Not at all. I would wager most everyone knows sharing music like this is illegal and even if they somehow didn’t that is no defense.
What I am saying is people can have a file sharing program operational on their PC and not know it is there and that others are nabbing their stuff. Like I said I could go to my mom’s house, put Kazaa on and it’d run in the background and she’d never know it was there (even if the icon is in the system tray…she just is not good with PCs). It would then merrily hand off her files till the RIAA came-a-knockin.
There’s a real disconnect between the crime & the punishment here. She’s being fined $9000 per song? Considering a song bought legally runs about a dollar, that’s a bit mad, isn’t it?
Shoplifting, to which this has been compared is illegal, but I’m pretty sure the cap on a fine for petty shoplifting is still less than $1000 most places.
Ah, you say, she shared songs, potentially with lots of other people.
And I counter that unlike a shoplifter, she took no physical property. Instead she put herself in the place of an alternative copying & distribution system. Whatever she’s “cost them” is hypothetical. It’s like the amount of money I “cost” a retailer by buying wholesale. She’s guilty of copyright infringement, not theft in a strict sense.
We’re at the point of picking one person in a million to punish with a Death of a Thousand Cuts. That’s terrorism, not justice.
And it could be that she installed it herself and was running it knowingly. As Bricker once said, “If only we had some system in place to weigh evidence and judge guilt…”
Would you see it differently if she burned 1000+ CDs and sold them on the street?
It is theft in a very real sense. Each time she provided a song to another person she deprived the artist of some money. Do not think it is different than her reaching into their pocket and lifting that money. It’d be like someone trying to pay for a soda at the corner store and you intercept the money before the clerk gets it and run off. Still theft.
My issue with the case is I think the evidence against her was insufficient (at least from what little I could tell from the article). In my hypothetical with my mom she would be found guilty the same as this woman was even if she herself had no idea it was happening. More to the point, in my experience as a computer support person, this is actually common. Many people have no clue what it going on.
Maybe she downloaded and used Kazaa for legitimate purposes (it can be used that way). What she was unaware of was it scanned her PC for MP3 files and was offering them up. There are lots of possibilities and before someone puts someone in debt for the next 20 years I would hope they have some good evidence.
Maybe the jury here got it exactly right…I don’t know but it looks a little dodgy to me. Juries are hardly infallible. You really can get innocent people.
I would. I would be more angry at someone who infringes my copyrights for profit.
More like giving away counterfeit brand name sodas outside the store. Still very illegal. Still not theft.
Copyright infringement is a crime on its own merit. Why must it be equated to a different crime (stealing) to show that it’s bad? Copyright infringement is morally and legally wrong, but it’s not stealing.
Can someone explain to me why this person wasn’t tried in criminal court? It is a crime and not a tort in the US, right?
I think it’s pretty obvious that she was guilty. The replacement of her harddrive right after recieving the legal notice seems a bit too convenient for me. That said, the fine is positively ridiculous. If the fine had been $5,000 or less, I would think justice had been done. This is just a travesty. It’s like giving someone a year in prison for jay-walking.
On a related subject, I wonder if the punishment for MediaDefender committing numerous acts of computer hacking will be similarly inflated. Surely there is equal justice under the law for individuals and corporations, right?
This article gives a very brief look at the closing arguments in the case. Now, I don’t trust reporters, nor do I trust lawyers, but it does give some more information about the case.
You can also check out other articles about the case here.
Some quotes: “they’ve shown that Thomas uses the “tereastarr” handle extensively (the KaZaA user identified by Media Sentry was “tereastarr@KaZaA”), that the IP address flagged by Media Sentry was assigned to her account at the time, and that only one MAC address was interfacing with the cable modem during the months before and after the alleged infringement.”
“Gabriel then asked her if she posted to the “anti-RIAA blog” Recording Industry vs. The People under the username “tereastarr.” After answering in the affirmative, questioning then turned to whether there was another PC in her home the night Media Sentry discovered the tereastarr@KaZaA account. She said that there was not.”
“The questioning then turned to her CD-ripping habits. In her deposition, Thomas said that she ripped no more than six or seven CDs per day, but on the stand today, she said she could have ripped over 2,000 songs in a little over two days.”
Yes, because that would require an active participation in the copying process. While she made songs available to others, she claims to not know if and when any data was transferred from her computer to someone else’s. A better analogy would be for her to put a CD on a desk and walk away.
Absolutely not in all cases. In the heyday of Napster, I downloaded thousands of songs. I can tell you for absolute certainty that I would not have bought any of them. Nor could I have in most cases, as they were not available (old cuts and/or obscure artists) for any price, anywhere. Some tunes were ones I had been casually looking for for decades and despaired of ever finding in the dustbins of garage sales. There simply wasn’t, and still isn’t for many artists, a vast archive of music available for legal download for a fee. Napster filled that gap and for a musical researcher or merely fan, it was nirvana.
In fact, due to random download of “interesting” songs and/or artists, I did purchase some CDs from exposure to artists I otherwise would never have known about. I also went to a concert because I heard and liked a new artist from a chance download.
So in my case, and I suspect I was not atypical, not only did Napster result in absolutely no loss to artists or record companies, it caused an increase in revenue for them. That’s why I think the RIAA is shooting themselves in the foot by their militant and misguided actions.
A) A lot of music is “given away” for free, because it’s a hook for advertising revenue. It’s up to the copyright holder to decide if he’s certain that no money could be eaked out from his creations–through sales or advertising revenue–not you. Circumventing a method for your attaining his product that he approved is denying him of money he could have made off of you.
B) The reason for the difficulty of finding rare music was because it wasn’t feasible before the advent of digitised music, massive hard drives, and the internet. Once those came into existence it was just a matter of time before huge, official, and profitable repositories with all that stuff came to be. Illegal trading ended up undercutting any move in that direction. iTunes would most assuredly have had a larger catalogue and less or no DRM had there not been the big Anti-RIAA, let’s-steal-music extravaganza.
No matter how you cut it, undercutting the creators of music is ultimately going to undercut yourself–and that’s just as it should be.
Thanks for providing this. Here’s another link that describes four reasons why the RIAA won.
This doesn’t seem like the case to use to go against the RIAA. She didn’t have a WiFi AP, so the defense’s argument that someone was sitting outside her window downloading is really hard to justify. Likewise, she had put no effort into concealing her identity on Kazaa making it easy to connect-the-dots. And finally, she was being sued for a large number of songs which makes her risk of fighting the case very large.
If you dislike the RIAA, download songs illegally, and get caught: Why would you go to court and attempt to deny it was you? It seems like the two logical courses would be to either pay the ~$3000 settlement or go to court and fight on the grounds that your downloads were not uploaded and thus distributed. Or maybe this was the defense’s intention, but they were out-lawyered with the jury instructions?
That is a completely ridiculous analogy. Child porn is a serious crime. Music isn’t.
If she had distributed child porn, then she should have been charged with that. Copyright issues would be entirely irrelevent. It’s the porn that is serious, not the copying.
But since child porn has nothing to do with the case, your question is an obvious piece of nonsense.
How would you feel about a public library that bought a CD, then let any member of the public borrow it for free? Doesn’t that deprive the artist of their money?
It is different. She didn’t make copies and sell them for profit. She allowed other people to make copies of her CD for free. There is a difference between the two.
Sure, she was guilty of a crime. But not a serious one, and the punishment is entirely disproportionate.
Yes and no. I know a girl that I consider to be reasonably intelligent that said something that stunned me a while back. She purchased BearShare software and has been downloading songs for over a year while decrying illegal downloading. I said “but you ARE illegally downloading songs.” She said “No, I’m not. I bought the program.” She seriously thought that by buying the software, it was a legal license to get music from it. I couldn’t believe it.
Not Kazaa, but BearShare does the same thing as far as I know.
I was trying to show that insisting on witnesses that could testify she was sitting at her computer was not a practical or reasonable standard of proof.
Even for the more serious issue of child porn, we would consider other evidence beyond “witnesses that could testify she was sitting at her computer.” So if we would accept other evidence for the more serious crime, then we clearly should accept other evidence for the lesser.
That’s your theory. You might be right, but in the absence of firm proof, I call it bullshit.
Janis Ian once called for a radical proposal, for all artists with old, non-revenue producing catalogs like her own, to open up these huge amounts of such music and offer it to the public at a pittling cost, like 5 to 25 cents/song. She felt that such a minimal cost would be no barrier at all to someone who might balk at $5 or even $1 per purchase, and since posting data online for automated download has a near-zero cost, any income at all is gravy. She predicted that everyone would benefit, and went so far as to post a few items from her old catalog for free.
So what? That has nothing to do with the statements made by Sage Rat.
Plaintiff says Defendant did x. Defendant says, prove it. Plaintiff says everything the plaintiff here said. Defendant says, “but you can’t establish to 100% certainty it was me.” Plaintiff says, “no, but I can establish that it is highly unlikely it was not you, and that’s all I have to do.”
What part of the fact that this is a civil case and the proof standard is only “more likely than not” do you fail to appreciate?
ETA: For what it is worth, I expect the proof offered would be sufficient to convict in a criminal case, where the standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
