4 ms·

Just after a general opinion, what would people rate as a fair penalty in this case?

• htsh 17y ago
  24 tracks, how about $24 dollars? I'd even give them double, or $48. For the 1700 tracks (that she allegedly downloaded but was not tried for), $3400. The extra dollar for each song goes towards the administrative costs of tracking them down.
  • seertaak 17y ago
    To be fair, I think the original settlement proposed was around USD 10,000 certainly more than your proposal, but a far cry from the USD 1.9MM the court awarded her. In any case, your arithmetic seems to me to measure the wrong thing. The problem is not that she downloaded the songs. The problem is that she made them available for downloading. If all she had done was burned 24 tracks from a friend's collection and listened to that in her car and gotten caught, then your calculation makes sense. But each time someone downloaded the songs she made available, that person no longer need to buy the album from the artist. That's why two dollars per track, IMHO, is far from being a fair figure from damages. It's the viral aspect which makes P2P different, from, say, copying cassettes like we did when we were kids.
    • htsh 17y ago
      Again, if we're talking crime, you have to have an intent to commit that crime. If she wanted to listen, she gets punished for it. If she shares unintentionally (which is likely the case as most p2p applications share everything you download), then punish her a little more on top of it but don't treat her like she's some organized bootlegging ring.
      • deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      • gambling8nt 17y ago
        Not every crime requires intent; criminal action can occur purely through negligence--you don't have to have or prove criminal intent to get a ticket for running a stop sign or in order to get a parking ticket.
        • htsh 17y ago
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
          • deleted 17y ago
            [deleted]
          • gambling8nt 17y ago
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal) For most minor and petty crimes (such as my examples in another comment; parking violations, drunk driving, etc.), mens rea is unneeded (in the US, at any rate). The question of what degree of mens rea is relevant for intellectual property theft is both open and relevant; simply saying that, for example, it should should require mens rea because larceny (theft) does ignores the fundamental differences between the two. EDIT: Two clarifying points. First, there is legal language describing the mens rea necessary in intellectual property theft; however, there is not a significant body of case law interpreting exactly what it means. Second, the reason that you can't just copy the mens rea of larceny is that intent to commit larceny is the intent to deprive the rightful owner of the object, which is clearly not a factor in intellectual property theft.
            • htsh 17y ago
              Agreed. I posted that hastily. I think your posts shed some light on the situation even further, in that usually when you don't need mens rea we're talking of minor or petty crimes.
  • rationalbeaver 17y ago
    As I recall, the issue wasn't just that she downloaded the 24 songs, but that she made them available for download (shared). For that I would tack on an extra $7-$8 per song to account for the (likely) small number of people who downloaded from her.
    • radu_floricica 17y ago
      And a fixed amount of around $100 to cover the principle of the thing in cases with 1-2 songs, plus all the hassle should be just about right.
    • htsh 17y ago
      Isn't this the issue everytime someone downloads a song since every p2p & torrent client automatically shares the stuff you download? It seems silly to punish her for a systematic feature of the software she used to download the tracks. I dunno - it seems that if we're going to punish her for sharing as well, do we then not go after those 7-8 people that downloaded from her? Seems like there's a bit of double-dipping that's possible here (which again would lead to an Infinite amount of damages). But i'll give you that. We're now at $8-$10 a track. Which makes her fine somewhere between $200 and $17,000, still orders of magnitude less than the actual outcome.
  • TomOfTTB 17y ago
    I'd add reasonable interest but other than that I think I agree with you. The biggest problem with this discussion in general is that the RIAA has blurred the line between criminal and civil acts. Therefore you have a justice system that is imposing crime level punishment instead of civil restitution. I'm against music piracy and I think those who get caught should be responsible for paying back what they took from the other party. But bankrupting a person serves no societal purpose and actually provides a disincentive because someone who owes more money than they could ever pay will probably end up paying nothing at all. While someone who owes a couple thousand will probably just take the hit and move on.
• jcromartie 17y ago
  The price of the music... if she wanted to keep it, or else just let her delete the files.
  • seertaak 17y ago
    Great! So basically no punishment at all. What you're proposing is to turn the courts into an offline shop -- one which the customer shops at a massive cost to the retailer. The sense of entitlement evident in a statement like that is frankly breathtaking. I should be able to break the law, lie about breaking the law, get dragged into court, waste everyone's time, and then, as punishment, I should be given the option to simply delete the offending files? Are you serious? And what about the all the individual downloads of the songs she made available? Should we just ignore those, because the original perpetrator no longer has them? It's quite obvious that you haven't given this a great deal of thought.
• sili 17y ago
  A song on iTunes is a $1, so shouldn't he crime be equal to shoplifting a $24 dress from Macy's? Nobody is charging a shoplifter a million dollars because the dress' design is an intellectual property of the fashion designer.
  • seertaak 17y ago
    Seriously though: a dress can't be copied at zero cost.
    • sili 17y ago
      True, that's what sets media piracy apart from other stealing. But again, if she made the files available for download from her machine, does it mean that 79,000 other people (or even one other person) have download from her? I would like to see records of here traffic that proves that, otherwise she is being presumed guilty and has to prove that she is not. Trying for "potential damages" is a slippery slope.
• gambling8nt 17y ago
  The trick behind a fair and effective penalty for a crime is that there both has to be a realistic expectation of actual enforcement (there's no way a person can afford to pay $80k for a song unless their last name rhymes with Mates or Muffet, even if caught), and the expected value has to be obviously negative under most circumstances--that is, the probability of being caught times the expense must be much more negative than the value gained by committing the crime. We can see this principle at work in the fines for things such as littering, illegal parking, and drunk driving. Individual instances of these crimes gain a person a small amount of value; the fines for being caught are around one or two orders of magnitude greater than this (at first--often repeat offenses raise the expense another order of magnitude in the form of either jail time or increased insurance costs), in line with the approximation of being caught a non-negligible fraction of the time. By comparison, illegal file sharing has a vanishingly small chance of getting your life completely destroyed. The problem with this is two fold. First, it isn't at all calculable what the expected value is; there simply isn't enough data to accurately determine what the probability of getting caught from any single illegal act is. Second, the enforcement rate is sufficiently low that, even if it were reliably calculable, people would not emotionally treat it correctly--the same emotional detachment from strongly negative consequences occurs here as the one that makes people take other sorts of extreme risks such as teenage unprotected sex, extreme sports, and going to war as a foot soldier (note that I am not saying that these always have negative expected value; merely that people are not good at estimating these sorts of risks). The problem the RIAA faces is that enforcement to the degree necessary for a lower level fine to create sufficiently negative expected value is a practical impossibility; there's no reasonable way to effectively catch and fine even 1% of file-sharers (a rough estimate of what order of magnitude of enforcement is necessary to make people effectively able to gauge the risk--such an enforcement rate would not stop illegal file sharing altogether, but it would at least slow it down, much like my other examples). The only long-term option is to change business models to one less completely invalidated by the advance of technology.
  • seertaak 17y ago
    You raise some interesting and valid points IMHO. I fully agree that the expected cost/benefit balance has to be redressed. Personally, the way I see that occuring is via a variant of the three-strikes rule proposed in France. I think that rule is too draconian; I do think that the internet has enjoyed a penetration level in society similar to that enjoyed by other basic amenities such as water and electricity. So shutting someone off from the internet is a highly draconian measure, perhaps infringing on someones human rights. But what if rather than cutting someone of completely, you just limited their bandwidth to a size to make, say, reading email and news practical, but make it impractical to fileshare music in any reasonable volumes. What's good about this is that the penalty fits the crime: you'll still be able to enjoy the internet, just not media-intensive stuff. Certainly a nuissance and displeasurable to the perpetrator, but it seems to me a proportionate and fair response, and it directly affects their ability to continue engaging in the illicit activity.