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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."
So, 24 songs are worth $222,000... no, actually it's $1,920,000... wait, I mean $54,000... did I say that? I meant $1,500,000...
Who the hell decides these amounts? The guy who wrote the Windows file copy dialog?
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.
Arstechnica just posted a nice companion piece to this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/42-german-p2p-fine-stark-contrast-to-seven-figure-us-judgments.ars
Word game?
Why is it that in jury trials she gets slapped with over a million in damages, yet judges appear to favour a milder approach? Are the "Jury of your peers" seriously that gullible that they feel they have to institute massive punitive damages on an individual?
Copyrights were never really meant to target individual citizens; copyright is a regulation on businesses, and should only be applied to businesses. The way the RIAA is suing individuals is a disgrace, and their lawyers should be reprimanded for abusing the court system.
Not that anyone really cares about what is best for the people of the United States.
Palm trees and 8
If you don't have the money to pay 5k let alone 50k+ what does it matter if they tell you to pay millions? Why not billions? or trillions? It's a pipe dream to expect that amount. If I were her, I'd try to get that number as high as possible. The higher it is, the more the system looks like nonsense and the more chance there is for positive change.
I don't think you understand what she and her lawyers are after. The last thing they want is for the Jury to find her innocent or award a reasonable amount of damages. The more absurd the amount the better. They need the award to be absurdly high in order for an federal appeals judge to rule the law is in unconstatutional. Thats the end game here.
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...
You can't legally COPY someones work
Sorry, but we live in an age where copying is something that happens automatically whenever people use their computers. If you sent me an electronic copy of a book you wrote, my computer would automatically copy the book multiple times as part of its normal operation; I would also very likely make further copies when I back up my files, migrate to a new computer, and so forth.
The problem here is that people keep trying to define a difference between the sort of copying that is part of a computer's normal and routine operation, and sharing files with other people. It is an extreme blurry line -- multiple people may use one computer system, or a multiple computers with multiple users may be connected to the same LAN, or a computer might be connected to more than one LAN, or to the Internet, etc. Exactly where do you intend to define copying as a violation of the right you claim to have over dictating copying? If I have a digital copy of your book, can my roommate who shares a computer with me read it? Can my roommate copy it from my home directory to his home directory? Can we both read it at the same time, using two separate digital copies? What if we have two computers, connected to some sort of computer network; can the book be copied from one computer to the other? What if we have one computer with two processors and two hard drives? What if we have many computers in some sort of cluster? What if we are using a distributed OS?
Palm trees and 8
First, let me say that I do NOT think that she is deliberately trying to get absurd rewards. I just don't buy that argument. But playing devil's advocate and agreeing with it...
That's the point. The Supreme Court takes cases based largely on two criteria: First, that there is an important constitutional issue to settle. And second, that lower courts have arrived at different decisions. If every court that has ever heard a case agrees on how it should be handled, there's little reason to step in -- unless they want to reverse it. I don't see any reason that lower appeals courts wouldn't also consider cases along such lines.
This is one case with one set of facts, and yet four different outcomes. On the one hand you have a couple of jury decisions obviously attempting to apply the law, but arriving at pretty wildly different decisions. $1.92MM is over 30% higher than $1.5MM just in percentage terms, and almost half a million dollars higher in absolute terms. And then of course the first jury with a $222K verdict that is nearly an order of magnitude different. That alone is an indication that the law may be too vague and require clarification, either by the Congress or the judiciary.
At the same time we have judges raising constitutional concerns. An award that is "monstrous and shocking" is essentially code for "in violation of the Eighth Amendment," and his reduction took the damages from the highest the case has ever seen to four times less than the lowest jury award. That's significant. So startling, in fact, that the RIAA offered to let her settle for half that ($25,000) if she asked the judge to vacate his verdict -- it is so vastly different, in short, that it has the RIAA worried it might be used as precedent.
These are all extremely intriguing things for appeal, and for a higher court to step in and go "alright, wait a minute here; something obviously is not right." If they do so, and if they agree that following the law leads to unconstitutional awards, or even that the law is so ambiguous that justice is not being served leaving it so wildly in the jury's hands, it may end up with the law being struck down.