Per request of the poster
Posted on 06/18/2009 6:29:59 PM PDT by dayglored
A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each — a total of $1.9 million — for 24 songs.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said.
Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com ...
If music was marketed differently I don’t think musicians would lose much by downloading. Probably make more money. Over-priced cds and crap music and crap media (cds) hurt more than poor folks pirates.
parsy, who still has his vinyl
> Great analogy.
Yeah, I re-read the exchange, and you're righter than I am. Well done.
Yep, that's worse.
But for what it's worth, this woman's kids, although not swinging from a rope, are screwed pretty bad. The money that should be feeding and clothing them, buying their schoolbooks and giving them a send-off into adult life, will all go to the RIAA to pay for the record executives' fancy cars and coke spoons.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
[sarc] I mean, she copied some of their songs illegally and made them available for free over the internet. That's certainly worth ruining a family for life, right? [/sarc]
What she did was wrong, and deserving of punishment. But this punishment is vast overkill.
...despite the fact that the Pennsylvania Constitution states explicitly that the jury is to judge both the law and the facts of the case. (And pointing out that the judge's instructions are in direct contradiction of the words of the Commonwealth's Constitution means that my voice is silenced via voir dire)
Jury nullification is the conscious disregard of the law to achieve a desired verdict.
Yes, it is designed to protect the rights of The People from problems that Common Law can create.
"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." --John Jay (1789), the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme CourtI'm no big fan of Alexander Hamilton, but in the Zenger case, he got it right.
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts." --Samuel Chase (1796), signer of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact." --Oliver Wendell Holmes (1902), U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided." --Harlan F. Stone (1941), Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Nope. She merely has to hire another lawyer for around $700 and declare bankruptcy. Stroke of the pen, Judgement debt gone. . .
Congress has repeatedly increased penalties for copyright infringement because those who create are entitled to the fruits of their labor. It is not just downloaded music in question. Every kind of copyrighted material is being shared without payment due to Internet use.
An argument to ignore infringement of copyrights just because a lot of people are doing it is wrong on many levels.
People who create and produce original works have a right to be paid for their work.
If the penalties for copyright infringement are kept low, those who infringe will laugh, ignore the potential cost of being caught and continue stealing the creativity of others.
We cannot raise a generation of young people who devalue intellectual property to zero. Such a course threatens anyone with new ideas who spends years trying to develop ideas into property of value.
If copyrights can be infringed with impunity, why not patents?
The concept of protection of intellectual property is vital to society.
This is why virtually all developed countries have strong laws prohibiting infringement of intellectual property.
We will all lose by devaluation of creativity.
If the world is free to steal your creation, why create and share it at all? Why bother?
There is a way to legally obtain music off the Internet.
I use iTunes all the time and am thrilled to only pay 99 cents per song for any of millions of songs available to me.
Show me where the damages even slightly approach what was done to her.
Nice high horse you have there.
When the music industry stops telling me how, when, and where I can use the music and movies that I pay for and stops trying to think up a zillion ways to get me to pay repeatedly for the same music, they won’t see a dime from me. They need to join the 21st Century and stop circling the wagons around a dying business model.
I know that a woman received a harsher penalty for dowloading two dozen songs than she would have for killing someone. If that puts me in the "not understanding" camp, so be it. It also makes me a tad reluctant to spend another penny on packaged music. Not that I have in at least a decade.
He said MediaSentry downloaded a sample of them from the shared directory on her computer. That's an important point, given Davis' new instructions to jurors. Although the plaintiffs weren't able to prove that anyone but MediaSentry downloaded songs off her computer because Kazaa kept no such records, Reynolds told the jury it's only logical that many users had downloaded songs offered through her computer because that's what Kazaa was there for. From here.
She wasn't "stealing". At least, that's not what she was convicted of.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds this behavior annoying. Especially at work. Or in church.
Yup! Bankruptcy is her best option. All secured debtors will keep taking payments as if it never happened, all unsecured debtors and this judgment will suck air. She won't loose her home, her car or her way of life. This is purely the music industry trying to make an example. Not to mention the fact that, any music over 20 years old is fair game, is it not? It would have to be current copyright protected which expires after a set number of years.
That's *exactly* why God created jury nullification.
I'm no lawyer but I think that court judgments can't be discharged in bankruptcy court.
My anger about this judgment is not the "guilty" part, since she's obviously guilty as hell. It's that $80,000 per song is so ridiculous. It would have made more sense to stick with the $3-4K/song typical award. That's still a crushing fine for someone in her shoes, but it's in line with precedent.
> I use iTunes all the time and am thrilled to only pay 99 cents per song for any of millions of songs available to me.
I find most of what I want on eMusic.com, and pay $12/month for 50 tracks -- about a quarter a song, regardless of length. But that's mostly classical/jazz/blues/indie stuff, not pop. If I wanted pop I'd be on iTunes, or one of the other pop services.
IMO it's a shame (and their own fault) that the CD companies didn't get this new model working for them a decade ago -- we all could have avoided this hassle.
Per request of the poster
yes.
i know a union-socialist woman from minnesota that’s afraid of her california neighbors that are mexican and black.
Um, 20 years is for patents. Copyrights last a LOT longer (variously life of author plus 70 years, 95 years after publication, or 120 years after creation, depending on several factors): http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
See some real misconceptions on this thread. For example, this isn’t a “conviction,” it is a civil judgement. The penalty is not “worse than for manslaughter” because there is no jail time. Physical property rights and intellectual property rights aren’t that different if you understand the core concept of property.
As to the “stealing a car is different” idea, OK, what about someone stealing the detailed engineering plans (data files) for how the car is made? After all, that’s just copying bits, the original data files are still there, so no harm done, right? Of course, the real value in a car is the intellectual property it embodies; without that, all you have is a couple hundred bucks of plastic, metal, silicon, glass, and wire.
Or how about if someone makes a movie script, ad campaign, piece of art work, etc., and people copy it and use it without paying just because it’s “only copying” the bits? So much for the writer, designer, or artist, eh? Say nobody pays - then the person gets zilch for their work. Hopefully everyone can see how that would squelch creation of such works. OK, say 90% pay - that makes the other 10% freeloaders who are harming both the producer and the people who play by the rules because they are taking up the slack for those freeloaders.
One reason why most consider taking, copying, or using others’ intellectual property embodied in bits to be a lesser violation of the law is because it is so easy at the time of the act. It is hard to see any harm being done. On a one-off case, there isn’t much, but when that same easy act is repeated millions of times, there is real harm done. Another reason is that most people have done it, and people don’t like to face that what they themselves have done really is depriving others of the fruits of their labor (both the creators’ labor and the labor of the people who played by the rules and paid more to take up the slack for the freeloaders).
Finally, for those who think the music industry’s business model and/or products suck, the right answer is to make your own, compete with them, and bury them in the market place. Oh, you can’t? Takes too much money and work? Gee, guess all that sucky junk isn’t so sucky then if you can’t do it better. Also, if it is so sucky, why bother copying it?
PS PSYCHO-FREEP, all but the first comment aren’t directed at you, I just got on a roll...
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