Supreme Court Refuses P2P 'Innocent Sharing' Case

yoyo81 writes "The Supreme Court has refused to hear an 'innocent infringement case' in which Whitney Harper shared some music on the family computer when she was a teenager and was subsequently hit with a lawsuit from the RIAA. An appeals court overturned an earlier ruling from a federal court that reduced damages to $200 instead of the statutory $750 claiming 'innocence' was no defense, especially since copyright notices appear on all phonorecords. She appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear her case, but Justice Alito stated, 'This provision was adopted in 1988, well before digital music files became available on the Internet' and further, 'I would grant review in this case because not many cases presenting this issue are likely to reach the Courts of Appeals.' For now, though, Harper's verdict remains in place: $750 for each of the 37 songs at issue, or $27,750."

Comments

All we need now is

[unity100]

wikileaks exposing this pieces of crap as they are. a few 'trade secret' communications in between execs and their henchmen should wake the whole public up to the shit these are pulling.

Re:This is how I see it

[amicusNYCL]

If this becomes the norm we might as well start actually stealing from stores, since the penalty is so much smaller.

If you steal a music CD from a store, and then make a bunch of copies and start distributing them, expect the same penalty. The girl is not charged with theft, she's charged with distribution of a copyrighted work. Her defense is that she didn't know she was distributing it, and the court says that doesn't matter. This line strikes me as odd though:

claiming "innocence" was no defense

I guess there's a reason they wrote it in quotes, but I was under the impression that innocence, by definition, is in fact always a defense. Apparently not.