6 ms·

Thomas verdict: willful infringement, $1.92 million penalty

43 points by clint 17y ago

ramidarigaz 17y ago
$80,000 per song... That is fucked up (pardon my language), but that is fucked up. Edit: Isn't the law supposed to protect against ridiculous punishments like these?
- behe101 17y ago
  Honestly, she didn't have much of a leg to stand on in terms of defence, but a song is NOT worth $80,000. Ever.
- latortuga 17y ago
  I believe it was a civil suit (that's really the only possible way that 80 grand per song couldn't be considered cruel and unusual).
- fatdog789 17y ago
  Yes. In a recent case, SCOTUS ruled that punitive damages more than 10 times the amount of compensatory (actual) damages is per se unconstitutional except in cases of malice or fraud. Of importance, in followup cases by SCOTUS and the federal appeals courts, the courts have determined that punitive damages in excess of 2x actual damages (or $100,000), which ever is greater, is probably unconstitutional, except in cases of malice or fraud. When malice or fraud are involved, there is no limit on punitive damages. Note that the fraud must be part of the crime itself; Thomas' perjury on the stand should play no role in punitive damages. The award will almost certainly be reduced...however...it is likely that Thomas will settle before then. Though $200k was outrageous in the first trial, unique circumstances in this trial make it unlikely that the judge will reduce the amount to anywhere close that number, given that a separate and independent jury found such a large number.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  There are statutory damages for infringement of works protected by a federally registered copyright. The reason the statute is written that way is to make trials more efficient, so that once infringement (and registration of the copyright) are proven, the trial court doesn't have to do nit-picky fact-finding about how big the economic damages are from the proven infringement.
jonknee 17y ago
Sometimes I wish hell were real so that the lawyers working double time to make sure a woman goes bankrupt over 24 songs could go there. It just doesn't make sense to have "damages" like that.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  While I fully agree that this result is unjust, I would not blame the lawyers. Remember the lawyers have a professional duty to faithfully represent their client. If their client insists on pressing for the maximum possible damages then the lawyers have a professional duty to take every action within the bounds of ethics and law to get them. This result was definitely unjust, but the lawyers are the wrong ones to blame.
  - ambition 17y ago
    What? No. The lawyers have a ethical and moral duty as lawyers and human beings to do the right thing. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll make an analogy relevant to my profession. If some guy hires me to make a picture site and then insists on a section for sex pics of children I have an ethical duty to back out of the contract.
    - emmett 17y ago
      I understand your sentiment, but you're wrong. We need lawyers who will work even for despicable clients. The reason for this rule is that everyone is entitled to legal representation they can trust. The clients really are at fault here.
      - greendestiny 17y ago
        I'd say the law (not lawyers) was at fault as well, or even mostly. A legal system can't rely on the honesty or ethics of claimants and defendants to function correctly almost by definition.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      The lawyers have a ethical and moral duty as lawyers and human beings to do the right thing. That's not exactly how a lawyer's professional responsibility is defined. But anyway, as a producer of original writings that have been infringed more than once, I'm glad there are lawyers who work to uphold the copyright laws.
boryas 17y ago
Would you steal a purse? If getting caught cost me $80,000 then probably not... So much for reasonable punishments.
- dflock 17y ago
  Imagine the outcry if all punishments were meted out on this kind of scale. Jaywalking: 10 years hard labour! And no, I wouldn't steal a purse, because a purse is a physical object, owned by an ordinary individual human being, who would be materially and emotionally harmed by the theft. This case of Copyright infringement involves imaginary property of enormously rich corporations who would not be materially affected by it in any measurable way. It's more akin to stealing an invisible mote of dust from the bottom of someones purse, without them being aware of it at any point. All the evidence actually suggests that music sharing increases income for commercial music as a whole, yet sharing these 24 tracks has resulted in a $2m fine. Ironically, you would be punished enormously less for actually mugging someone and stealing their purse.
  - boryas 17y ago
    I wasn't trying to say that we should have equally barbaric punishments for purse-snatching but rather that we should have equally fair and reasonable punishments for file-sharing. I can see how my point was made unclear by the unsuccessful joke, though.
- fatdog789 17y ago
  Civil case. Your example is not analogous. Theft is a crime. Thomas committed a tort. The difference: police get involved with crimes, and you can be arrested for a crime. You cannot be arrested for a tort (unless the tort is the "civil" counterpart of a crime allowing the victim to recover for injuries from the crime).
  - jrockway 17y ago
    This is how the law works, yeah, but don't you think it's broken?
dflock 17y ago
I can't really see how this is even remotely proportionate, by any stretch of the imagination. What were these 24 tracks? A bunch of obscure Swedish Death Metal by all accounts. Is it likely that collecting these damages would make more profit than the sales of the tracks ever would? Maybe. But, as she pointed out, she hasn't got $2m anyway, so they can't collect - it seems likely that the RIAA will just use the damages as a sledgehammer to bludgeon her into settling 'out of court' and out of the glare of publicity. It makes me wonder what the jurors were thinking - awarding life destroying damages against a fellow citizen who is, presumably, an ordinary person, just like them. I don't think that I could do that, personally.
- fatdog789 17y ago
  Punitive damages are not meant to be proportionate. They are meant to be penal, and to "send a message" to other potential tortfeasors. (Civil trial for damages = tort). However, SCOTUS has ruled very recently that punitive damages must be proportional to the income and assets of the defendant, for example, $1M is nothing to Bill Gates but is beyond devastating to the average man.
  - greendestiny 17y ago
    I'm not sure I've seen the justice in using people as examples. The compliance of others isn't their problem. Awards being relative to income make sense for fines, and I guess thats what these punitive damages are. This behavior of record companies makes it hard for geeks like me who don't support the abolishment of copyright. I think the worst that should happen in cases of copyright infringement of music is a several hundred dollar fine total, not per song.
pg 17y ago
Something is broken in this country.
- daeken 17y ago
  Agreed, but what do we do? I've seen few reasonable copyright reform ideas, and none of them actually discussed how we can push forward to implement them. Everyone simply says that too many people with too much money want things to stay the same, but I don't buy it. This attitude bothers me most when I see it here; this site exists because we know the power of the little guys in the market, and I know there's a workable approach to the copyright issue, it just needs to be found.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  I think the broken thing in this trial was a misdirection of efforts. The defendant was quite clearly guilty, (her cable modem, her mac, mysteriously replaced hdd). The defendant spent her time grandstanding obviously false innocence, thumbing her nose at the court and the intelligence of the jury. The RIAA representatives spent their time grandstanding obviously false damages, thumbing their collective noses at the whole justice system. In the end, the whole thing was just a circus that missed the most obvious point: What is a reasonable course of action for dealing with this type of infringement? The sad part is, this trial was a wasted opportunity where we could have begun to address this issue. Instead the judge let it slip once again into a good ol' fashioned case of American side-show freakery.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    A trial court's job is to determine facts: did infringement occur? An appellate court has some power to get into some of the interesting policy issues you bring up. Maybe that will happen in this case, or maybe not.
  - rms 17y ago
    They would have had better luck with jury nullification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
- 17y ago
skwaddor 17y ago
How do you think it stacks uo to what happened back in 2002 : Tennessee Attorney General Paul G. Summers announced today that five of the largest U.S. distributors of pre-recorded music CDs and three large retailers agreed to pay millions of dollars in cash and free CDs as part of an agreement on price-fixing allegations. The companies will pay $67,375,000 in cash, provide $75,500,000 worth of music CDs, and not engage in sales practices that allegedly led to artificially high retail prices for music CDs and reduced retail competition as part of the agreement. Tennessee's share is an estimated $993,948 in cash and $1,507,852 in CDs. http://www.attorneygeneral.state.tn.us/press/2002/story/PR13.pdf http://www.attorneygeneral.state.tn.us/press/2002/story/PR13...
- blasdel 17y ago
  I got a check for ~$10. Public libraries all over the country got shipping containers full of Mariah Carey deadstock. The lawyers leading the class action got tens of millions of dollars.
quizbiz 17y ago
What % of people that have downloaded a song without paying would have paid for that song?
quoderat 17y ago
From the tone of many in this thread, it seems that people don't understand that non-commercial copyright is not a crime, but instead is a civil infraction -- hence why Thomas was not arrested, and not tried in a criminal court. But the copyright industry certainly wants everyone to believe it is a crime. Looks like it is working. Sad.

43 points by clint 17y ago

$80,000 per song... That is fucked up (pardon my language), but that is fucked up. Edit: Isn't the law supposed to protect against ridiculous punishments like these?

behe101 17y ago
Honestly, she didn't have much of a leg to stand on in terms of defence, but a song is NOT worth $80,000. Ever.
latortuga 17y ago
I believe it was a civil suit (that's really the only possible way that 80 grand per song couldn't be considered cruel and unusual).
fatdog789 17y ago
Yes. In a recent case, SCOTUS ruled that punitive damages more than 10 times the amount of compensatory (actual) damages is per se unconstitutional except in cases of malice or fraud. Of importance, in followup cases by SCOTUS and the federal appeals courts, the courts have determined that punitive damages in excess of 2x actual damages (or $100,000), which ever is greater, is probably unconstitutional, except in cases of malice or fraud. When malice or fraud are involved, there is no limit on punitive damages. Note that the fraud must be part of the crime itself; Thomas' perjury on the stand should play no role in punitive damages. The award will almost certainly be reduced...however...it is likely that Thomas will settle before then. Though $200k was outrageous in the first trial, unique circumstances in this trial make it unlikely that the judge will reduce the amount to anywhere close that number, given that a separate and independent jury found such a large number.
tokenadult 17y ago
There are statutory damages for infringement of works protected by a federally registered copyright. The reason the statute is written that way is to make trials more efficient, so that once infringement (and registration of the copyright) are proven, the trial court doesn't have to do nit-picky fact-finding about how big the economic damages are from the proven infringement.

jonknee 17y ago

Sometimes I wish hell were real so that the lawyers working double time to make sure a woman goes bankrupt over 24 songs could go there. It just doesn't make sense to have "damages" like that.

timwiseman 17y ago
While I fully agree that this result is unjust, I would not blame the lawyers. Remember the lawyers have a professional duty to faithfully represent their client. If their client insists on pressing for the maximum possible damages then the lawyers have a professional duty to take every action within the bounds of ethics and law to get them. This result was definitely unjust, but the lawyers are the wrong ones to blame.
- ambition 17y ago
  What? No. The lawyers have a ethical and moral duty as lawyers and human beings to do the right thing. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll make an analogy relevant to my profession. If some guy hires me to make a picture site and then insists on a section for sex pics of children I have an ethical duty to back out of the contract.
  - emmett 17y ago
    I understand your sentiment, but you're wrong. We need lawyers who will work even for despicable clients. The reason for this rule is that everyone is entitled to legal representation they can trust. The clients really are at fault here.
    - greendestiny 17y ago
      I'd say the law (not lawyers) was at fault as well, or even mostly. A legal system can't rely on the honesty or ethics of claimants and defendants to function correctly almost by definition.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    The lawyers have a ethical and moral duty as lawyers and human beings to do the right thing. That's not exactly how a lawyer's professional responsibility is defined. But anyway, as a producer of original writings that have been infringed more than once, I'm glad there are lawyers who work to uphold the copyright laws.

boryas 17y ago

Would you steal a purse? If getting caught cost me $80,000 then probably not... So much for reasonable punishments.

dflock 17y ago
Imagine the outcry if all punishments were meted out on this kind of scale. Jaywalking: 10 years hard labour! And no, I wouldn't steal a purse, because a purse is a physical object, owned by an ordinary individual human being, who would be materially and emotionally harmed by the theft. This case of Copyright infringement involves imaginary property of enormously rich corporations who would not be materially affected by it in any measurable way. It's more akin to stealing an invisible mote of dust from the bottom of someones purse, without them being aware of it at any point. All the evidence actually suggests that music sharing increases income for commercial music as a whole, yet sharing these 24 tracks has resulted in a $2m fine. Ironically, you would be punished enormously less for actually mugging someone and stealing their purse.
- boryas 17y ago
  I wasn't trying to say that we should have equally barbaric punishments for purse-snatching but rather that we should have equally fair and reasonable punishments for file-sharing. I can see how my point was made unclear by the unsuccessful joke, though.
fatdog789 17y ago
Civil case. Your example is not analogous. Theft is a crime. Thomas committed a tort. The difference: police get involved with crimes, and you can be arrested for a crime. You cannot be arrested for a tort (unless the tort is the "civil" counterpart of a crime allowing the victim to recover for injuries from the crime).
- jrockway 17y ago
  This is how the law works, yeah, but don't you think it's broken?

dflock 17y ago

I can't really see how this is even remotely proportionate, by any stretch of the imagination. What were these 24 tracks? A bunch of obscure Swedish Death Metal by all accounts. Is it likely that collecting these damages would make more profit than the sales of the tracks ever would? Maybe. But, as she pointed out, she hasn't got $2m anyway, so they can't collect - it seems likely that the RIAA will just use the damages as a sledgehammer to bludgeon her into settling 'out of court' and out of the glare of publicity. It makes me wonder what the jurors were thinking - awarding life destroying damages against a fellow citizen who is, presumably, an ordinary person, just like them. I don't think that I could do that, personally.

fatdog789 17y ago
Punitive damages are not meant to be proportionate. They are meant to be penal, and to "send a message" to other potential tortfeasors. (Civil trial for damages = tort). However, SCOTUS has ruled very recently that punitive damages must be proportional to the income and assets of the defendant, for example, $1M is nothing to Bill Gates but is beyond devastating to the average man.
- greendestiny 17y ago
  I'm not sure I've seen the justice in using people as examples. The compliance of others isn't their problem. Awards being relative to income make sense for fines, and I guess thats what these punitive damages are. This behavior of record companies makes it hard for geeks like me who don't support the abolishment of copyright. I think the worst that should happen in cases of copyright infringement of music is a several hundred dollar fine total, not per song.

pg 17y ago

Something is broken in this country.

daeken 17y ago
Agreed, but what do we do? I've seen few reasonable copyright reform ideas, and none of them actually discussed how we can push forward to implement them. Everyone simply says that too many people with too much money want things to stay the same, but I don't buy it. This attitude bothers me most when I see it here; this site exists because we know the power of the little guys in the market, and I know there's a workable approach to the copyright issue, it just needs to be found.
noonespecial 17y ago
I think the broken thing in this trial was a misdirection of efforts. The defendant was quite clearly guilty, (her cable modem, her mac, mysteriously replaced hdd). The defendant spent her time grandstanding obviously false innocence, thumbing her nose at the court and the intelligence of the jury. The RIAA representatives spent their time grandstanding obviously false damages, thumbing their collective noses at the whole justice system. In the end, the whole thing was just a circus that missed the most obvious point: What is a reasonable course of action for dealing with this type of infringement? The sad part is, this trial was a wasted opportunity where we could have begun to address this issue. Instead the judge let it slip once again into a good ol' fashioned case of American side-show freakery.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  A trial court's job is to determine facts: did infringement occur? An appellate court has some power to get into some of the interesting policy issues you bring up. Maybe that will happen in this case, or maybe not.
- rms 17y ago
  They would have had better luck with jury nullification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
17y ago

skwaddor 17y ago

How do you think it stacks uo to what happened back in 2002 : Tennessee Attorney General Paul G. Summers announced today that five of the largest U.S. distributors of pre-recorded music CDs and three large retailers agreed to pay millions of dollars in cash and free CDs as part of an agreement on price-fixing allegations. The companies will pay $67,375,000 in cash, provide $75,500,000 worth of music CDs, and not engage in sales practices that allegedly led to artificially high retail prices for music CDs and reduced retail competition as part of the agreement. Tennessee's share is an estimated $993,948 in cash and $1,507,852 in CDs. http://www.attorneygeneral.state.tn.us/press/2002/story/PR13.pdf http://www.attorneygeneral.state.tn.us/press/2002/story/PR13...

blasdel 17y ago
I got a check for ~$10. Public libraries all over the country got shipping containers full of Mariah Carey deadstock. The lawyers leading the class action got tens of millions of dollars.

quizbiz 17y ago

What % of people that have downloaded a song without paying would have paid for that song?

quoderat 17y ago

From the tone of many in this thread, it seems that people don't understand that non-commercial copyright is not a crime, but instead is a civil infraction -- hence why Thomas was not arrested, and not tried in a criminal court. But the copyright industry certainly wants everyone to believe it is a crime. Looks like it is working. Sad.