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Obama Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict
- rbranson 17y agoThis makes me extremely angry. $675,000 verdict to the average person is basically going to ruin their life. Per-capita income is still only about $21,500 in the US, so you're asking for 30 years of their working life.
- tptacek 17y agoA $675,000 tort judgment is going to send you into Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which will take 3-5 years to resolve. It's bad, but it's not going to ruin your life. I think there's cognitive dissonance here between the ease of committing torts on the Internet and the severity of the penalty. If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement. But on the Internet, we all know that the same tort is a couple clicks away, and that it's widely practiced. So there's outrage and surprise when the law works the same way against those filesharers. I guess I see things a little differently because my career has been spent in close contact with other torts that, while far more damaging than file sharing, are often just as simple to commit. Nothing stops you from sharing files, and so you feel somewhat entitled to do so. But nothing stops you from crashing any number of important web applications, either.
- mrcharles 17y agoI upvoted you even though I disagree with you. Ultimately, it's still not the same thing as one is a physical object that cost actual money for actual materials to produce, and the other is simply a computer process that duplicates bits. I apologize for starting this conversation. That being said, I haven't seen it on HN before (though I'm sure it has happened). I'd be curious to see where the readership lands on this issue.
- tptacek 17y agoThe marginal cost of a single compact disc is very low. It is clearly not the physical cost of goods sold that is driving the damage estimates.
- tjic 17y agoAnd why should it be? Nothing in tort law says that damages are limited to the physical cost of goods - all sorts of other damages exist.
- tptacek 17y agoRight. That's my point.
- steveklabnik 17y agoAt the same time, theft isn't wrong because of marginal costs. Theft and infringement are fundamentally different activities.
- lallysingh 17y agoI have to agree with the gp on this one. It's still software theft (at least in my book) to copy a CD/DVD instead of shoplifting one from the store. I can't really find a logical distinction between that and stealing music. The verdict amount, however, is ridiculous. But so far, it's just been debate. I'd love to see a study on how many actual copies of music are made through a given file share, and how many of the downloaders avoided a purchase they would've made otherwise.
- emmett 17y agoThe fact that it is widely practiced is a defense. For the same reason that people would rightly object to a $675,000 tort judgment for speeding, or jaywalking, or smoking marijuana. Are they crimes? Certainly. But because they're widespread, generally unenforced, mostly "victimless", people are outraged that they'd have such high penalties. If you applied that judgment fairly you'd probably bankrupt 3/4s of America, if not more, which would be bad. Any law that you don't want enforced in the general case is a bad law that's going to generate outrage when it is enforced.
- tptacek 17y agoTorts and crimes aren't the same thing. There is, for instance, no such thing as a "victimless tort".
- lutorm 17y agoExplain. If I burn a copy of a CD I own for shits, that is formally an act of copyright infringement. Who is victimized by this act? I understand that tort by definition is compensation for injury, but if that injury as defined by the law does not actually harm a party, it fits my definition of "victimless". Statutory damages for copyright infringement have historically been in lieu of actual damages when such were hard to prove, and IIRC earlier versions of the copyright act explicitly said that statutory awards are not to be construed as punitive. It's hard to argue that these awards are anything but punitive.
- randallsquared 17y agothe damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. Filesharers do no damage. Theft does damage, but filesharers create value.
- tptacek 17y agoThis assertion is repeated often by defenders of file sharing, but it's been uniformly rejected by the legal systems of --- from what I can tell --- most of western civilization. The RIAA makes over-the-top claims about the evils of file sharing, but district and appellate court judges in the US are not uniformly shills of the RIAA, and none of them adhere to your logic.
- randallsquared 17y agoI wasn't suggesting it was legal, or non-infringing, only that referring to it as doing damage is incorrect. Whether something is actually damaging doesn't have perfect correlation with whether you can get legal damages in court.
- tptacek 17y agoSince people are losing tort cases, I'm pretty sure the legitimacy of the word "damage" is a settled issue.
- randallsquared 17y agoThis is the case only if you believe the law defines fact. Since some law is contradictory, it's clear that there is room to disagree with law, in at least some cases. But maybe you only meant to imply that legal damages were being awarded, which I can agree with.
- wglb 17y agoBut in a way, isn't there a precedent in mass torts and an effective change in practice? When video recorders came out, it was clearly forbidden to record programs off the air. Enough people did it that there wasn't any prosecution, and there was eventually a settlement that validated this practice?
- tptacek 17y agoThe practice that was validated was time-shifting content that was provided for free over the public airwaves.
- robryan 17y agoWith a VHS you had to fast forward the ads and still be somewhat exposed to them, I think now TV networks are more worried by the fact you can easily skip them all together.
- defen 17y ago> If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement. Actually, I think a $150,000 judgment for stealing a single CD would be outrageous. I can see where you're coming from, but it seems to me that you are justifying making an example of people via massive financial penalties for causing no actual harm, only theoretical harm. If I make an unauthorized copy of an MP3, what is the actual harm? In what sense can an unobservable event be said to have happened? At best you can argue that it's a quality of life crime - if everyone did it, there would be reduced incentive to create and hence a lower standard of living. But if that's the case, why aren't other quality of life crimes punished as harshly? Drunk driving or speeding in a residential zone massively increase the chances that you will kill someone, and yet the punishment is nowhere near as harsh.
- thwarted 17y agoif everyone did it, there would be reduced incentive to create and hence a lower standard of living. Let's not assume this either. Maybe this would result in more people who actually want to create, rather than doing it for the money, entering the industry. It would also avoid the middlemen who just skim off the top and don't add a lot of value.
- stse 17y agoIn industries where copying is accepted, like with cooking and fashion, the level of creativity is very high. You could argue that a high fashion brand "loses money" when a low price retailer, like H&M or Zara, produces more or less the same design, but very few do. I recommend reading "The Pirate's Dilemma" which is available from $0.00 upwards at http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book Edit: The difference between the high fashion brand and the low price retailer clothes are quality, perceived quality, recognition/brand, legitimacy and cost. Which is more or less the same difference as between a pirated copy and an original one.
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- rbranson 17y agoI'm pretty sure that nobody would really care if someone stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse. It's not even worth the legal costs to press charges. If some crackhead punches a hole in my window to take my CDs and I call the cops, they're going to say "sorry bud, shit happens." I highly doubt the Obama administration would support a $675k judgement against someone who stole 30 CDs from FYE. Just sayin. The guy would get a thousand dollar fine, a slap on the wrist, and a month of probation.
- miked 17y ago>> per-capita income in the US is still only about $21,500. You're way off. It's $46,900. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
- nitrogen 17y agoThat's the US GDP divided by the US population, which is not the same as mean or median earned income.
- cabalamat 17y agoI would have less problem with the size of this fine if, when the music industry breach copyright law, they had to pay bankrupting fines too. With no limitation of liability.
- city41 17y agoConversely, it makes me happy. Yes, yes, downvote me, as supporting copyright holders is the unpopular opinion on the internet. But this notion that everyone can just take what they please and expect no repercussions needs to stop. It's trampling on the rights of people who create intellectual things. The very people that make all of this content possible in the first place. I still don't understand why they always get the short end of the stick.
- kiba 17y agoNobody is entitled to anything, not even your starving artist or starving authors. If the majority of the people don't want to support your career choice, you don't have the right do anything about it. If that mean that the creation of arts and musics grind to halt, so be it. That's how a free society work. Artists, programmers, and everybody else are supposed to die and live by their creation. It is their job to convince everyone else that their career is worth supporting. Consumer sovereign are sovereigns for a reason, because they have the money. They are your lifeline, and they're alway right. You can whine about how authors are being ripped off, or you can choose to look at reality and the economics of it. Your choice.
- tptacek 17y agoI like this reversal. Nobody is entitled to anything. Not artists. Not authors. Except for random people on the Internet. They're entitled to the works of those artists and authors. Anxiously awaiting the 19 paragraph response that will clarify this for me further.
- kiba 17y agoNope. I will not argue anything further than that. Nobody mean nobody. Not me, not you, not filesharers. Nothing and nobody. EDIT: I made it very clear that if nobody wants to buy from the authors, artists, programmers, the incentive to produce will suffer. If this is what the consumer sovereign truly intended, than it is an ethical outcome and an outcome that cannot be changed.
- tptacek 17y agoBait-y title. I read the article, perhaps a bit casually, and I'm left with doubts that Obama even knows about this verdict.
- Retric 17y agoPlease change title to Obama [administration] Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict It’s what the article actually says and is far less link bait. The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.
- dschobel 17y agoHow is he not directly responsible for his administration's statements and positions?
- roc 17y agoIndeed, we held Bush responsible for things that we know his administration was deliberately keeping out of his immediate purview for deniability reasons.
- GiraffeNecktie 17y agoWhatever this supposed "we" collectively did, it's still a linkbait title. Sure the buck stops at the president's office, but you can't say that person X supports some very specific activity unless they come right out and say it. However it is certainly fair comment to say that Obama, by appointing industry lawyers, has given tacit endorsement to the industry stance of harsh penalties.
- mschy 17y agoit is certainly fair comment to say that Obama, by appointing industry lawyers, has given tacit endorsement to the industry stance of harsh penalties. No, it isn't. If I know that X laws need reform, I'll hire lawyers who are very familiar with X laws to review possible changes, their effects, and how they would use those laws, to try to avoid making a bad situation worse. On the flip side, if I want X laws strengthened, I'd still hire lawyers who are familiar with X laws, to figure out how to make them stronger, and plug the holes. As such, I'd contend that Obama's hiring of lawyers who specialized in IP tells us only that his administration is interested in gaining expertise in the application of IP law. That said, I tend to be a lot less outraged about politics than other HN'ers.
- mrcharles 17y agoThese methods aren't going to make people share music less -- it will simply make them find more secure ways of sharing. Lets all remember, that at the end of the day, if I burn a few gigs of MP3s to a dvd and pass it to a friend hand to hand, the music industry will never know. Ultimately, sharing is something people want to do as a natural inclination. I like this band, so I want you to like this band, so here's their music. I personally have found the vast majority of the music I love in this fashion. I love passing on my love of music to other people. I've run private MP3 servers before. It brings me much joy to share music and then talk about it. I don't really know what these large verdicts do. They are still effectively like being hit by lightning, it's so unlikely it will happen to you.
- roc 17y agoFrom what I've seen, that's how sharing has been going since the extortion/lawsuit campaign started. The average person doesn't hit TPB. They ask their friends. On the edges of the graph people are downloading, but it's a small minority of the actual sharing going on.
- chrischen 17y agoIt's also much easier to find the songs on google. And if you're more dedicated, ripping the audio from YouTube.
- randombit 17y agoThis made me think of a quote which turns out to be from a Clay Shirky essay (http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html) "It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. [...] Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon."
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
- Luyt 17y agoWhat kind of public image is the RIAA seeking for itself? Can't they see they're committing imago suicide? Maybe these lawsuits were meant to show unequivocally to the public that file sharing is not permissible and will be prosecuted, but these figures are getting ridiculous. They lost their sense of proportionality.
- robryan 17y agoDoes anyone else have the same problem as me in this area? I am more than happy to pay for things, I just find it very hard to justify paying for some things that don't give any benefit over a one that I can get for free. So if they were to find a way to totally stamp out piracy or make it as likely to get punished for as taking goods from a store I'd be happy to pay for everything. A good example is things like the WSJ, sure I probably don't read them enough to pay anyway, but the fact that you can just Google search things to not pay means that I would never see the value in paying. I think when you feel that you are paying to support the content producer rather than to acquire the content something is wrong.
- dusklight 17y agoI find the headline very disturbing. It says "Obama" supports the verdict, when really it is Obama's administration. I am not a Washington insider but something tells me more likely than not, Mr Obama was not personally involved in this decision at all. He has more important things on his mind right now, and other fires to put out. I worry a lot about how so many people think "I voted for Obama, ok he's in office, my job is done!" and then they sit there and do nothing and wait for Obama to pull off some magic and make the world good again. In the meantime the other side has a whole army of crazies pushing their agenda.
- ximeng 17y agoThis is a list of some of the songs Joel is accused of sharing: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.pdf http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.p... Funny thing is if I type the names (e.g. Nirvana "Come as you are") into Google in a couple of seconds I can listen to all the songs on YouTube. I would have thought Google would be a better target than Joel. If the music industry are justified in their cause they could do at the very least do a better job of communicating why.
- ratsbane 17y agoThis judgement is a travesty. - Justice is only just if it is handed out evenly and in proportion to the crime. If ten million people share an mp3 and only one person is convicted for it, should that person have to pay for the alleged damages caused by the ten million? That's contrary to my sense of justice and to hundreds of years anglo-saxon jurisprudence. - Stealing one CD from a store is clearly a more tortuous act than making one copy of the songs on a CD. If you steal a CD then the owner doesn't have it any more. If you make a copy of a CD then the copyright owner's potential sales may be diminished by some theoretical fraction of the original value of the CD.
- nfnaaron 17y ago"The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement 'creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.'" I wonder how much campaign contribution money the RIAA had to spend to get those five lawyers (or lawyers with that resume) into those five positions?