Supreme Court Won't Hear Jammie Thomas Appeal
from the but-of-course dept
We didn't think that the Supreme Court would grant cert to hear the appeal in Jammie Thomas' case and now it's been confirmed. As we've said for a while, neither Jammie Thomas's case nor Joel Tenenbaum's case,were ideal cases to take to trial, and both people mounted questionable defenses, which massively harmed their credibility. There are serious issues that could have and should have been covered in these kinds of cases, including the Constitutionality of certain levels of statutory damages. However, the way they went about this case made sure that it was doomed from the start. And, unfortunately, now it's just more bad precedent out there.
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Filed Under: copyright, jammie thomas, jammie thomas-rasset, statutory damages, supreme court
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Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up at same place!
http://techdirt.com/
What are you stoopid pirates doing here? Mike supports copyright!
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Re:
Fuck off.
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Re: Badly done imitation. At least spell right!
Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up at same place!
http://techdirt.com/
What are you stoopid pirates doing here? Mike supports copyright!
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There, fixed that for ya.
Don't you kids wish YOU were influential enough here to have imitators? Heh, heh.
Anyhoo, ACTUALLY, as I've said, I think the punishment MUCH too severe: should be quite limited -- to, say, the $3500 bucks they originally wanted to extort. Lower fines but more certain to be caught would be better.
I'd mostly blame EFF or whoever backed her legal challenges in the first place.
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Re: Re: Badly done imitation. At least spell right!
If you consider yourself to be an "imitator" of yourself, you have deeper psychological problems thant we already thought, boy.
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Re: Re: Badly done imitation. At least spell right!
MY OPINION: Jammie Thomas knew that what she was doing was wrong. Who cares if the law system if flawed, it's better to ignore the faults it produces and focus on the results...which have been apparently zilch to none.
Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up at same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Where fanboys assert that working industries are doing it all wrong!
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Re: Re: Re: Badly done imitation. At least spell right!
Fixed that for you.
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Results?
So, it would be ok if I gave everyone in your family a deadly disease which killed you all and then rumage through your remains and developed a cure for it?
Because, who cares if you suffer agonizingly long, terrible, deaths. I got the cure now, right?
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Re:
I think the boy's been hitting the bottle while keyboarding.
Perhaps he finally realizes what a lonely, wasted life he has...
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I think you're slipping.
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On a side note, why is this site called Techdirt anyway. I never see any tech stories anymore. It should be renamed copyright and patent dirt since 99% of the stories anymore have to do with those topics
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Now
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Re: Now
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Re: Now
And it's not a bad precedent, it's a good one. Everyone predicted it would happen from the beginning except the tenured law professors who wanted to smoke up and dream wacko thoughts.
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Re: Re: Now
That is stepping aside from the real issue that these damages will actually erode what respect of copyright the average person holds. When they hear that uploading 24 songs will get you fined hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are just going to laugh and go right on doing what they do everyday with the addition of complaining about how one sided copyright law has become.
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It's a push
On the other side, they're kind of meh. There's much more interesting stuff out there.
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Um, hold up a sec
I have no idea where the hell you people are coming up with the idea that just because the US Supreme Court denied Thomas-Rasset her appeal means that there's some sort of precedent being set. All means is that the decision of whatever lower court ruled on the case last is the final outcome.
In short, we're back to square one. No binding (nationwide) precedent has been set. The RIAA is still able to sue for outrageous amounts of cash if they so desire (however, after all the terrible press they received from the "we're gonna sue you into poverty for rest of your life" angle, they'd have to be really stupid to try something like that again), and the people still have the ability to appeal to the courts over the constitutionality of exorbitantly high damages.
If something like this happens again, perhaps next time we'll have a defendant who has a better case to take to trial.
As the Zen Master says, "We'll see."
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Re: Um, hold up a sec
As noted elsewhere, this whole matter is the Frankenstein created by the zealots of EFF and tenured law professors who pushed her into the spotlight to further their cause and beliefs rather than act in the best interest of their client.
Now she gets to hold the bag while they tilt at their next windmill.
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Re: Re: Um, hold up a sec
As for the argument of one circuit/the lawyers looking at the result here when crafting an opinion about a case, that's pretty much a given. However, it's also equally likely that they could dismiss what happened in the Eighth Circuit and come to their own conclusion on the matter.
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Feeding
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Re: Feeding
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Re: Feeding
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Did the crime... pay the fine
You seriously believed those free culture lawyers who
told you that you are entitled to other people's hard
work for free...
Oops! They were wrong.
I am betting they won't pay your fines for you.
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