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8th Circuit Upholds $220,000 Verdict In Jammie Thomas Case
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit has upheld the initial jury verdict in the case against Jammie Thomas, Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas-Rasset. This case was the first jury trial for a file-sharing suit brought by the major record labels, and focused on copyright infringement for 24 songs. The Court of Appeals has ruled that the award of $220,000, or $9250 per song, was not an unconstitutional violation of Due Process. The Court, in its 18-page decision (PDF), declined to reach the 'making available' issue, for procedural reasons."
Having people who know nothing about technology make case law about technology is like having a Capuchin monkey fix the brakes on your car: cute and funny at first, but ultimately a bad idea that is also highly dangerous.
Bazinga.
Some nonsense about the costs of receiving permission to distribute copyrighted works from a patent lawyer trying to rationalize this garbage
regardless of my personal convictions, it looks like torrenting songs is a big crime with big consequences. I'll think I'll just do itunes. it's more convenient anyway. to be honest, most of the stuff that is torrented is fluff anyway that you wouldn't pay for. Call me maybe!
We will continue to share and the labels will learn their place.
Please stop.
Bazinga.
Somewhat seriously. The aristocrats of the Capitalistic system are totally messing with us.
From the Wikipedia article:
1st civil jury trial Statutory damages of $222,000 ($9,250/song).
2nd civil jury trial Statutory damages of $1,920,000 ($80,000/song).
Remittitur Statutory damages reduced to $54,000 ($2,250/song).
3rd civil jury trial Statutory damages of $1,500,000 ($62,500/song).
Damages reduced Statutory damages reduced to $54,000 ($2,250/song).
Seriously, statutory damages are a joke. The number is completely arbitrary and jumping around, seemingly randomly, from $54k to almost $2m. Isn't this a pretty good sign that things are FUBAR, and "statutory damages" is devoid of all meaning? The $150,000 statutory damages maximum (per infringement) was written into law with a very different context in mind than it's being applied to (industrial scale for-profit copyright infringement). These statutory damages seriously are completely defunct, yet copyright holders are exploiting them to no end. *We* as a society have provided *them* copyright to promote the *useful* arts and sciences. I think it's becoming very clear the art they are producing is no longer useful, but a determent to society. Perhaps *we* as a society should take those rights away, or at the very least severely curb them to avoid this utter nonsense.
Industry shills are constantly trying to convince the public that piracy = theft, but punishments like this make it seem more like piracy = murder. In my home state, anyway, "a person convicted of the offense of retail theft of merchandise having a retail value not in excess of $100.00 shall be punished by a fine of not more than $300.00 or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both." Torrent the same CD, however, and you're out $150,000 ($10,000/song, assuming 15 songs on a CD).
Note to potential downloaders: just steal the goods you want. You'll get off a lot lighter that way.
Due process is guaranteed by the 5th and 14th amendments. The problem with this case is excessive fines, prohibited by the 8th amendment. Why wasn't this an issue in this appeal?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Torrent the same CD, however, and you're out $150,000 ($10,000/song, assuming 15 songs on a CD).
I agree that the theft analogy has flaws, but let's run with it for the moment: Someone who trades infringing copies over BitTorrent or other reciprocal peer-to-peer file sharing protocols is like a fence, someone who sells stolen property. If the P2P software uploaded 9,250 copies of each song to other users, then Thomas isn't paying more than retail.
I've always thought of suing file sharers akin to attacking a swarm of bees with a hand pistol. It won't do a thing to stop the bees, but your bullet *might* hit one of those bees and absolutely obliterare them. Looks like Jammie was the unlucky bee.
The major labels' profit model based around sales of shiny circular pieces of plastic is no longer valid because customers stopped patronizing them years ago out of disgust over labels suing their customers and exploiting musicians out of royalties. So their new profit model is based around litigation against customers. Looked how well that worked during the dinosaur age.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
So much for the idea that the rich don't need government or benefit from the taxes they pay. Otherwise the RIAA could never afford a global goon squad this effective. It will take decades to ring hundreds of thousands from this kid. He might never pay it off.
The whole "your honor" thing just grates on me. I understand you have to have order in a court; but honorifics? Really? The new Constitution should outlow the applicaction of honorifics. They're like royal titles.
And only anal dentata can save you now.
In the writeup the appeals court asserts that the awards per song were constitutional only because the record company only chose to go to court over 24 of the songs. What stops them from splitting an offense into 24 song incriments and filing a lawsuit for each??
I think she's out of appeals now. Time to declare bankruptcy and move on.
I've read in the past about her case and this is what I remember being her main problems.
1) She had bottom of the barrel lawyers in all of her trials. If I remember correctly at one of the later trials she was actually represented by law school students who prior to the trial basically bragged that this case was going to be "easy" to win. Practicing law for real may just be a little tougher than it seems in class, boys.
2) She has been perceived extremely negatively by juries, which has definitely led to the size of the judgements against her.
3) She's been her own worst enemy when testifying, but that relates to #1 in large part. She lacks a credible excuse for her behavior and seemed to jurors to be a liar and trying to cover up what she did. That has worked heavily against her in reaching a verdict.
4) She has consistently displayed an outsized ego and an erroneous belief that she can beat the charges by going to court when in fact she has probably had the weakest case of anyone to ever challenge the RIAA. I would call her delusional.
In summary, she's got a terrible case and she's tried to win it on the cheap and the outcomes are predictable.
In the years this crazy case has dragged on, we've seen awards of $222,000, $54,000, $1,920,000, $1,500,000, and a settlement offer. We don't know what the offer was, but may have been a few hundred or a few thousand. The $54000 would have been lower if the law had allowed it. Obviously, they're having a very difficult time deciding just what the damages should be. When it is so difficult to set an appropriate damage amount, it seems to me that calls for an examination of the basic premise of the suit and the laws it is based upon.
This whole case tries to treat the defendant as if she was a distributor in an environment where the ability to distribute is uncommon, because duplication and distribution is expensive. In such an environment, it may be reasonable to suppose that she might have done the record companies out of hundreds or even thousands of sales, and so a penalty of many thousands of dollars may be a fair amount. But this is not the environment we live in today. On the Internet, anyone can be a distributor at very little cost, and duplication is very nearly zero cost. This is not 1984, when the only practical way to illegally copy a lot of music was to run a bootleg CD stamping (or even vinyl record stamping) or cassette tape recording business, which cost serious money. The law should be changed to reflect these facts. And the court ought to have the power or guts to do more than regretfully reduce the damages insufficiently to fix the real problem. They're leaving a mess, and hoping the legislature takes the hint and does something about it. Meantime, the victims of these lawsuits are harmed disproportionately.
The industry is abusing the slowness of adaptation of new principles in the law to crucify and make an example of a victim. Letting bullies run wild is a hell of a way to run a justice system.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Despite the current and past crappy rulings on this case...the first thing I think about is what kind of name is "Jammie" anyway? Is it pronounced like "Jaimie", or like some weird singular form of the slang for pajamas ("Ja-mee")? Either way, I wonder wtf is wrong with parents and naming these days. For me, this is a hard case to read about.
So does the judge call her "Jam-e"? Because that's how her name is spelled. Like a sandwich with too much jam, it is very jammie!
well, do I need to finish the thought?
The judge is not doing anything but interpreting existing law as two sides claim it applies to their point of view.
You may not agree with the end result--- but I suspect the solution found by a jurist with many years experience is much more likely to be correct, than the gut check of a random slashdot commenter.
"Jammie"...
when the rich and powerful control everything. Unless people rise up and vote the RIAA/MPAA lacky's out of office, nothing will ever change.
How much money does he make per year?
How much money does BP make per year, maybe they should have been fined multiple times what they make in a year for the oil spill.
This is one way to mention "circuit" and "220" in the same sentence having nothing to do with electricity.
Is the judge allowed to tell the jury about jury nullification? If he is, then his/her hands are never tied.
Historically, jury nullification freed the Klansman and hanged the black man.
It freed the good old boys and not the outsiders. Three guesses as to whether the geek will be found on the side of the angels. Three juries cheerfully took turns hammering Jamie Thomas and her pro bono attorneys into the marble flooring.
Look, I know everyone here is favouring the defendant in this case, and sure I feel for her, but a basic question:
Just how long can this go on? Just how many times can a judgement go against you before you run out of appeals?
The US legal system is being made to look stupid with their habit of never-ending cases. The impression that one gets as an outsider is that provided you've got enough money to pay for it (or you have sufficiently generous lawyers), then it's basically possible to string a case out indefinitely until your get a judgement that suits you.
If you don't like it, lobby your lawmakers.
And who will "your" lawmakers listen to, you or these guys?
Lobbyists
Interest groups
PACs
As someone already commented on here earlier, "We'll keep sharing, and the labels will learn their place." This is quite simply a statement of reality, because the record labels are in the business of making money. It just so happens they do so by locking musicians into contractual deals where they promise to "promote" their music in return for a cut of the profits made selling people rights to obtain copies of the artists' recordings to listen to per the licensing/usage terms granted.
They can scream about it being illegal and punishable by law all the want, but it will never change the technological realities of things. These days, musicians no longer need the record labels as much as the record labels need them. The same technology that allows end-users to easily duplicate and redistribute the content on their own lets musicians record and redistribute (and market!) their content too, without help of a big company.
Following the money leads to a steady stream of revenue bleeding away from the record labels. Their best move to prove their worth these days lies in throwing down lawsuit after lawsuit to convince artists they're still "adding value" by forcing people to "pay up" when they're caught duplicating their artists' works without getting permission first.
But as we should all know by now? Those who don't innovate litigate. It's a sure sign of an industry in decline.
I'm on vacation on a place far away from the RIAA and MPAA tentacles. Walking back from the beach today I walked into a store where I could get any DVD I wanted, in a little plastic wrap with a color photocopy of the original DVD, for the equivalent of about $1.17, any CD I wanted for $1.75 Who needs napster, limewire, etc?
Many had no pity for fascists hanged by their jackboots in a public place.
"Except, they can find those MP3s on your computer at a border patrol stop (and yes, they really are searching computers for pirated content at border crossings now) and arrest you for pirated content on your computer. You have no way of proving you got the songs legitimately. iTunes is not the solution to the problem."
Yes there is for some cases. If they're really doing that, then one of my many little projects is starting to have value. I call it various things, such as "WhiteListing" and preparing for "Digital Audits". It basically means that as far as possible, to have proven source acquisition paths for every file on your computer. Skipping the edge cases like malware and drive-by-wifi-ers, if it's on your computer, you put it there. So for every song you could have a matching PDF of the purchase, or the copy of the CC license that lets you have it.
It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting. Look at what we think "web 2.0" is = "sharing"? That's why I have snarked that Web 3.0 will be various flavors of Walled Gardens and draconian control. A really ugly use case is indie music. A cash greedy tyrranical bureaucrat will say "I don't care where it came from, if you don't have one of the seven authorized certificates for it, it counts against you". I have a ton of stuff that came from Music.Download.com back when it was freely offered for download. Oops - that site doesn't exist anymore, and I'll never see those bands again. Same rough idea with Youtube Remixes. Who the heck is someone like "DJ DeadCat" and how do I find her to get copyright clearance??
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They go to the common weal.
As a US CEO once said in court: It depends what "is" is.
The original court ADMITTED that they gave her a high penalty for lying. That's perjury, and there's a process to go for that and the penalty isn't a million dollars. Meanwhile the jury, by conflating and JUDGING THEMSELVES on a perjury case never brought have PERVERTED THE COURSE OF JUSTICE.
That's quite a crime there.
When deciding if two things are the same, you can't look at one word and then say they are the same, you need to look at both definitions and compare those:
Statutory damages:
Statutory damages are a damage award in civil law, in which the amount awarded is stipulated within the statute rather than being calculated based on the degree of harm to the plaintiff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages
Fine:
"A fine is money paid usually to superior authority, usually governmental authority, as a punishment for a crime or other offence. The amount of a fine can be determined case by case, but it is often announced in advance."
They aren't the same, anyone who tells you they are is ignorant.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Banks get fined in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars (if at all) for robbing billions from entire countries, but what happens to this woman is somehow constitutional.
how is babby formed?
"It basically means that as far as possible, to have proven source acquisition paths for every file on your computer."
This is really beside the point, though. Even if it is a civil matter, the burden to show at least "a preponderance of evidence" is supposed to be on the plaintiff (or complainant, if you prefer). Having to prove your innocence is not exactly a traditional American concept.
See the definition of financial gain in copyright law, 17 USC 101. Trading one copyrighted work for another is financial gain.
No doubt the opposite of what they want is going to happen as a result of asshat wearing judges.
"It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting."
So true. Something I posted in 2001:
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gnu.misc.discuss/30tDY9VE92Y
"My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?"
Also, where I hypothesized millions of US citizens arrested over copyright, same as now for marijuana: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
I'm thinking more and more that it is just not possible for anyone to really prove they have a legal right to have proprietary content on some specific device when you look really hard at it. Bills of sale might be forged, to begin with, so what does showing one prove? And if you not going to jail depends on some third party verifying something over and over, good luck. And many proprietary licenses are violated often if you have too many copies (including on backup media), so you really can never 100% prove you have right to the software on a device because there might be copies elsewhere, and how do you prove you don't have extra copies somewhere? A very problematical situation if someone really pushes things...
Also, border searches now occur a hundred miles or so inside the actual US border, so most US Americans (who are mostly bi-coastal) can in theory be searched at any time this way by warrant-less border-related searches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Since, as above, people can't really prove they have legal access to anything they paid for, that makes almost everyone in the USA effectively a felon who can be arrested tomorrow by the border police if someone with some power wants to push the point. So, using only freely-licensed information might just become the safest option, even if that might also not be good enough (how do you known a statement about something being under a free license is really valid?). We'll see how all this "artificial scarcity" plays out...
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
This book has a section on why goods with low incremental costs for distribution should be free according to the authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
A "basic income" could fund creators rather than copyright monopolies...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Nice reply, with a lot of work in it.
Unfortunately you have laid out most of the remainder of the premise, leaving me for one to just hope that someday some watershed event occurs that flips the whole thing around. Even the IRS doesn't usually play too far off the known track. Sure the tax code is a nightmare, but if you follow it right, the IRS stays happy.
These bubbling enforcement mentalities are seriously threatening to become guilty until proven innocent. Someone posted as a reply to me one level up "that's not traditionally American". Unfortunately, it might become the New America if we don't watch out, and get a couple big pieces of luck.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
She deserves to pay. The RIAA, however, does not deserve to collect.
Lying in court was an affront to the jurisdiction of the court, not to the RIAA.