual damages... Still excessive in my book. She didn't pay for the 28 songs she downloaded. Charge her $5 per song, and walk away.
Before someone replies with "That doesn't count the number of times she shared that file" I say, "BS." I'm sorry, she got the files from someone else, and those downloaders could have pulled it from yet another party. If they could verify how many people pulled the song from her, I'm wondering why they don't have those people in court either.
I doubt she instructed anyone else to download those files. They way I see it, she's responsible for downloading them... and that's it. You can't control the actions of other "anonymous" internet citizens.