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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.'"
Reminds me of the exchange of Good Will Hunting.
ok, how?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
cultural birthright from the parasitic rent-seeking content cartels
I can't agree with this. You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright. It is a paradoxically impossible question. If you put the punishment for copyright infrigement at a "reasonable" amount - say, 10 times the price of the CD/whatever it comes on, then it costs more to chase the punishment than it does to get it back. If you put the punishment at a level where it potentially becomes financially feasible for the copyright owner to chase it down, then it is an asinine figure for the actual infringement.
The only solution that I see is for the media companies to make their products so accessible that it is simply no longer WORTH bothering to download it illegally, but the problem is that the folks who put torrents or downloads online do such a damn good job that is makes competing with them very difficult.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
When I was 6 years old, my father took me back to the store where I'd stolen a pack of gum with the money to pay the owner. After a rather sheepish apology that involved no eye contact from me at all, the proprietor accepted my dime and my remorse. My punishment was to return to the store after school and sweep for a week, every day after school. In the movies, that's how the story ends, with an errant youth learning a valuable lesson. In riaal life, his 11 year old son kicked the shit out of me every day but one... and that one day was the worst because I waited all day for the beating that never came.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Here's the problem. There ARE supposed to be punishments are are strong enough to deter people from committing the crime, but those are punishments, not reimbursement. If I steal money from someone, I would generally be expected to pay back what I stole and then serve jail time as a punishment. Does the victim benefit from me being in jail? No (apart from the fact that there's one less thief on the streets). If you let media corporations sue for such huge amounts of money that it becomes beneficial to them for people to commit crimes against them, they have no motivation to actually prevent the crime in the first place. You know something's wrong when the victim of the crime comes out significantly better off than they were before.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it doesn't seem to be working.
Isn't it?
Whilst the "content-cartels" occasionally ruin the odd-person's life, hundreds of millions, if not a billion, people continue to share files, every second of every day. Young whippersnappers under 30 don't even *get* what the fuss is about (or why we even *share* (or own) music files when there's spotify, grooveshark, pandora...)
And I do think it's tragic, and despicable, that even one person is ruined by the various aa's and their/our bought-and-paid-for politicians/legislatures.
Ultimately, the few sporadic *gains* by the bad guys pale in comparison to the sheer number of those who don't feel threatened. Or who rightly believe it's an amoral issue unworthy of their attention.
It's not unlike weed use. Are the anti-weed folks winning? Sooner or later (measured in decades...) common sense does indeed prevail.
A lot of us may not live long enough to experience it, though.
cheers,
I quit buying music albums when they were still on cassettes. The return simply wasn't worth the cost for me. I appreciate music in my life but not enough to spend much money, particularly when I was content with radio.
Then Pandora caught my attention. I enjoyed it enough that I actually paid (and have continued paying) for the upgrade. It's a small cost for getting to hear what I want and being able to get a wide variety. I don't really have to pay for those two things, but I get a slightly higher quality and no ads for the price of the upgrade, plus I'm supporting a company I want to succeed.
Recently I've begun buying albums and tracks again. I only do it on systems where I get a downloaded copy of the music that I can move to whatever device I desire. I don't have a tremendous collection by any means, but I appreciate being able to hear what I want, when I want to, and not pay for full albums when I only like one or two songs.
I am aware that I could download the same songs and albums without paying for them but generally speaking my Pandora subscription, the convenience and the quality of the download I'm able to get at the price I pay makes it worth more than the effort of attempting to do it illegally.
Even if there were no risk whatsoever, my history of purchases shows that I still pay for quality and convenience, particularly where I value the success of the company I'm dealing with.
I know that one user doesn't make the case, but thunderclap is right: Do it well and at a fair price and people like me are willing to pay even if they could get it for free.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I'm pretty certain you would love this debate Glenn Greenwald had with GWB's drug czar. If you want to see the drug war eviscerated in the most plain and eloquent terms possible, this is it:
http://vimeo.com/32110912
The Q&A session is definitely worth watching too as GG in no uncertain terms, but with great skill, points out that his opponent is just flat evil.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Just back after watching it through.
Several things. The irony of the prohibitionist saying that people using drugs could never admit they were wrong and so needed to be stood up to, during an evening where a great deal of what he was saying was wrong, and people were standing up to him, was quite poignant.
The lesson here is that even when the arguments are couched in terms of empirical data, the prohibitionists are in no way inclined to listen. The defender of drug prohibition was an ex-government figure; even outside the context of having to back the administration that put him in that position, he couldn't admit he was wrong. And he was so very, very wrong.
Not that it matters, but several opportunities were lost, I thought, WRT claims of violence consequent to legalization; low prices deter thievery, availability deters seeking illicit sources, these are obvious but there was no contest offered, which was too bad.
Why I say it doesn't matter is because here, in the context of a Brown university hall, these arguments will have no effect. Half the hall left after the talk and before the Q&A; the level of engagement was minimal. Most of these kids, to be blunt, don't care. They don't care now, when their peers are actively engaged, and they'll care even less when the concern of the day is how to pay back the student loan, the mortgage, and why-o-why did we ever let that pregnancy come to term. The odds of any of them becoming political figures that can make a difference are depressingly low, and frankly, those few are the ones most likely to know better than to try to handle a political hot potato. So really ... doesn't matter. A great speaker indeed, but one who wasted an evening unless he found a good restaurant there.
Looking back on the effect he had on his opponent -- none -- consider what would happen if you put this empiricist, full of vigor and data and common sense, up in front of congress. Do you think it would change anything? I don't believe it. The drug war is a cash cow and a power cow and they simply won't let anyone back it down.
That's how I see the coming copyright war. All the signs are there. I sit through four or five warnings on some BDs and DVDs that I have purchased. I'm starting to see absurd monetary awards. Those same warnings point out there are criminal, not civil, penalties for various infringements upon the rights holders. HDMI incorporates HDCP, and my expensive receiver no longer offers the simple ability to record, or to down convert from say, HDMI to component or even composite. The barriers are going up everywhere, and the penalties are being crafted right now, as are the legal precedents that are going to be the bloody edge of the axe that strikes the collective neck of the current and forthcoming generations.
I wish I didn't see it that way. But I do. I hope I'm wrong. But I'm almost certain I'm not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All you will accomplish is the forcing of consumers to accept highly restrictive contracts (not user agreements or licenses) that prevent you from doing anything with the software.
Well, I'm opposed to adhesive contracts, at least in consumer settings. It wouldn't take much tweaking of the UCC to shut that down, but I felt it was outside the realm of a discussion about copyright.
Individually negotiated contracts, OTOH, are okay I guess. At the very least I'd be willing to take a wait and see attitude. I figure the transactional costs will handle it.
Point #3 would ensure that I would code in special lockouts that prevent you from using the software and if I just felt like it, a yanking of your rights whenever I felt I couldn't trust that you didn't share your software.
I'm guessing you hadn't reached point 4 yet, when you wrote that.
Copyright law needs to be changed, but not yanked.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think that the basic idea of copyright is very good, but the implementation needs serious work. Abolition should remain on the table, but is obviously an option of last resort; it only makes sense when there is not a single possible copyright law that provides a greater public benefit than having no copyright law at all. I don't think this is likely anytime soon.
Of course, I have noticed more and more people who, frustrated with how bad the current law is, are supporting abolition just to be done with the whole thing. This is a dangerous side effect of copyright maximalism, IMO.
You should know full well that when you take away my rights you effectively do something like repeating prohibition -- that worked out wonderfully.
Again, I agree. When you have copyright laws, you take away my right to make copies of your published work. And while this can be justifiable, if I benefit more from that sacrifice than I lose, under the current law much otherwise unobjectionable behavior is being prohibited, the law is widely flouted, and it reminds me a lot of Prohibition.
If copyright were far more important -- like desegregation -- then I could see pushing it on a public that was not happy about it. But it's not anywhere near that level. Copyright really is of trifling importance in the grand scheme of things, somewhere in the neighborhood of building codes that require white picket fences or bans on jaywalking.
You really are a bloodsucking lawyer, aren't you? You effectively just destroyed capitalism in the sense that I, as an author, should get paid for my work...unless I decide not to publish it, which means I can't make money off of it.
Melodramatic much?
Right now there are a plethora of ways that you, as an author, cannot get paid for your work. For example, if you sell a copy of a book, you can get paid for it that one time only; after that, everyone can resell that same copy again and again and again and you don't see a dime.
All I'm doing is creating a single exception which would allow natural persons (as distinct from artificial entities, like corporations) to act freely -- as they basically already do -- provided that it is strictly non-commerical. No ads, no tip jars, no file sharing ratios, nothing.
You can still sell copies to people; some of them will buy it. You can still sell copies to other entities, or to people engaged in commerce.
Copyright, remember, doesn't guarantee that the copyright holder will make money, it just funnels a goodly portion of whatever money there is in the direction of the copyright holder. The funnel is not changing, but the available pool of money may shrink somewhat.
I would agree that it is a big deal. I have traditionally thought of this as the nuclear bomb of copyright exceptions. But after a long time of mulling it over, I support it. Filesharing is the new drinking, and banning it is as futile and dangerous as Prohibition was. And Pr
-- 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.
Some content does. Notably movies. Music, not so much. I'm a musician, I have a complete 32 track studio in my home, along with a full band's worth of instruments. If you brought me several rhythm guitarists, a singer, a keyboard player, a bassist, a drummer and a lead player, all without gear, I could set them up, record them, either together or by individual tracks, and produce a high quality master CD for them for zero cost beyond what I've already invested -- and what I've invested (some years back now) is less than a cheap car, and even that was far more than you'd have to spend today to do the same thing. Or, if I went acoustic, I could walk into a bar, sit down, and begin to play and sing. No cost other than my time. Dinner, a few beers (not too many or the performance... ugh, lol) maybe a few bucks in a hat... that'd make it practical, if the audiences found me worthy. Attention from the opposite sex used to go a long way too, though today, I'm settled down.
So bands... no. Most television productions aren't worth a plugged nickel. The acting is terrible, the scripts worse. Something like Avatar or the new Star Trek... some spending happening there and no way around it as yet. Less in the future, I think, but still, gotta give your point to you on that front. All I can say there is I own both recordings; not even a slight urge to grab them for free. Well worth the cost. I'd like to be able to back them up, lest something happen like what happened to Heavy Metal (rights bitch fight), or perhaps one of the kids using it for a clay pigeon, etc. I can't.
No, you really can't make that argument. There wouldn't have been any music, opera, plays, street performers prior to about 1920 if that was the case. But there were. There are other forms of funding that the arts can extract from society than direct charge for recordings. We can ague the merit of those methods, but you can't say they didn't work, because they most assuredly did. I suspect they'd work again, and in such an environment, we'd see some very fine performers, as well as a good bit more variety. But that is, of course, just my opinion.
What you're missing here is that music, and I presume other forms of performance are, is a joy to produce. I'd kick you out of the way to get a space to play. It's not always about money. Ask yourself if you'd have to be paid to have sex. It's kind of like that. I couldn't tell you how many times I've played for free, both solo and with bands. And I'm pretty good -- fifty years of experience now, rock, blues, hard rock, even some folk, that's me. I just love music and performing musically, and that's true for a very large portion of the other musicians I've known over the years. Fame isn't the prime motivator for everyone, nor is money. Sex, well, yeah. ;)
This is an excellent strategy and I encourage you to pursue it. I always buy a CD from a live performance, if they offer one. Or several, hell, I'll buy your whole catalog if given a chance and you gave me a nice evening.
What you have to do, though, to make that strategy really effective, is get everyone you know to pursue it, and they their acquaintances, etc., ad infinitum.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'll never believe the drugs should not be controlled nonsense. I've seen too many really bad consequences of drug use. Yes there are a lot of people in prison for drug crimes. But we would have a greater problem if they were not in prison. And it does not help to spew the old false arguments. Whether it is in Amsterdam or in Alaska drug policies that were liberalized have now gone back towards harsher control simply because of the consequences.
Really just a desire to get high is in itself a proof that something is very wrong with a person. I hope we find a quick and easy medical fix but if we can not we might see a day in which those that get high or drunk are simply quickly executed. If we have too many of them and can not afford to keep them locked down and can not release them then termination becomes the one remaining choice.
California offers a great example now with pot. Check the prices on pot in the stores that sell it. Now tell me that users do not have to get involved in crime to pay for their pot. One way or another these folks are doing crimes to get by and get high. How many people in America have an extra $50. a week to waste on pot? How many working people even have an hour or two free a week to get high? These days people work, sleep and answer the bell and do it all over again just to have rent and groceries.