Woman fined $1.9 million for illegal song downloads

The BBQ Pit
121

He played the music for his brother even though his brother hadn’t paid. Listening to music before buying it vs. reading a book before buying it - how are these things different?

And thanks for the info about libraries paying for their copies :rolleyes:… that still doesn’t equal revenue for the author each time the book is read.

You’re joking… right? If you give them away, you still owe the band for two licenses.

To legitimize their possession of the tracks from the CD, you need to give the physical disks to your mother and brother.

122

Unequal representation is an inherent feature of the adversarial system. If you’re calling this trial unfair than you might as well call all trials unfair, since no two legal teams are ever going to be exactly equal. In any case, as sleestak notes, her attorney is hardly Joe Q. Mediocre, Esquire, but even if he was, what possible mechanism could be put in place to prevent what you’re talking about?

The penalty is harsh, but look up Draco sometime- under his code, the RIAA would be allowed to quite literally enslave the woman in payment of her debt. I don’t know what sort of punishment you think murderers get, but it is not “a fine” - not even a really big one. I’m not going to bother addressing your claim about circumstantial evidence.

123

No, I’m not joking. The band still gets the money owed to them, and they get further exposure. I’m pretty sure that they value the latter more than the former.

124

Isn’t it up to the band to decide if they want the exposure rather than the income from two more CD sales, not you?

125

Well, probably, but they won’t return his phone calls.

126

Let’s see if they return my e-mail.

127

Nope, I do understand the difference. I’m just concerned about the precedent this sets as far as how shoddy evidence is enough to ‘prove’ their claims. If they had been going after her for damages because she stole all the music and didn’t pay for it, then I’d have much less of a problem. The issue is that they’re claiming losses because she distributed or rather redistributed the songs. But without proving that she actually redistributed anything.

Take for example bittorrent. I go out and decide that I don’t want to buy a copy of “Hotel for Dogs”, but rather just want to steal it. I fire up the Pirate Bay, find me a torrent, and start downloading the movie. Now while I’m downloading the pieces of the file from 30 different people, I’m also letting the pieces that I’ve already got be uploaded to others. Am I distributing the work at that point? I don’t have the complete file, so I couldn’t share the complete work with anyone. Or say the size of the file is 2 GB. Well it takes me 4 days to download the whole thing because there’s only 2 people with the whole file, but during that time, I’ve shared a total of 6 GB with other people. True that just means that I have a larger number of people grabbing the bits that I have, not that I’ve given the file to 3 other people, but how to you show that? Prove that?

Yes I know she lied, and covered up evidence, and was an all around idiot. The problem is that this will be held up as an example of what should be done to file sharers as a whole, not someone that thumbed their nose at the system.

I do want to note that her current lawyer the Harvard Grad only came on the case a week or so ago after her lawyer at the time quit (because of legal fees). I’m not sure that the previous lawyer had the same chops. He was most likely what she could afford, not someone moved by her plight to assist her.

128

Sharing a complete work is not an element of copyright infringement.

Then she got representation equal to or better than a criminal defendant with similar means.

129

About the only thing you can’t discharge in bankruptcy is student loans. That’s not to say that bankruptcy would be fun for her and that she might not lose her house or savings, but she can certainly discharge the judgment in bankruptcy.

Edit: Appears I may be wrong. That’s what I get for posting about an area of law I don’t practice in.

130

Your former girlfriend didn’t look upon giving away her work as “further exposure”.

Look, I’m pro-file sharing. Been there, got the t-shirt. What I find hard to swallow is that you seem to think your girlfriend’s friends had a nerve to ask for free copies of her work, but don’t mind giving away free copies of your friend’s work. Your brother has already redistributed their CD once, and there’s nothing stopping him doing it a million times more. In comparison, your girlfriend’s book can only be used by one person at a time. It’s unlikely that suddenly everyone in her street will be thumbing through a photocopied edition that may be the exposure that inspires them to run out and buy a real copy, or may be what they consider sufficient so they don’t have to buy it.

131

Well damn. I expected her to say “Hey, don’t worry about it, I just do this for fun.” Instead she was all “Bla bla bla, my son’s college fund.”

So my offer still stands. If I buy two copies and give them away, she’ll consider us square.

132

Gfactor got it right in the links he posted, but I thought I could expand on it a bit.

First of all, though, you’re wrong in calling them fines, as other posters have commented. Fines are the punishment for a criminal offence, and are paid by the convicted felon to the government. This is a case of damages, awarded in a civil trial, and are paid by the defendant to the plaintiff.

The reason I mention that is that most legal systems treat penal sanctions differently than civil damages, for the purposes of enforcement in another country. As a general rule, one country will not enforce another country’s penal sanctions, but will enforce civil damages. Civil damages are a private right, between one private party and another, and are normally treated as a debt owing. Fines are considered part of the criminal law, and one country normally doesn’t enforce the other country’s penal law - it’s an aspect of the sovereignty of nations.

Here, the defendant owes a civil judgment, so it normally will be treated by foreign courts like a debt owing. In one of Gfactor’s links, there’s a discussion of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Beals v. Saldanha, where the Supreme Court had to decide if the Canadian courts should enforce an unusual judgment from the Florida state courts:

[ul][li] some Canadians owned a vacant lot worth US$8,000 in Florida;[/li]
[li] they sold it to some people in Florida;[/li]
[li] a dispute arose and the Floridians sued the Canadians in Florida state courts;[/li]
[li] the Canadians did not appear in the Florida state courts to defend;[/li]
[li] the jury gave a judgment of US$210,000 in compensatory damages and US$50,000 in punitive damages to the Floridians against the Canadians;[/li]
[li] the Floridians sued to enforce the judgment in the Ontario courts;[/li]
[li] by the time of the hearing, with interest, the award had grown to approximately C$800,000;[/li]
[li] the Supreme Court of Canada, by a 6-3 majority, held that the damage award was enforceable in the Canadian courts. [/ul][/li]
So based on that decision, the general rule in Canada now is that foreign judgments are enforceable, even if they seem extreme.

(Not intended as legal advice; your mileage may vary; consult a lawyer who knows something about this stuff before buying or selling land in Florida.)

133

SOURCE (Bolding mine).

Since when did Congress decide constitutionality? WTF.

134

There’s a presumption that laws don’t violate the Constitution, and it turns out that almost all of the laws passed by Congress don’t.

135

The trial was more than fair, as are the damages awarded considering the circumstances, and “circumstantial evidence” is recognized as more than suitable for both civil and criminal trials.

And what bizarre fantasy world are you living in where murderers who are identified as such by the legal rulings of juries get off with no prison time?

In short, you are an idiot. You know nothing nothing about the law and have demonstrated time and time again on this thread and others like it that you are an immoral dickwipe.

136

So you think a multi-million dollar award for sharing 20 songs is reasonable? And considering that she actually shared several thousand songs, would it have been even more reasonable if she were ordered to pay similar damages for the other songs?

$150,000 per infraction is unreasonable. It’s ludicrous. It’s unfair. It’s inappropriate. It’s barbaric. It’s inhuman. It’s stupid.

You really read about that award, and said to yourself, “Yep, that sounds about right. Share 20 songs on the internet, get a million dollar fine. That’s reasonable.” Honestly?

137

Not only do I think that it is reasonable and that this woman fully deserves what she gets, the Obama DOJ does as well.

Note the time line on this. She had an offer to settle. She declined. She went to court and lost for 222,000, an amount that the jury decided upon. She decided to go to court again on appeal and lost. This time the jury upped the amount to $1.92 million. Now she is apparently thinking of trying a third time.

Note that the RIAA has been willing to settle this from the start as is still willing to do so.

This lady is dumb as dirt. She tried hiding evidence and seems to believe that since she once wrote a paper in college about how file sharing should be legal it must be true.

She is fucked, but it is her own doing.

Slee

138

On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock we will recall Abbie Hoffman, John Sinclair and Pete Townsend.

Sinclair got busted for two joints and got a sentence of 15 years. But the cop said, “It wasn’t his first offense of being busted for pot.” Like “wow” this make him a hardened criminal! When Hoffman tried to make an issue of the injustice on the Woodstock stage, Townsend hit him in the head with his guitar. Look it up.

All that being said, 15 years for two joints is too much (just like $1.9 million for allowing some songs to be downloaded at no profit). It makes a mockery of the justice system. There is a clause in the Constitution about “cruel and unusual punishment” which I take to mean that the punishment should fit the crime. As appealing as it may seem, making an “example” should not determine the sentence.

This whole thing is BS. If I was the appeals court judge I would send the whole thing back to be retried.

139

The fact that you quote the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the federal constitution in regards to this shows that you clearly have little or no understanding of how our justice system works. Fortunately, the courts do.

140

You’ve got your head stuck too far into a law book that looks like a horse’s ass. I’m talking about justice, not some lawyer’s BS.

If the “gun nuts” can interpret the Second Amendment the way they do, I’m free to offer an interpretation of “cruel and unusual punishment”.