Thomas verdict: willful infringement, $1.92 million penalty

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-retrial-verdict.ars

by clint • 17 years ago

43 40 17 years ago

arstechnica.com

ramidarigaz• 17 years ago

$80,000 per song... That is fucked up (pardon my language), but that is fucked up.

Edit: Isn't the law supposed to protect against ridiculous punishments like these?

latortuga• 17 years ago

I believe it was a civil suit (that's really the only possible way that 80 grand per song couldn't be considered cruel and unusual).

fatdog7893• 17 years ago

Yes. In a recent case, SCOTUS ruled that punitive damages more than 10 times the amount of compensatory (actual) damages is per se unconstitutional except in cases of malice or fraud. Of importance, in followup cases by SCOTUS and the federal appeals courts, the courts have determined that punitive damages in excess of 2x actual damages (or $100,000), which ever is greater, is probably unconstitutional, except in cases of malice or fraud.

When malice or fraud are involved, there is no limit on punitive damages. Note that the fraud must be part of the crime itself; Thomas' perjury on the stand should play no role in punitive damages.

The award will almost certainly be reduced...however...it is likely that Thomas will settle before then. Though $200k was outrageous in the first trial, unique circumstances in this trial make it unlikely that the judge will reduce the amount to anywhere close that number, given that a separate and independent jury found such a large number.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

There are statutory damages for infringement of works protected by a federally registered copyright. The reason the statute is written that way is to make trials more efficient, so that once infringement (and registration of the copyright) are proven, the trial court doesn't have to do nit-picky fact-finding about how big the economic damages are from the proven infringement.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

Sometimes I wish hell were real so that the lawyers working double time to make sure a woman goes bankrupt over 24 songs could go there. It just doesn't make sense to have "damages" like that.

timwiseman2• 17 years ago

While I fully agree that this result is unjust, I would not blame the lawyers. Remember the lawyers have a professional duty to faithfully represent their client. If their client insists on pressing for the maximum possible damages then the lawyers have a professional duty to take every action within the bounds of ethics and law to get them.

This result was definitely unjust, but the lawyers are the wrong ones to blame.

ambition• 17 years ago

What? No. The lawyers have a ethical and moral duty as lawyers and human beings to do the right thing. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll make an analogy relevant to my profession. If some guy hires me to make a picture site and then insists on a section for sex pics of children I have an ethical duty to back out of the contract.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

I know what you're saying, but I just don't see how someone can purposefully ruin someone's life for nothing more than a claimed "professional duty" and a fat paycheck. There are many clients out there, they chose to take the case. Ultimately the client (RIAA) is to blame, but in my mind they are accessories. This is probably why I'm not a lawyer.

ensignavenger• 17 years ago

Good thing that hell is real! I won't judge the lawyers, though.

boryas2• 17 years ago

Would you steal a purse? If getting caught cost me $80,000 then probably not... So much for reasonable punishments.

dflock2• 17 years ago

Imagine the outcry if all punishments were meted out on this kind of scale. Jaywalking: 10 years hard labour!

And no, I wouldn't steal a purse, because a purse is a physical object, owned by an ordinary individual human being, who would be materially and emotionally harmed by the theft. This case of Copyright infringement involves imaginary property of enormously rich corporations who would not be materially affected by it in any measurable way. It's more akin to stealing an invisible mote of dust from the bottom of someones purse, without them being aware of it at any point.

All the evidence actually suggests that music sharing increases income for commercial music as a whole, yet sharing these 24 tracks has resulted in a $2m fine. Ironically, you would be punished enormously less for actually mugging someone and stealing their purse.

boryas2• 17 years ago

I wasn't trying to say that we should have equally barbaric punishments for purse-snatching but rather that we should have equally fair and reasonable punishments for file-sharing.

I can see how my point was made unclear by the unsuccessful joke, though.

fatdog7893• 17 years ago

Civil case. Your example is not analogous. Theft is a crime. Thomas committed a tort. The difference: police get involved with crimes, and you can be arrested for a crime. You cannot be arrested for a tort (unless the tort is the "civil" counterpart of a crime allowing the victim to recover for injuries from the crime).

jrockway• 17 years ago

This is how the law works, yeah, but don't you think it's broken?

abstractbill• 17 years ago

Would you steal a purse?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGXavXZwRcg ;-)

(this judgment is a bloody disgrace btw).

barrkel• 17 years ago

"This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions."

(UK)

dflock2• 17 years ago

I can't really see how this is even remotely proportionate, by any stretch of the imagination. What were these 24 tracks? A bunch of obscure Swedish Death Metal by all accounts. Is it likely that collecting these damages would make more profit than the sales of the tracks ever would? Maybe. But, as she pointed out, she hasn't got $2m anyway, so they can't collect - it seems likely that the RIAA will just use the damages as a sledgehammer to bludgeon her into settling 'out of court' and out of the glare of publicity. It makes me wonder what the jurors were thinking - awarding life destroying damages against a fellow citizen who is, presumably, an ordinary person, just like them. I don't think that I could do that, personally.

fatdog7893• 17 years ago

Punitive damages are not meant to be proportionate. They are meant to be penal, and to "send a message" to other potential tortfeasors. (Civil trial for damages = tort).

However, SCOTUS has ruled very recently that punitive damages must be proportional to the income and assets of the defendant, for example, $1M is nothing to Bill Gates but is beyond devastating to the average man.

greendestiny2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure I've seen the justice in using people as examples. The compliance of others isn't their problem. Awards being relative to income make sense for fines, and I guess thats what these punitive damages are.

This behavior of record companies makes it hard for geeks like me who don't support the abolishment of copyright. I think the worst that should happen in cases of copyright infringement of music is a several hundred dollar fine total, not per song.

pg• 17 years ago

Something is broken in this country.

daeken• 17 years ago

Agreed, but what do we do? I've seen few reasonable copyright reform ideas, and none of them actually discussed how we can push forward to implement them. Everyone simply says that too many people with too much money want things to stay the same, but I don't buy it. This attitude bothers me most when I see it here; this site exists because we know the power of the little guys in the market, and I know there's a workable approach to the copyright issue, it just needs to be found.

noonespecial• 17 years ago

I think the broken thing in this trial was a misdirection of efforts. The defendant was quite clearly guilty, (her cable modem, her mac, mysteriously replaced hdd). The defendant spent her time grandstanding obviously false innocence, thumbing her nose at the court and the intelligence of the jury. The RIAA representatives spent their time grandstanding obviously false damages, thumbing their collective noses at the whole justice system.

In the end, the whole thing was just a circus that missed the most obvious point: What is a reasonable course of action for dealing with this type of infringement? The sad part is, this trial was a wasted opportunity where we could have begun to address this issue. Instead the judge let it slip once again into a good ol' fashioned case of American side-show freakery.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

A trial court's job is to determine facts: did infringement occur? An appellate court has some power to get into some of the interesting policy issues you bring up. Maybe that will happen in this case, or maybe not.

rms• 17 years ago

They would have had better luck with jury nullification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

tptacek• 17 years ago

You mean the fact that we fund public schools with local property taxes, right?

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

You mean the fact that we fund public schools with local property taxes, right?

In Minnesota, schools are funded with general state taxation on a per-enrollment basis. But that doesn't keep the government-run schools from being remarkably ineffective.

rw• 17 years ago

I have to agree with you, Thomas. While IP law in the United States is clearly full of problems, we cannot ignore the simple numbers: millions of childrens' lives are worsened every year, through no fault of their own, just because of where, or to whom, they were born.

Healthcare? Quality education? Who gives a fuck- I want my free mp3s!

There's a reason the American dream isn't called the American reality: widespread socioeconomic injustice is alive and well in the United States of America.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

That isn't the case in a lot of states that aggregate the taxes and disperse them. Texas does this, I think.

ckinnan• 17 years ago

Help fix it: join EFF: http://www.eff.org/

skwaddor• 17 years ago

How do you think it stacks uo to what happened back in 2002 :

Tennessee Attorney General Paul G. Summers announced today that five of the largest U.S. distributors of pre-recorded music CDs and three large retailers agreed to pay millions of dollars in cash and free CDs as part of an agreement on price-fixing allegations. The companies will pay $67,375,000 in cash, provide $75,500,000 worth of music CDs, and not engage in sales practices that allegedly led to artificially high retail prices for music CDs and reduced retail competition as part of the agreement. Tennessee's share is an estimated $993,948 in cash and $1,507,852 in CDs.

http://www.attorneygeneral.state.tn.us/press/2002/story/PR13...

blasdel• 17 years ago

I got a check for ~$10.

Public libraries all over the country got shipping containers full of Mariah Carey deadstock.

The lawyers leading the class action got tens of millions of dollars.

quizbiz• 17 years ago

What % of people that have downloaded a song without paying would have paid for that song?

quoderat• 17 years ago

From the tone of many in this thread, it seems that people don't understand that non-commercial copyright is not a crime, but instead is a civil infraction -- hence why Thomas was not arrested, and not tried in a criminal court.

But the copyright industry certainly wants everyone to believe it is a crime. Looks like it is working.

Sad.

Thomas verdict: willful infringement, $1.92 million penalty

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