Slashdot Mirror
Listen to the RIAA's Appeal In Jammie Thomas Case
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA doesn't really like free mp3 files floating around but here's one you can access legally — the audio file of the June 12, 2012 oral argument of the RIAA's appeal in Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas-Rasset. At issue in this case are (a) the RIAA's 'making available' theory and (b) the constitutionality of large statutory damages awards for download of an mp3 song file. The lower court rejected the making available theory, and reduced the jury's verdict to what the judge considered the maximum possible award of $2250 per file. I'm predicting the Court will affirm. After listening to the oral argument, what do you think?"
A lot of the numbers, arguments, evidence etc. don't make a jot of sense to us. It's all pie-in-the-sky hyperbole and backwards Hollywood accounting, where a song which makes $0.99 per sale from a retailer is worth $150,000 if downloaded and shared.
You're the lawyer; You tell us!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
it's tail thrashes around a lot, and does a lot of damage
it's still going to be extinct very soon nevertheless
you can't foist a business model from a dead era on us
well you can try, and drain all of your coffers in the process, thereby speeding up your demise
but economic reality has a way of being economic reality despite your protestations
they call things like the Internet "disruptive technology" for a reason
consider yourself permanently disrupted, media conglomerates
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Additionally, the argument seems to not be focused on the statutory range at all - which is a mistake when they're arguing about the Constitutionality of the statute. Rather, on page 5, Thomas notes that the damages could be as low as one song times the minimum, or dozens of songs times the maximum, and then compares this to a range of "$50 to $10,000,000"... But that's not the range in the statute. Instead, at best, it's an argument that dozens of instances of infringement of independent works should be treated only as infringement of a single work, and I can't see the court deciding that Congress lacked a legitimate reason for not writing the statute that way.
Also, from her brief: "If the recording companies are correct, then they are claiming that Congress considered and approved damages ranging from one song times the minimum ($250) to thousands of songs times the maximum (hundreds of millions of dollars or more)." That's just sloppy. Either he means $750 or he means $200, but which is not clear.
Artificial scarcity is morally wrong and economically harmful.
Business models that involve data should not be dependent on artificial scarcity.
We can revisit the old artificial-scarcity model when and if the predicted-but-never-demonstrated cultural impoverishment (a hypothesized result of a lack of new content which is a hypothesized result of a lack of financial incentive to create which is a hypothesized result of the inability to wring every last penny out of everyone that receives a copy of the data) actually happens (which it won't).
It'll just make a bigger mockery of our court precedents. If hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for what would no more than grand theft in most states is not "cruel and unusual" WRT fines, then how can the Supreme Court possibly justify things like saying that it is cruel and unusual to use the death penalty on someone who is a serial child molester (they struck down Louisiana's law which provided for execution of repeat offenders say it was "uncivilized").
Oh wait, this is the same federal judiciary that only recently discovered that the 2nd amendment was part of the Bill of Rights and was being excluded from incorporation under the 14th. In another 150 years, they might discover that the DMCA's statutory damages are unconscionable and hypocritical as well.
One number that no one seems to have argued about much is the number of downloads that could have come from one user's computer. This is the basis for the entire idea of multiplying the damages to levels we all know are ludicrous. The RIAA insists hundreds of people could have downloaded from Jammie Thomas. Although that's possible, it's highly improbable. The most likely number of downloads is 1 per file. That's one, not hundreds or thousands. The court ought to use that number to compute damages.
Why only 1? For the same reasons that Ponzi schemes do not work. The network quickly becomes saturated. Suppose people can give out copies at more or less the same rate, to anyone else. And once a copy is received, the recipient can quickly turn around and share it. (BitTorrent is even better than that, starting the sharing of parts of a copy before a recipient has received the entire file.) Each generation, the number of people who could have a copy doubles. By the time a person is giving out a copy for the 20th time, 1 million people could have a copy. By the 33rd time, everyone in the world could have it. Even if everyone in the world wants a copy, only one person, the originator, could have given out as many as 33 copies, and only the first recipient could have given out as many as 32. Just 8000 people could have given out 20 copies, and just 1 of every 2000 people could have given out 10 copies. Half the people will have given out zero copies, because by the time they got it, there was no one left who still didn't have a copy of their own. The average number of copies of 1 file that a person gives out is 1.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"