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Posted Oct 4th 2007 6:21PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Portable Audio
The first RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial just wrapped, and sadly, the outcome isn't a positive one. Regardless of the incredibly asinine and consumer-hostile comments made by Sony BMG's head of litigation the other day, the jury found Jammie Thomas, a single mother from Minnesota, liable for willful copyright infringement and awarded the RIAA plaintiffs $222,000 -- that's $9,250 for each of the 24 songs she was alleged to have made available on Kazaa, for those of you keeping track at home, and probably something like, oh, say, $222,000 more than she should have had to pay, since the RIAA plaintiffs weren't required to show that Thomas had a file-sharing program installed on her machine or that she was even the person using the Kazaa account in question. Of course, this is just one case and there's always the possibility of appeal, but anything that emboldens the RIAA's litigation team is never good for the general public.
Disclaimer: Although this post was written by an attorney, it is not meant as legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.
I feel kind of bad for Jammie Thomas because she's a single mother who just shared 24 songs on Kazaa and wasn't even making a profit from sharing those 24 songs, so i think she have a very tough time paying back the RIAA unless she does something drastic like sell her house or most of her belongings, declare bankruptchy etc. How many lives does the RIAA have to ruin before they stop with these dumb lawsuits that just make the consumer more disgusted by the RIAA actions?
riaa tactics are disgusting, what there doing is putting people off wanting to buy there files with these scare tactics,
i'd like to see a major boycott of the riaa records,
they chagre £13 for a an album in th uk
12p cd, 50p for a jewel case, 87p for a bit of art work,
£1.49 to produce a cd of 12 tracks,
£11.50 profit, for what? to fund lawyers to sue single parents who alledgedly shared a pathetic 24 tracks, a court case that sould of cost thousands of pounds, for something that cost £3 to make
another disgusting part of this trial was that the jury selection wasn't that great either. They should at least picked Jury members that are computer literate. The American Judicial system seemed kind of screwed up.
If you read the court transcripts, you'll find that the jury members had hardly any computer experience whatsoever. If I'm not mistaken, more than one juror had never used a computer before and another refused to purchase one because she was afraid she'd be on it all the time. Sounds like a basis for appeal to me. And where the f*ck to they come up with such absurd rules to rule someone as being liable? The judicial system is seriously going to sh*t.
