Because that’s not practical, and obviously on the market the distribution rights are only worth several million dollars not an infinite value.
Punishments need to be worthwhile. There’s no sense charging a beggar a million dollars nor is there sense in charging a multinational corporation a thousand dollars for some crime. But there does need to be some minimum value set that is enough to simply scare people from even attempting it, which CaveMike listed earlier in the thread.
There’s worthwhile, then there’s draconian. The settlement that the RIAA reaches with most of the people who don’t choose to fight seems fair (usually in the few thousand bucks range for a typical music collection). But the current system is rigged heavily in favor of the RIAA, where someone who is potentially innocent is out thousands of bucks because they’re too scared to fight it because they might lose a couple hundred grand instead. A jury need only believe there’s a 51% chance I did it, then I’m royally screwed.
Don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime.
I prefer a system of justice that relies on more than simplistic bumper sticker slogans.
Will you silly people STOP talking about this in terms of “stealing?” The infringment of copyright is not theft. It is violation of the right of a person to be in control of what happens to his/her performance. You will always have trouble with the law on this subject if you treat it as a form of “theft.”
Blalron, you are upset at the way this is treated because you don’t view the violation of the copyright holder’s rights as particularly important. Kinda like speeding, or maybe paying a little less on your taxes than you really owe. Well, you may be right, in a social sense. However, Congress (and most other legislative bodies in developed countries) views it as a serious concern. They view the loss of the intangible right to control copying and distribution as an irreplaceable loss. Thus, they punish accordingly. So let me ask you: if Congress thought something far more important to you was important, but decided not to punish it, or punish it with only a wrist slap, would you be happy? 
As for whoever it was who posted the link to the RIAA’s blurb about “monitoring” the potential statutes on the subject, how does that equate to RIAA wrote the current law? :dubious:
Really?
On what basis do you believe an appellate court would overturn this verdict?
And on what basis would the award be reduced? Remittur on statutory damages seems a reach – what similar cases are you thinking of when you say that such is often the final outcome of cases like this?
It can be explained in the terms of theft, which is something that is more real and meaningful to the majority. shrug
In what manner can copyright infringement be accurately explained in terms of theft? All this business about “stealing distribution rights” is inaccurate, because even after I illegally pirate music, I haven’t gained any distribution rights and no one else has lost any distribution rights. I’ve gained the physical ability to distribute some music, sure, and others have lost exclusivity on such ability, but the physical ability to distribute music is not the same thing as having the distribution rights to it, of course. Even after I pirate music, I lack the legal ability to share it and the copyright owner retains the exclusive legal ability to share it. So, if I’ve “stolen” anything, it’s not distribution rights.
It’s crystal clear to accept that copyright infringement is, under our current system of laws, a crime, without having to come up with some contrived explanation of it as actually covered under the category of theft. (And to this, the protester can say “Yes, that is true, I accept that this is the current legal situation, but I find the current legal situation undesirable for such and such reasons, and propose that the laws regarding copyright be changed”). This all leads to much clearer discussion than any attempt to conflate two very different situations.
Then the only way to explain why copyright infringement is a crime is because…copyright infringement is a crime. That’s just not very edifying, and certainly won’t convert anyone.
If you can find any errors in the train of thought leading from theft to copyright infringement (if you go back through the thread), I’m certainly glad to hear it. But that I can tell it can be expressed in the terms of theft even if it isn’t prosecuted as such, just the same as plagiarism.
I’d say that what we’re talking about is unauthorized broadcasting, not theft. The individual ‘distributing’ the file isn’t making a profit, and theft is all about profit.
In fact I would say that most of the disconnect around this issue is about profit. The pro-RIAA side seem to argue that file-sharers should be subject to the same sanctions as if they were selling copyrighted materials. If we were to shift this discussion to the merits of Tom Waits’ suit against Frito for unauthorized use (plagiarism) of his materials in their commercials, there would be more consensus.
As for my personal take on file-sharing - it won’t be the end of civilization. The technology has changed, and the mindset and business-model will change (or disappear). The only reason the record industry could charge me xdollars for a vinyl or a CD was because they could physically control the distribution. When my vinyl recording wore out and was scratched to death, there was never any talk of free replacement, or at a special price because I’d already paid for the intellectual property. When the switch to CDs happened, there wasn’t an exchange vinyl for CD program. Clearly the whole intellectual property argument was only applied to business-to-business transactions (pirate labels, TV, advertising etc) until the advent of file-sharing.
So, assuming no profit is involved, how many people can I freely broadcast a recording to before I expose myself to legal action ? If a group of students pool their money, buy a stack of recordings, and post them on an intranet, is there a breach of copyright ? If so, at what point did it happen ? If they eschew the intranet, and simply put the tunes on their MP3 players, is there a breach ? Listen to the recordings together at a free party ?
I believe it’s fair to say that Britney Spears, Universal BMG or whoever, modeled their business on a certain number of assumptions which did not include me freely distributing their recordings. In that sense, file-sharing is certainly harmful to them. On the other hand, it’s way out of line to conflate file-sharing with theft or piracy as there’s no profit involved. And what exactly are the terms of the contract I enter into when I buy Britney’s latest marvel - as a naive consumer I believe I now own that work, but apparently this is not the case. Still, I don’t remember signing anything, or even being clearly informed of my rights and obligations.
unrealistic ramble : In my utopian vision, a breakdown of the record industry business model might even mean a revival of working musicians and entertainers. Instead of having 99% of the audience’s entertainment bucks channeled into the deep pockets of a handful of corporate shareholders and music video fashion-plates, we might actually find ourselves paying to hear musicians play for live audiences at modest sized venues - a new golden-age of artistic diversity and community! OK, maybe not, but it’s nice to dream. Or maybe a subway car full of hermetically sealed ipod heads studiously ignoring each other, and not even realizing that they’re all actually listening to the same pre-digested jingles is actually the best and only.
I am not able to quote chapter and verse, and the time it would take me to do the research isn’t cost effective; I’m not a highly-paid SDMB staff consultant like some people. 
Surely you aren’t saying that every court case that establishes a precedent is never overturned by higher-court review; if you are, I can easily throw a handful of examples where exactly that occurred.
With respect to the $ amount of the fine, alternative formulas have been offered in this thread. We don’t even know the formula the court applied, do we?
But I have stored in my cummulative memory a lot of cases (general law, not copyright-specific) where the initial decision was shocking, and made large frontpage headlines. Sometime after, it gets overturned or the fine reduced or the parties settle, and that makes much less of a splash with tiny backpage headlines if not buried entirely. It’s the way journalism works. The first story is sensational; the followup, much less so.
Another possible outcome is that legislators take pity on how severely the law was applied and modify the statutes to soften them a bit.
So I say let’s wait and see. This would be a good thread to resurrect in about 2-3 years; mark your calendar and I’ll meet you back here. Wear a red carnation.
There is nothing that says that musicians have to be paid like Indian princes. Maybe the age of superstar musicians making fortunes from product sale is over and in future (as supposedly is beginning to happen) they make a living from live performance.
Why don’t we? I linked to the jury instruction up-thread. It gave the range of statutory damages for each file ‘distributed’.
I agree that there are plenty of famous cases that start with outrageous settlements and move downwards. The ones that come to mind have very wealthy corporate defendants who can afford to fight in appeals. That’s not the case here. Likewise, this is the first RIAA case to get a jury verdict, right? There isn’t a long history of damages being lowered on appeals for file-sharing. Finally, unlike the famous cases that are a one-time action, this case represents one of many actions that the RIAA is making. It is not in their interest to have the damages lowered on appeal because it will undermine their position in subsequent cases. To that end, it seems like a good RIAA strategy would be to let the defendant offer a smaller out-of-court settlement and let the official verdict stand at $9k per infraction.
First, that’s a strawman. No one is “claiming the work of someone else as [their] own”; that would be fraud. A file sharer doesn’t claim to have any distribution rights, just like a crack dealer doesn’t claim crack is legal to possess or sell - he just does it anyway, knowing that it’s illegal.
Second, they may be different things, but they’re comparable in the aspect you mentioned: they both devalue someone else’s property (if we consider copyright to be a form of property), and they both do it in the same way, by providing a cheaper alternative. If you won’t buy a song from me because sk8rsharer12345 already sent you a copy for free, my copyright has been devalued in exactly the same way as your chainsaws are devalued when no one will buy them from you because they already got cheaper chainsaws somewhere else.
Yes, if you maintain an obsessive and irrational focus on selling copies, then you need copyright. But you don’t need to sell copies in order to make money as an artist!
Like I said, you just need to get paid for your labor, which is how it works in nearly every other industry. An accountant doesn’t need to sell copies of his clients’ tax forms; he charges for filling them out in the first place, and then he’s done.
If it costs me $10,000 to produce an album, then I can choose a price higher than $10,000 and collect that much money before I start recording. Whether I collect it from hundreds of individual fans, corporations, nonprofit organizations set up to fund music production, or some other source is irrelevant to me, but there are a few conceivable ways it could work (and has worked in real life). And every dollar I collect past that initial $10,000 is profit. If I set my price at $15,000, then I know that once I reach that goal, I’ve already made $5000 profit - I don’t need to sell any copies to make money, so I can just release my work to the world once it’s finished.
Calling it theft won’t convert anyone either, because people aren’t blind to the obvious differences between theft and copyright infringement. Most of the people who see nothing wrong with file sharing still find robbery and shoplifting to be immoral, because they perceive the obvious differences between physical property and information.
Errors have already been pointed out time and time again. The bad thing about theft is that the victim is deprived of the stolen item; he no longer has it after it’s taken away. The bad thing about plagiarism is that it’s fraud; the plagiarist lies to the public about the authorship of a certain work. Neither of those apply to copyright infringement.
I can attest to the truth of this. Keep in mind this is partially anecdotal, but I’ve been a touring musician for about two years now. While we’re definitely a small band, the amount of money we see for an honest night’s work roughly equals, at best, the sales of a couple hundred CDs, and we have a rather generous deal with our distributor. Nearly all other musicians I meet attest to the same dynamic, be they in their 50s or teens.
Meanwhile, these sorts of lawsuits are filed only by the RIAA (crooked) and large labels whose original business model has been upended by fast internet connections. There are plenty of smaller labels who make money for themselves AND their artists by thinking with originality and spending money with some frugality.
Exactly. Debate-by-analogy muddies the issue more than casts any light.
Brilliant. My thoughts exactly.
It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled Justice
The crew visits a planet where all offenses, no matter how trivial, are punishable by death. But the punishment is only enforced in randomly designated areas called “punishment zones.” Wesley Crusher trips and falls over a Keep Off The Grass sign, and happened to be unlucky enough to be in a designated punishment zone at the time. Selecting out a handfull of file sharers out of millions for a “financial death penalty” seems almost as cruel to me. But I guess our value systems are different. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
Jammie Thomas will appeal. (Link to a donate site available)
A bit of an aside, but haven’t most musicians always made the lion’s share of their take-home pay from live performances?
It’s always been my understanding since well, the beginning of the big record companies, that historically artists have had none of the resources required to put out their own albums (manufacturing, distribution, advertising, et cetera.) The record companies come in by “signing” the artist to a contract and in return the record company now “owns” the rights to distributing the music in CD (or vinyl or cassette etc) form. Since the record company is the one who is providing virtually all the costs of getting the albums to the market, they devour the overwhelming portion of the profits (especially when you factor in that the artist’s manager/agent probably gets a slice of the eventual profits that go tot he artist/group.)
The advantage the artists get is that by distributing their music (by putting it in stores, advertising it, getting it on radio stations) the record companies establish the artist(s) as a “big name”, so that the artist can go from performing in small clubs to selling out huge arenas from which they reap an enormous amount of money, as the artist themselves gets to reap a larger share of the profits from live performances.
Now, I know that a lot of superstar artists from the past probably make most of their income now from royalties and such; but I imagine they are making way less money overall than they did back when they toured regularly. I also know that some artists like Michael Jackson have bought up the rights to thousands of songs by dozens of other artists and that MJ makes a ton of money from this fact, but I think he’s more an exception than the rule even among music superstars.
I know pretty much nothing about the music industry, but isn’t this the case? I always thought that the record companies pretty much have always taken such a huge portion of the record sales that artists pretty much had to do live shows to live the lifestyle they want (keeping in mind I’m talking mostly about superstar-level artists.)