No P2P jokes please: Jammie Thomas fundraising knickers
Posted on 01/03/2008 11:54:09 AM PST by ShadowAce
Things are looking up for the World's Dumbest File Sharer, Jammie Thomas, who became the first American to go to court in a P2P case in October
A jury of her peers found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and set a fine of $222,000 - but now she's been dumped by the person most responsible for leaving her in this predicament (apart from Jammie herself) - her attorney Brian Toder.
It was Toder who foolishly advised her to make a principled fight of the matter in court - thereby turning what would have been a $2,000 tax into a candidate for bankruptcy. And it was the sheer ineptness of Toder's defence strategy that led the jury to conclude she was taking the piss.
(The no nonsense, blue collar jury resented having their time wasted, they later revealed).
Now Toder, who was working pro bono, is cutting his losses and will no longer represent Jammie. P2P site TorrentSpy notes that Toder was a maritime law specialist and describes his performance as "a frankly lacklustre non-existent defense".
The news was announced over Christmas on the website Thomas has set up to sell merchandise to raise money for her defence fund.
Here you can buy a Jammie Thomas thong (illustrated below) to help fight the good fight. No, they don't say "World's Dumbest File Sharer" - but like a good PC, they do appear to have plenty of room for expansion.
And who says P2P file sharers are mean spirited philistines who don't like putting their hands in their pockets? Free Jammie has raised $1,189.57 in the past nine weeks alone.
No P2P jokes please: Jammie Thomas fundraising knickers
Only $204,621.59 to go, then. But at least she may not have to pay legal fees for the original case, suggests CNet.
The Thomas case surely marked a low point for both sides in the P2P wars.
In failing to urge its members to license the free flow of digital music, the Recording Industry Ass. of America has created a punishment where none need exist: while its policy of suing users hardly helps its moral cause, that artists and creators deserve to be paid. And as the dispute has dragged on, file sharing has only increased. Thanks to BitTorrent, it's now common practice to download entire career worths of work, not just the latest Britney.
On the other side, can there ever have been a more empty and worthless cause than fighting for the right for artists not to be paid? I suspect that one reason for the lack of popular support for Thomas may be that when it comes to getting stuff for free - we've never had it so good. With so much cultural material available for nowt over the internet, only a sentimentalist or the chronically impatient net user ever has to pay for anything again. And the price for this is merely an ever-falling broadband fee.
As I suggested last year, most people share files, but we have about as much chance of being "taxed" as we do of being hit by lightning. Many of us would happily pay a broadband fee to legalise this mess. No wonder so many P2Pers have decided that keeping a low profile is probably the best thing to do.
(Even CNet's favourite lobby group, the EFF, has failed to come to Jammie's aid).
The futility of the litigation made me as popular with the phonographic industry as it did with people who have RIAA bumper stickers - but sometimes you have to call it like you see it. ®
I guess if you’re name is Jammie there’s not much hope for you anyway.
The music industry DOES NOT have the power to tax the consumer, but they do have the power to influence Congress to tax consumers (and it has been done in the past on blank recording media).
Sure. There is a long established history of works lapsing into the public domain. But books/films/recordings that were created after 1930 "seem" to be considered in a different class. Those that created many of these works are dead.
And many of the writers of the hit songs we know were cheated out of their royalties by an unscupulous industry. The more I learn about the crap the founder of Atlantic pulled, the less I see any reason to celebrate the artists he is credited with releasing. Stax was responsible for some of them and had their holdings taken from them when Atlantic was sold to ABC. And Atlantic had a nasty habit for not paying the royalties they were supposed to.
So if the artists responsible for those works saw their works in the p.d. they could at least compete AGAINST Atlantic and Big Media in the marketplace to see who's collection was the bigger seller.
Dumb woman. She was clearly guilty of distributing copyrighted works under the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of civil suits. Having to have the hard drive replaced in the meantime was just a little too convenient. She should have just settled for the two grand.
Now when the RIAA tried to steamroll that non-computer-using grandma who was supposedly sharing gangsta rap, that’s a different story.
Sounds like Toder had visions of a major Hollywood motion picture dancing in his head and cast himself as the hero when he advised her.
I’m more outraged by the RIAA going after people ripping paid-for CD’s to their computer. Just another Dinosaur Media entity heading at lightspeed toward oblivion.
January 3, 2008 4:00 AM PST
Washington Post sticks by RIAA story despite evidence it goofed
Posted by Greg Sandoval
(I will excerpt this because Greg writes for the WP even though this article probably doesn’t fall under their control, the people discussed are Marc Fisher - a Post columnist, William Patry - the copyright guru at Google)
Patry does, however, caution that recent statements made by the RIAA and included in Fisher’s story reflect the group’s growing tendency to use language as a means of control.Fisher quoted Sony BMG’s chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, who testified recently in court that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.”
Patry disagreed.
“This new rhetoric of ‘everything anyone does without (RIAA) permission is stealing’ is well worth noting and well worth challenging at every occasion,” Patry wrote. “It is the rhetoric of copyright as an ancient property right, permitting copyright owners to control all uses as a natural right; the converse is that everyone else is an immoral thief.”
To everyone that says the woman should “just have paid”, what amount of the amount of “tax” paid would’ve made it back to the artist who was “wronged”? This is supposed to reflect a damage to the artist’s ability to earn money. Would the full $2,000 have gone to the artist? $1,000? $0.70?
They're not going after people specifically for that -- yet. They believe it's infringement, and will keep pushing to make it legally so.
Absolutely none. Yep, zero, zilch, nada, not a penny. I know you didn't think the RIAA was in this for the benefit of the artists.
All the money goes back into the RIAA's extortion machine. In fact, the contract for paying the extortion fee specifically does not protect the person from the artists later suing for infringement. But this girl knew she distributed copyrighted works and should have known she couldn't win, and therefore she should have just settled for the lesser amount. The article is probably right in that the lawyer egged her on.
The two people mentioned....
I was in that argument also and I still feel they are setting up precedent to encroach into that exact lawsuit in the future or they would never have used that exact language, the act of putting copyrighted material IN ANY FORM into the shared folder is what makes it illegal, so why stuff in all the other stuff about .MP3 files etc.... UNLESS, they are setting up precedent...
my bet is $0.01 so they can say they gave the artist their cut....
That's Jammie & her idiot attorney?
Good thing she didn’t model the thong.
One wonders if her parents considered, then rejected, Lingerie and Peignoir and Hubby’s Shirt.
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