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SCOTUS Refuses To Hear Tenenbaum Appeal
quantr writes "The Supreme Court has declined to hear Joel Tenenbaum's appeal. A jury in 2009 ordered Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs. A federal judge called the penalty constitutionally excessive, but the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it at the request of the Recording Industry Association of America. Tenenbaum's attorney, Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, said he's disappointed the high court won't hear the case. But he said the 1st Circuit instructed a judge to consider reducing the award without deciding any constitutional challenge. Nesson said 'Tenenbaum is just entering the job market and can't pay the penalty.'"
Ok, screw the NRA. Buckeye Firearms. Funded almost entirely by individual donations. Run by a volunteer who has to read briefs for his day job in between committee meetings. Has completely rewritten Ohio concealed carry laws over the last ten years.
The system is rigged to prevent any change by average people and you know it. Money buys you access, access buys you laws. Period.
It is rigged. How do you think it got that way?
By a problem in the design of the US election system combined with having a large country. The primary problem in the design is that there's a first-past-the-post election system combined with simple plurality voting. This leads to very heavy strategic voting ("Don't vote for a third party or your vote is wasted") locking in a bi-partisan situation (and, through "Attitudes follows behavior", mentality). A secondary problem is the use of campaign contributions for the main thrust of political campaigning; this leads to politicians being dependent on contributors to make the cut.
This means that for areas where people do not strongly care, the parties will not risk offending the contributors, as that may lead to the loss of the next election.
Having a large country strongly compounds that. If you have a country of three million people, an industry can spend 2 million in lobbying to do something that takes one dollar from each citizen, and make a million - 50% return on investment. In a country with 300 million, they can spend 200 million for the same law and get the same return on investment.
An individual citizen's relative voice scales the opposite way.
This makes a 100x difference in size into a 10,000x difference in relative influence. There's a couple of factors that bring these relative factors back a little bit - primarily, the time of politicians are limited, so you can't apply 100x more lobbying expense effectively in convincing people, and people get demotivated by being such a small cog, so the people that *do* have motivation have more access than they proportionally should. Also, much of the money goes to advertising, and that has some proportionality to the number of people reached; though there is a large fixed base.
But overall, these things taken together makes it hard to get influence. Things have to really enrage people to get them blocked if there's "bipartisan support".
Because people didn't care.
People didn't care because they feel like they have no chance of actually changing things - and unless there's work to fix the system, they're often right.
Is it beyond all hope? Depends. What are you going to do to change it?
Oh, right. Nothing.
I try to convince people that they need to hit the hydra at the base: Election reform. By informing people about it. (I can't vote in the US, and my care for the US internal politics is to a large degree compassion - I think the US people deserve a system of government that isn't unduly influenced by corporations.)
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
If someone stole and destroyed my $20,0000 car, and I sued him for 4.7 Million, do you think a court would award me such damages? No, the would laugh me out of court.. So how is it that 30 songs is worth over a half a million? And this is fair and reasonable? Some one please explain it to me..
To bring the money into perspective, in the widely reported Apple vs. Psystar, Psystar was ordered to pay $30,000 for making about 800 illegal copies of MacOS X for commercial gain. I think the software was sold for $129 a piece at that time. So $675,000 for an unknown number of copies of 30 songs that can be bought for $0.99 each seems a bit exaggerated in comparison.