Jammie Thomas Verdict: This Time It's $1.5 Million For Sharing 24 Songs
from the pick-a-number,-any-number dept
The farce that is the Jammie Thomas-Rasset legal battle with the RIAA continues. In the third in a series of jury decisions, Thomas-Rasset has been hit with a $1.5 million verdict for sharing the same 24 songs, or $62,500 for each song. That is just slightly less than the last time around. From very early on, we had believed that Jammie Thomas' case was always a bad test case, and one where she likely would have been better off settling. There are important legal questions in these fights, but Thomas-Rasset's own actions greatly weakened her own case and served to distract from the important issues. However, she pushed forward. In the first trial, the jury awarded the RIAA (technically Capitol Records) $222,000, or $9,250 per song.The judge then realized that he had made a mistake in issuing instructions to the jury and declared a mistrial. The second trial, apparently with proper jury instructions but lots more problems for Thomas-Rasset, resulted in a whopping $1.92 million verdict, or $80,000 per song. The judge then made the somewhat surprising move of unilaterally lowering the verdict down to (a still extreme) $2,250 per song. Neither side was particularly happy about this, and now the third trial is over and the jury has come close to that last award anyway. So, now what? One assumes the judge will reduce the award for the same reason he did last time and the case will finally move up a level for appeal.
The RIAA will, once again, gloat about this ruling, falsely implying that this is more evidence that "ordinary people" find such actions reprehensible, but that, again, is pure spin and ignores the reality of the situation. To be honest, this particular trial has become such a farce, that it's really not worth paying much attention to it until we get to dig into the real issues at the appeals court.
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Filed Under: copyright, damages, jammie thomas
Companies: riaa
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Was there actually any evidence admitted at trial proving that she did in fact share those songs? That is, someone actually downloaded those songs from her without authorization from the copyright holder?
I'm bored of the case too, but from my memory no such evidence was ever admitted.
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Thing is, no evidence was found of it being shared except it being downloaded by Media Sentry.
source
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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-first-p2p-case-to.ars
"The huge disparity between what judges (who see all sorts of awards) and juries (who know almost nothing about them) has been a key feature of these cases, and the massive award today is certain to set Judge Davis off once more. Which may explain why, after the verdict was read out, he simply smiled a wry smile and walked right out of court, shaking his head the whole way."
It seems the judge is sympathetic and understands how ridiculous the damages awarded are. It will be interesting to see what he has to say and how much he lowers the amount.
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How much will the artists get?
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please, thats the easy question
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When you upload a torrent file, you only upload pieces of that file that are useless on their own, so technically, if you want to prove that she's guilty, you have to find the other million users who uploaded the remaining small tiny useless pieces of data, to every single person who has downloaded the file, and calculate the percentage that Jammie Thomas contributed in, and sue her according to that.
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A far better argument would be that she only served up 0.03% of that file to any particular peer and thus should only be liable for 0.03% of the maximum damages at most.
Don't take any of the above to mean I'm an RIAA appologist. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that a bad argument is a bad argument, even if I'm on your side.
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$0.00
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You may have wrong notions about appeals courts.
[ By the way: Thomas-Rasset is anagram for "master - hot ass". See, I can do irrelevant; it's easy. ]
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Re: You may have wrong notions about appeals courts.
Recent Supreme Court cases have held or suggested that punitive damages must bear some relationship to actual damages, but copyright statutory damages are not tied to actual damages, so this will be an interesting issue for the appellate court(s) to decide.
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Can you expand a little on what you mean here? It seems to me that the jury would not have come in at $1.5M if they did not find her "reprehensible." If they didn't think her so, wouldn't they have come in much lower.
Even the statutory minimum of $18,000 would have been significant punishment, and in my opinion, the jury would have come in closer to the minimum if they didn't find her "reprehensible."
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Yeah, right.
Apparently the only way to defend Mike's argument that this is not "evidence that 'ordinary people' find such actions reprehensible" is to make faith-based, conclusory statements.
Funny that.
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This is not a jury of peers (pun intended).
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On the contrary, she was using a new method called P2T sharing (Peer to Thrall).
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This is not a jury of peers (pun intended).
Those are some big assumptions, and they don't answer my question to Mike.
I'm curious how Mike thinks 11 people finding her liable for $1.5M is not "evidence that 'ordinary people' find such actions reprehensible."
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According to arstechnica, there were two such people dismissed: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/third-jammie-thomas-p2p-trial-begins-it-is-groundhog -day.ars
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I would also tend to wonder at the wisdom of admitting at a legal proceeding that you're a filesharer.
Especially at this one...
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So... if you're of the firm opinion that all RIAA employees should be shot, you'll probably be dismissed by the prosecution. On the flip side, if you "know" that all file-sharers are nothing but thieves, the defense will probably toss you out.
What remains -- or is supposed to remain -- is a group of people willing to listen to BOTH sides of the argument and make a fair and impartial decision.
Which you can't do if you're mind is already made up.
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"Which you can't do if you're mind is already made up."
To dismiss all people who's minds are "already made up" is to create an unrepresentative jury.
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Maybe so, but I don't think a "representative" jury is a desirable thing if it comes at the expense of getting a jury that will actually consider the evidence before making up their minds.
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Juries
By the time they have gone through the juror challenge process in the US the one thing that juries are NOT is "representative of ordinary people". Any such juror would have been weeded out by the RIAA lawyers.
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I don't get it
At best, the award will make her declare bankruptcy, and no one gets anything anyway. At worst, the rest of her employable, money-earn-able life is ruined.
The Christians were right in the eighties - Rock and Roll is evil and will bring about your demise.
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That's not the rationale for the award.
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So iTunes has a library of 10 million songs at .99 cents a pop. Thats a mere 9.9 million bucks to download everything that iTunes has. According to this ruling, the worth of a song isn't .99 cents, it's $62,500 dollars, making the actual cost of purchasing all of itunes tracks 625 billion dollars. Looking at it another way, if a purchased song is .99 cents, it would take 63,000 people to download a song to justify a 62,500 judgment.
So if I am reading this correctly, they say for the 24 songs in question, they have proof positive that each song must have been downloaded 63 thousand times and that each download is a lost sale? Either iTunes is severely undervaluing their assets or this verdict is a pile of unimaginable horse shit.
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That is a misinterpretation of the purpose of statutory damages. Statutory damages were designed to cover the situation where actual damages would be difficult to determine. That does not justify setting damages at a level that is provably several orders of magnitude greater than actual damages could possibly be.
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Not exactly. Even if actual damages could be determined with 100% accuracy, the plaintiff can still elect statutory damages.
Factors to be considered when awarding statutory damages include the blameworthiness of defendant, the expenses saved and the profits reaped by the defendant, the revenues lost by the copyright holder, the strong public interest in insuring the integrity of the copyright laws, and the deterrent value of the sanction imposed.
Perhaps most important here is that statutory damages should bear some relation to actual damages. They are not intended to provide plaintiff with a windfall.
I expect the judge will reduce the award to $54,000 ($2,250 per infringement--the same as Tenenbaum) on constitutional grounds. Then there will be two cases on appeal, in different circuits, where the judge slashed a jury award to $2,250 per infringement on constitutional grounds.
I'm looking forward to it.
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"In determining the just amount of statutory damages for an infringing defendant, you may consider the willfulness of the defendant�s conduct, the defendant�s innocence, the defendant�s continuation of infringement after notice or knowledge of the copyright or in reckless disregard of the copyright, the effect of the defendant�s prior or concurrent copyright infringement activity, whether profit or gain was established, harm to the plaintiff, the value of the copyright, the need to deter this defendant and other potential infringers, and any mitigating circumstances."
I think the "need to deter this defendant and other potential infringers" is where you get the huge damages award.
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If anything, these outrageous laws makes me feel less guilty if I do infringe on anything and they make me more likely to infringe. Not that I encourage infringement and I'm not saying that they will cause me to infringe. To the extent that I follow the law it's because I believe in following the law as a matter of principle. But if the law is poorly principled and corrupt (ie: with excessive fines) it diminishes my respect for the law. If it weren't for principle (mostly the fact that I'm Christian and Christianity generally encourages us to follow the law) I would blatantly break the law every chance I thought it was in my best interest. The excessive fines are no deterrent to me, if anything, they convince me that the law is intended to be selfish (and not benevolent to humanity) and so survival requires one to be selfish as well even if that means breaking the law. It's every man for himself, we're not part of a society that has our best interests in mind and so we must determine our best interests for ourselves (since the law makes no effort to do so).
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Given such a dichotomy most people are going to break the laws if they perceive the laws to be nefarious and the laws indeed are nefarious and unconscionable.
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So that works out as a fair bit of maths then... also the joke "I used to be into sado-masochistic, bestial necrophilia... then I found out I was flogging a dead horse." springs to mind.
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That is the current state of the law - but not the original purpose. If it had been clear (when the law was made) that actual damages would always be easy to assess then statutory damages would never have been invented. The law might have included a punitive element for "wilful infringement" or whatever - but it would almost certainly have been a simple scaling factor applied to the actual damages.
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Statutory damages are certainly limited to situtations in which actual damages are , or may be difficult to determine. This is why they apply to copyright infringement. To show that there was another motivating purpose behind statutory damages you would need to show that there was another entirely separate area of civil law which has statutory damages and where it is clear that actual damages will always be determinable. Other areas of law which have statutory damages seem to include them to set a minimum where actual quantifiable damage may be very small but there is an associated emotional distress. (eg privacy violation and harrassment over a debt)
and I know I've seen cases touting their disincentive function. Usually at the behest of plaintiffs, trying to up the award...
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In that case they would/should have been called "punitive " or "exemplary" damages.
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AND YET
makes a million in cash
gets a year in jail , and fined 500K
so
lesson kids
START SELLING IT CAUSE YOU GET TO KEEP HALF THE DOH
id do a year in jail for half a million bucks
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Re: AND YET
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What's next
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I think there is a difference between a jury that's supposed to rule on whether or not the law was violated, the extent of the violation, and what punishments the law imposes on violations vs a jury that's supposed to rule on its opinion about the benevolence of the law and only enforce laws and punishments that it sees benevolent to the extent that it sees such enforcement benevolent.
For a jury to say, "You broke the law and the legal punishment for breaking this law is $x" is different from one that says, "I agree with this law."
Though a jury can always claim that these excessive fines do nothing to promote the progress and are hence unconstitutional and thus a violation of law?
Besides, aren't juries only supposed to rule on fact and not law?
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I think there is a difference between a jury that's supposed to rule on whether or not the law was violated, the extent of the violation, and what punishments the law imposes on violations vs a jury that's supposed to rule on its opinion about the benevolence of the law and only enforce laws and punishments that it sees benevolent to the extent that it sees such enforcement benevolent.
For a jury to say, "You broke the law and the legal punishment for breaking this law is $x" is different from one that says, "I agree with this law."
Though a jury can always claim that these excessive fines do nothing to promote the progress and are hence unconstitutional and thus a violation of law?
Besides, aren't juries only supposed to rule on fact and not law?
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RiAA thieves!
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Double Dipping.
Seems like Double Dipping, to me.
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download = theft
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Re: download = theft
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Ordinary People?
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Re: Ordinary People?
(Hint: You're on the opposite side.)
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Where did you get this number? You know that civil trials do not require a decision beyond a reasonable doubt, only a preponderance of the evidence (ie: just a majority vote, not a unanimous vote).
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check it out
The articles coming out are really harsh on her making her seem like shes a career criminal and she should cut her losses and pay the fine.
this writer is obviously on the side of the RIAA
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music piracy
The officer was talking about downloading music for free. He named the name Kazaa which has appeared in numerous news articles. He talked about how the songs were arranged in groups and you choose and click and get the songs. He said it was the thing to do everybody was doing it. He bet his daughters had downloaded a THOUSAND SONGS on his computer. He said he had to get a new computer his old one FILLED UP WITH MEMORY? He laughed and said he hoped the federal government did not come in and investigate him.
Considering the lawsuits being filed against these people and the amount of fines they are having to pay and considering this is a law enforcement officer having such a conversation shouldn't this conversation be investigated to see where the thousand songs he talks about came from, who the every body is he speaks of and if he or his daughters possibly committed what the FBI the RIAA and others have called a crime.
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