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.'"

Comments

$24

[schlachter]

How about they ask her for $24.
Seems pretty reasonable.
Would still deter people from sharing thousands of songs.

Re:$24

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:$24

[rubycodez]

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.

Re:$24

[fyngyrz]

Isn't it?

No.

hundreds of millions, if not a billion, people continue to share files, every second of every day

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.

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:$24

[Mr. Slippery]

Do you own your home? Can I just come and take whatever I want out of your house?

As soon as you can copy it with affecting my use of it, sure.

Information is not things.

Re:$24

[cpt kangarooski]

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

Re:$24

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:$24

[cpt kangarooski]

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.

Re:$24

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:SCOTUS Lowered Exxon Valdez Punitive Award

[Anonymous Coward]

Jammie Thomas didn't make any campaign contributions.

What an insult

[jamessnell]

$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.