Obama Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/obama-supports-filesharing-verdict/

by phsr • 17 years ago

49 99 17 years ago

rbranson2• 17 years ago

This makes me extremely angry. $675,000 verdict to the average person is basically going to ruin their life. Per-capita income is still only about $21,500 in the US, so you're asking for 30 years of their working life.

tptacek19• 17 years ago

A $675,000 tort judgment is going to send you into Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which will take 3-5 years to resolve. It's bad, but it's not going to ruin your life.

I think there's cognitive dissonance here between the ease of committing torts on the Internet and the severity of the penalty.

If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement.

But on the Internet, we all know that the same tort is a couple clicks away, and that it's widely practiced. So there's outrage and surprise when the law works the same way against those filesharers.

I guess I see things a little differently because my career has been spent in close contact with other torts that, while far more damaging than file sharing, are often just as simple to commit. Nothing stops you from sharing files, and so you feel somewhat entitled to do so. But nothing stops you from crashing any number of important web applications, either.

mrcharles3• 17 years ago

I upvoted you even though I disagree with you.

Ultimately, it's still not the same thing as one is a physical object that cost actual money for actual materials to produce, and the other is simply a computer process that duplicates bits.

I apologize for starting this conversation. That being said, I haven't seen it on HN before (though I'm sure it has happened). I'd be curious to see where the readership lands on this issue.

emmett3• 17 years ago

The fact that it is widely practiced is a defense. For the same reason that people would rightly object to a $675,000 tort judgment for speeding, or jaywalking, or smoking marijuana.

Are they crimes? Certainly. But because they're widespread, generally unenforced, mostly "victimless", people are outraged that they'd have such high penalties. If you applied that judgment fairly you'd probably bankrupt 3/4s of America, if not more, which would be bad. Any law that you don't want enforced in the general case is a bad law that's going to generate outrage when it is enforced.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does.

Filesharers do no damage. Theft does damage, but filesharers create value.

wglb• 17 years ago

But in a way, isn't there a precedent in mass torts and an effective change in practice? When video recorders came out, it was clearly forbidden to record programs off the air. Enough people did it that there wasn't any prosecution, and there was eventually a settlement that validated this practice?

defen• 17 years ago

> If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement.

Actually, I think a $150,000 judgment for stealing a single CD would be outrageous.

I can see where you're coming from, but it seems to me that you are justifying making an example of people via massive financial penalties for causing no actual harm, only theoretical harm. If I make an unauthorized copy of an MP3, what is the actual harm? In what sense can an unobservable event be said to have happened? At best you can argue that it's a quality of life crime - if everyone did it, there would be reduced incentive to create and hence a lower standard of living. But if that's the case, why aren't other quality of life crimes punished as harshly? Drunk driving or speeding in a residential zone massively increase the chances that you will kill someone, and yet the punishment is nowhere near as harsh.

rbranson2• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure that nobody would really care if someone stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse. It's not even worth the legal costs to press charges. If some crackhead punches a hole in my window to take my CDs and I call the cops, they're going to say "sorry bud, shit happens." I highly doubt the Obama administration would support a $675k judgement against someone who stole 30 CDs from FYE. Just sayin. The guy would get a thousand dollar fine, a slap on the wrist, and a month of probation.

miked• 17 years ago

>> per-capita income in the US is still only about $21,500.

You're way off. It's $46,900.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

cabalamat• 17 years ago

I would have less problem with the size of this fine if, when the music industry breach copyright law, they had to pay bankrupting fines too. With no limitation of liability.

city414• 17 years ago

Conversely, it makes me happy. Yes, yes, downvote me, as supporting copyright holders is the unpopular opinion on the internet. But this notion that everyone can just take what they please and expect no repercussions needs to stop. It's trampling on the rights of people who create intellectual things. The very people that make all of this content possible in the first place. I still don't understand why they always get the short end of the stick.

kiba7• 17 years ago

Nobody is entitled to anything, not even your starving artist or starving authors. If the majority of the people don't want to support your career choice, you don't have the right do anything about it.

If that mean that the creation of arts and musics grind to halt, so be it. That's how a free society work.

Artists, programmers, and everybody else are supposed to die and live by their creation. It is their job to convince everyone else that their career is worth supporting.

Consumer sovereign are sovereigns for a reason, because they have the money. They are your lifeline, and they're alway right.

You can whine about how authors are being ripped off, or you can choose to look at reality and the economics of it. Your choice.

Gormo3• 17 years ago

But what are the inherent rights of the creator of an intellectual work over his product?

Accepting the concept of copyright, do you consider $675,000 a proportionate penalty in this case?

bwh2• 17 years ago

Do you believe that a $675k judgement is reasonable for sharing 30 songs? I'm genuinely curious about the math behind this line of reasoning.

tptacek19• 17 years ago

Bait-y title. I read the article, perhaps a bit casually, and I'm left with doubts that Obama even knows about this verdict.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

Yes I was a bit confused on that too.

phsr• 17 years ago

It is, but thats what Threat Level used. I never edit the title other than to shorten it

Retric2• 17 years ago

Please change title to Obama [administration] Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict

It’s what the article actually says and is far less link bait. The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.

dschobel• 17 years ago

How is he not directly responsible for his administration's statements and positions?

roc3• 17 years ago

Indeed, we held Bush responsible for things that we know his administration was deliberately keeping out of his immediate purview for deniability reasons.

Retric2• 17 years ago

There was a big scandal a few years ago for the administration interfering with federal prosecutors. Either they have independence or we have prosecution mixed with politics. An administration can publicly pardon people, but quietly squashing prosecution is a horrible precedent.

That said, there is some degree of guidance possible as to the overall tone. However, that mostly works to increase the number of prosecutions in some area not eliminate them.

mrcharles3• 17 years ago

These methods aren't going to make people share music less -- it will simply make them find more secure ways of sharing. Lets all remember, that at the end of the day, if I burn a few gigs of MP3s to a dvd and pass it to a friend hand to hand, the music industry will never know.

Ultimately, sharing is something people want to do as a natural inclination. I like this band, so I want you to like this band, so here's their music. I personally have found the vast majority of the music I love in this fashion.

I love passing on my love of music to other people. I've run private MP3 servers before. It brings me much joy to share music and then talk about it.

I don't really know what these large verdicts do. They are still effectively like being hit by lightning, it's so unlikely it will happen to you.

roc3• 17 years ago

From what I've seen, that's how sharing has been going since the extortion/lawsuit campaign started.

The average person doesn't hit TPB. They ask their friends. On the edges of the graph people are downloading, but it's a small minority of the actual sharing going on.

chrischen• 17 years ago

It's also much easier to find the songs on google. And if you're more dedicated, ripping the audio from YouTube.

randombit• 17 years ago

This made me think of a quote which turns out to be from a Clay Shirky essay (http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html)

"It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. [...] Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon."

RyanMcGreal2• 17 years ago

On the other side of the ledger we find this famous quote from Tim O'Reilly:

> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html

bch• 17 years ago

See http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/07/harry-potter-and-digita... and search for "Recorder Identification Code". I don't know if there's a way to subvert this.

Luyt• 17 years ago

What kind of public image is the RIAA seeking for itself? Can't they see they're committing imago suicide? Maybe these lawsuits were meant to show unequivocally to the public that file sharing is not permissible and will be prosecuted, but these figures are getting ridiculous. They lost their sense of proportionality.

robryan2• 17 years ago

Does anyone else have the same problem as me in this area? I am more than happy to pay for things, I just find it very hard to justify paying for some things that don't give any benefit over a one that I can get for free. So if they were to find a way to totally stamp out piracy or make it as likely to get punished for as taking goods from a store I'd be happy to pay for everything.

A good example is things like the WSJ, sure I probably don't read them enough to pay anyway, but the fact that you can just Google search things to not pay means that I would never see the value in paying.

I think when you feel that you are paying to support the content producer rather than to acquire the content something is wrong.

dusklight• 17 years ago

I find the headline very disturbing.

It says "Obama" supports the verdict, when really it is Obama's administration. I am not a Washington insider but something tells me more likely than not, Mr Obama was not personally involved in this decision at all. He has more important things on his mind right now, and other fires to put out.

I worry a lot about how so many people think "I voted for Obama, ok he's in office, my job is done!" and then they sit there and do nothing and wait for Obama to pull off some magic and make the world good again. In the meantime the other side has a whole army of crazies pushing their agenda.

ximeng• 17 years ago

This is a list of some of the songs Joel is accused of sharing:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.p...

Funny thing is if I type the names (e.g. Nirvana "Come as you are") into Google in a couple of seconds I can listen to all the songs on YouTube. I would have thought Google would be a better target than Joel. If the music industry are justified in their cause they could do at the very least do a better job of communicating why.

ratsbane• 17 years ago

This judgement is a travesty.

- Justice is only just if it is handed out evenly and in proportion to the crime. If ten million people share an mp3 and only one person is convicted for it, should that person have to pay for the alleged damages caused by the ten million? That's contrary to my sense of justice and to hundreds of years anglo-saxon jurisprudence.

- Stealing one CD from a store is clearly a more tortuous act than making one copy of the songs on a CD. If you steal a CD then the owner doesn't have it any more. If you make a copy of a CD then the copyright owner's potential sales may be diminished by some theoretical fraction of the original value of the CD.

nfnaaron• 17 years ago

"The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement 'creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.'"

I wonder how much campaign contribution money the RIAA had to spend to get those five lawyers (or lawyers with that resume) into those five positions?

Obama Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict

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