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Jammie Thomas Denied Supreme Court Appeal
sarysa writes "The Supreme Court has refused to hear the latest appeal of the 7 year old Jammie Thomas case, regarding a single mother who was fined $222,000 in her most recent appeal for illegally sharing 24 songs. Those of us hoping for an Eighth Amendment battle over this issue will not be seeing it anytime soon. In spite of the harsh penalties, the journalist suggests that: 'Still, the RIAA is sensitive about how it looks if they impoverish a woman of modest means. Look for them to ask her for far less than the $222,000.'"
Or we can, as a society, reject the notion that non-commercial file sharing should be a crime at all and take back our collective cultural birthright from the parasitic rent-seeking content cartels and their toadies in Congress.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Jammie Thomas didn't make any campaign contributions.
Sensitive about impoverishing a woman, sure. I believe it.
I bet all they'll ask of her is a modest $200,000 and that she appear on television, making a public statement demeaning herself on behalf of the record companies. Fuckers should burn.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Equal treatment under the law? But yes, absolutely! No matter who you are, what you believe, or where you're from, an equal amount of justice for every dollar you have. How's that not fair?
a 9.0 magnitude earthquake should solve the problem quickly.
OK that was wrong, but seriously the only solution is using the internet against them like we are doing. There is no other way that doesn't shed blood.
Since when should the legal system be like playing roulette?
Those were essentially extortion offers. Pay us or we'll break your financial knees.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
can you name 2 shows you would be willing to pay say $5 a month for
That's my point, not a month, but either per episode or per season - and yes.
Off the top of my head: Archer, Dexter, Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Revolution, Game of Thrones, Castle, American Horror Story, Big Bang Theory.
If I could download a decent quality (doesn't have to be super duper 1080p or anything like that) at the time it comes out and without a plethora of ads in it for $1 per episode, or get access to the whole season for say $15 or $20, I would gladly do so. Makes it easy for me to watch what I want to, and at the same time I can be smug in knowing that my money is supporting the shows that I like. It is a total WIN-WIN scenario.
Its all about control. they are losing it and the masses have it.
Absolutely. The problem is that the only way that they can wrest control back from the masses is to *at least* provide the same thing that they do. Make it even better, and the masses will give them control back.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
$200K+ for sharing 24 songs? Those profound douche-baggery. I'm so glad that newer methods are emerging to kill off the record label. This is an example of the industry that we call "The legal system", milking the life-force out of lady justice and then ripping her corpse apart and devouring it without a napkin. There's no measure of justice involved at all. Was there REALLY $222K in damage? Hell no, she helped advertise a brand, of sorts. What a disgusting farce. Glad I don't live in the states.
> You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright.
Sure I can. That's the real purpose for copyright. The fact that you dishonestly cloud the issue by focusing on an example that's easy to deride does not really alter that fact.
The whole goal of the system is to enable "piracy". It's not intended to create a new form of "property".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
She broke the law.
And so what? So for a minor civil infraction that caused virtually no measured or measurable damage to anyone we should take away her house?
People break the law all the time. Breaking the law isn't carte blanche for the anyone to take everything you have, and then some.
For her situation, with 24 songs shared, first offense. Anything over $500 is WAY out of line relative to what she did. This sort of thing belongs in small claims court.
If she had shoplifted a CD (24 songs) from a Walmart and it was a first offense a $200,000+ fine would be utterly outrageous.
You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright.
The right to take culture, modify it, and release it back to the world, enriching our common cultural heritage ... that certainly can be argued to be our birthright, in which case the current copyright regime is manifestly unjust. There's a reasonable compromise in which we say that modifying and releasing previous works is a human right, but getting paid for it isn't: in which case copyright should be enforced for commercial infringement only.
"Justices do not campaign. They are appointed ..." by people who receive bribes (oops, I meant "free speech" campaign contributions) and revolving door jobs (oops again, I meant highly merited post-political positions).
Justices do not campaign. They are appointed by someone that campaigned, go through a confirmation process by many people that campaigned, and join the Court. I hate to rain on your "Everyone's bought" theory.
Fixed it for you. The end result of all of that seems to be appointed stooges who agree with a given set of political views.
I never cease to be amazed that the supposedly nine most knowledge people on the laws of the nation can never actually agree on how those laws should be applied. It's like they're not seeking out facts, but national opinions. It's not like the supreme court hears cases where that need to determine who's lying to cover up a crime. Rather they mostly hear cases where both sides mostly agree on the crime, but differ on the legality of it.
And Jewish shop owners in Nazi Germany broke the law by being Jewish. And they paid the penalty. First their shops were confiscated, then the "lawful government" grew emboldened and their lives were confiscated.
You seem to look on the law as your master. I believe it is supposed to be the people's servant.
The original purpose of copyright in the USA was to give sole right of reproduction and distribution for a *limited* time, after which the work became the public's (the culture's). that time period was 14 years, with an option to renew for another 14 years if the author was still around and still wished to do so. So 28 years, and then it became the common cultural property. but the system we have today is the opposite of that, to keep things from the people indefinitely. This is done by cabals of power and money grubbing scum who are robbing the people of things valauble to culture.
No.
Ongoing activity is not evidence of a "win." Look at the drug war for your benchmark. About a million and a half people are in jail over that in the US alone, the war is wrong in every way that matters, yet it continues, people continue to suffer, the jails overflow.... not a win. In the case of file sharing, the laws and the tech are getting more draconian, not less, and the harm is beginning to spread. Again look at the drug war and see the risk you're facing: Just as in the 60s we did drugs with a "so what" mentality, and then many of us (including me) got swept up and jailed, surprise, the system has teeth and they count. You think facing down the corporate interests with a "so what" mentality will win the day, I'm really afraid you're not only wrong, but wrong in a way that's going to get a lot of people hurt.
Yes, but again, they don't know very much about it yet, nor do they understand the potential consequences. There's a great deal of "Internet Superman" behavior -- loudmouthery and etc. -- but when it comes time to face the judge, that stuff tends to evaporate like the worthless bluster it is.
Again, perfect parallel to drugs in the 60's. While we frolicked in the parks and ran naked through the woods, they were just beginning to wrap their heads around strategies that would become more and more vicious, and they've not stopped to this day. You're at the very beginning of your fight with the copyright holders, and they -- realistically now -- hold all the cards. They own the airwaves. They control the Internet. They know your IP and what you're doing with it. They have congress in their pocket. Congress effectively controls the legal system with very little interference from the judiciary (and even when they do take an interest, they usually side with the corporations and the government.)
The drug war, in the meantime, has turned prison into a for-profit enterprise; it's no longer a negative to the state to incarcerate you (and take all your stuff, ruin your life, etc.) The more, the merrier: They'll just build more prisons and use you as slave labor. So when they begin to really reap the violators -- and you may be dead certain they will -- the prison system is ready to pack you in there like sardines, no problem.
Now you're beginning to get it. Weed -- only one drug, and one so harmless it's amazing -- is just barely getting traction at the state level, while the feds -- congress and etc. -- continue to maintain the most draconian stance possible. It's been over half a century, and there's been one hell of a lot of suffering just in order to attempt assert the liberty one should have to ingest what one prefers to ingest. It isn't over, and it won't be over for a while, even assuming that in the end, the old, evil men in congress die and people come to power who actually understand liberty and comprehend punishing actual wrongdoing instead of going against every frightening ghost that lives in some weak-minded mother's head and then holding a grudge in the form of creating a permanent lower class of distinctly lower opportunity and economic potential.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You don't inherently have a right to something I produce or create
You don't inherently have a right to prohibit people from copying it, distributing it, etc. So where's that leave us?
AFAICT you can't be forced to create something, or to share it with someone else, but if you do, you don't have any right to control what they (and then, others) do with it, unless they willingly give you that right. Which they might, if there were a good enough reason to.
Community service, minimal fines, house arrest, and probation are ways to deal with this.
The state and the taxpayers should not have to shoulder the burden for the private benefit of copyright holders in the absence of a damn compelling reason otherwise. Better to just legalize much of the offending behavior and be done with it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
To get you up to speed. Copyright was granted in the Constitution as a limited time dispensation to promote the arts and sciences. Corrupt and abusive influences have manipulated our legal system where "forever minus a day" has actually been stated as a legitimate interpretation of limited time. Because of this, huge amounts of work that should have entered the public domain are locked away. The problem extends beyond simple rent seeking and involves the inability to determine who actually holds copyright for works as the period of time is so long. This is the cultural destruction that results from abusive and corrupt influences being suffered to live.
As soon as you can copy it with affecting my use of it, sure.
Information is not things.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Do you own your home? Can I just come and take whatever I want out of your house?
You might very well be able to. Property rights boil down to one, utterly non-sarcastic question: You and whose army?
Your natural right to own property is based on your ability to personally defend it from those who would take it from you. This isn't very useful, as there's always going to be someone stronger, and bigger, and badder, who can overpower you and take it.
So you ask for help from your neighbor; will he stand by your side and defend the things you claim as your property? Unless he is quite altruistic (uncommon), he's going to refuse unless there is some benefit in it for him, typically, that you agree to help him defend his things too. This is the beginning of the armies.
Internally, a group of people working for mutual defense will create rules that they can all agree on to hold their coalition together. But rules, like contracts, are something you only need once willing agreement has broken down. This means that some part of the group will try to enforce the rules against another part that is unwilling. And it's going to come down to force again. Sometimes this breaks groups into many pieces. Other times, there are few enough, weak enough, people that won't abide by the rules, and they can be overpowered and made to comply. The rules that the group develops will basically follow utilitarian principles, at least amongst the subset of the group that is strong enough that its opinions cannot be dismissed.
Assuming that like a lot of Slashdot users, you're an American, how did you think a bunch of people from entirely different continents came to live here? By waging a bloody and long campaign of genocide agains the previous inhabitants. The European settlers ultimately won because they were strong and the Native Americans were weak; this is all that it took to legitimize the settlers' claim to own this land. Likewise slavery; it was legal because the slavers were stronger than the slaves and those who sympathized with the slaves. It was abolished because the anti-slavery forces eventually grew strong enough to kill or otherwise impair the pro-slavery forces.
Even today, this is the unpleasant truth that underlies all property law: If you own a parcel of land, and I trespass on it, you can call the police and they will arrest me and take me away. If I resist, they'll use force. If I resist hard enough, they'll respond with yet more force until I submit, am incapacitated, or die. But suppose that instead, you own a parcel of land, I trespass on it, and I fulfill the jurisdiction's requirements for adverse possession. Now you can call the police, but I can claim that the law is on my side. We can go to court, I'll win (if I have indeed adversely possessed it), and should you attempt to use force against me, now I can be the one to call the police, etc. And if the state decides to take my land, they can use their self-granted power of eminent domain to do so, and this time I not only can't muster enough force to resist, but I can't even find a legal rule to help me; the land is theirs because I have no recourse whatsoever, not because of any other reason. And if a sufficiently powerful army moves in and conquers the land, it belongs to them, because no one is in a position to say otherwise.
Once upon a time, people used to think that the right of property came from God, or from the king or other silly things. But the truth of the matter is that it is all about force and utilitarianism, and this has been pretty well recognized for a few centuries now at least.
Copyrights work the same way: Everyone has an inherent right of free speech, and this encompasses the ability to repeat, verbatim, what someone else has just said. An author who creates and publishes a work literally has no inherent power, merely by virtue of being the original author, to stop other people from copying that work. Instead, the author is compelled for lack of any alternatives (aside fr
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Again, we come back to the law.
And the law is what I want to change.
Indeed, my top five changes to copyright law would probably be:
1) A system of strict formalities (registration, deposit, fee, notice, renewal) in order to get a copyright on a published work;
2) Very short terms (probably 1 year), renewable a varying number of times depending on the type of work (more for, say, a movie, less for, say, a computer program) but probably no more than 20 terms altogether;
3) Making non-infringing (or at least non-actionable) any otherwise infringing act engaged in by a natural person, acting non-commercially;
4) Placing works in the public domain immediately if they are published, under the imprimatur of the copyright holder, with DRM, and having a government-run program of distributing those public domain works and assisting in cracking DRM systems;
5) Withdrawing from all copyright treaties, instead offering national treatment to everyone unilaterally (but using diplomacy to encourage other countries to do the same, as well as to avoid mutually incompatible laws that would leave authors in a bind)
You should be arguing what levels of punishment is acceptable for when you steal my property
Setting aside that something like copyright infringement isn't stealing property -- because stealing doesn't occur and there's no property at issue -- my point 3 above indicates that if it was me, personally, and I acted non-commercially in doing so, the level of punishment would be ... none.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Why do you feel that you should be paid, but not me?
Why do you think that you couldn't get paid by offering your creative talents as a service, as opposed to what I imagine is your current practice of creating a work at your own expense and then selling copies?
Before I went to law school, I used to be a professional artist. And I supported myself quite comfortably selling my artistic services. I didn't need copyright to get by, and my clients didn't care about it either.
And there are other ways of making money from art. Fine artists (painters, sculptors, etc.) typically get paid for particular pieces. An original painting can command prices that no other copy of the same work can. A Van Gogh can go for millions; the life-sized poster of the same thing is a few bucks, because people will pay for provenance.
As a lawyer, I sell my services because I can't sell anything like copies. What would I do? Sell copies of a brief or a memo tailored for one case to some completely different client? Sell the outcome of a court case? The idea is nonsensical. But lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and even a lot of programmers and artists work in the service economy. Give it a try sometime.
America is about equality
Yes, there would certainly be an equal vote for the legislators who would draft the reforms and (indirectly) the President who would sign it. And the reforms would certainly affect everyone equally. So that problem is solved.
If you thought, though, that authors as a profession are entitled to an equal share of the income made in this country, well, you must not know many authors. The cliche of the starving artist exists for a reason. Copyright never guaranteed you a living; just a chance at one. And it would still do so even if substantially altered.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
hard copies(mp3 or any file counts as this) don't use bandwidth, don't require an internet connection, can NOT be taken away from you.
Thank you. As a creator myself, I often find this argument ridiculous and obviously from the mouth of someone who is NOT a creator. They don't understand that I create for the joy of creating, not the possibility of monetary reward,
Really just a desire to get high is in itself a proof that something is very wrong with a person
Sooo.. is the desire to go for a walk in the park, or have a nice hot bath or shower on a cold day also proof that there is "something very wrong with a person"? I rarely buy alcohol, and have never bought weed (though I have smoked it a couple of times). I hardly even drink coffee these days. But sometimes it's enjoyable to do these things. Why does there have to be something wrong with someone who wants to do change their environment for a little while, either physically or mentally?
which is totally what she said