Jammie Thomas vs the RIAA: round II
p2pnet news view RIAA | P2P:- “I am a single mother of 2 beautiful boys; Tyler who is 13 and Triston, who is 11. These two are my life and they’re the reason why I do anything. It is also because of these two I decided to fight back against the RIAA. After I received the various letters from both my ISP and the RIAA, I made up my mind I was not going to be bullied into paying for something I didn’t do. My father always taught me to stand up and fight for what I believe in and I figured what better way to teach my boys this same lesson but through example.”
So said Jammie Thomas in 2007.
Together with approximately 40,000 other innocent people, including very young children, she’s accused by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s RIAA of being a massive online distributor of copyrighted music.
Consequently, she faced heavyweight Big 4 lawyers in a civil court trial, after which she was ordered to pay the corporate music industry almost a quarter of a million dollars.
But US district judge Michael Davis, who heard the case, declared a mistrial after admitting he’d committed a, “manifest error of law” when he told the jury the, “act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without licensefrom the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown”.
Now, because the two sides have failed to reach a settlement, Jammie will have to go through it all again starting on June 15.
“We struck an impasse,” Jammie’s lawyer, Brian Toder, told the Duluth News Tribune.
“We actually had some offers back and forth, but there was definitely an impasse there that could not be overcome despite considerable efforts by Judge Erickson.”
Thomas, now Thomas-Rasset “after being married in February,” is quoted as saying offers were made to settle the case, “but that they didn’t include money”.
Said Davis in Civil File No. 06‐1497 after admitting his mistake »»»
While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs’ claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs – the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000 – more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent.
Thomas not only gained no profits from her alleged illegal activities, she sought no profits. Part of the justification for large statutory damages awards in copyright cases is to deter actors by ensuring that the possible penalty for infringing substantially outweighs the potential gain from infringing. In the case of commercial actors, the potential gain in revenues is enormous and enticing to potential infringers. In the case of individuals who infringe by using peer-to-peer networks, the potential gain from infringement is access to free music, not the possibility of hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of dollars in profits.
This fact means that statutory damages awards of hundreds of thousands of dollars is certainly far greater than necessary to accomplish Congress’s goal of deterrence.
Unfortunately, by using Kazaa, Thomas acted like countless other Internet users. Her alleged acts were illegal, but common. Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive.
1. The Court hereby VACATES the verdict rendered in this case by the ury and grants Defendant a new trial to commence on a date to be et by the Court after consultation with the parties.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
May, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy! Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
May 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
fighting back is a mistake. theres really too much evidence against the woman
May 13th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
just setle
May 13th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Why should she surrender? File sharing is not a crime only in the eyes of the Really Inept Association of Anal types and Mainly Putrid Association of Anal types. They whine and cry and kvetch about how they’re losing money because of people sharing music and movies, which is not the truth. The MPAA has a 14 BILLION dollar surplus this year alone, so where are they losing? File sharing has been shown to positively INCREASE sales not lose them. The only reason this farce keeps continuing is because the Big 4 and the MPAA, same crew, can’t control the flow of information as they did before the advent of the Internet.
Jammie Thomas and others like her are innocent victims in this PR Campaign against anything new and different that threatens their bottom line. The RIAA and MPAA refuse to come into the 21st Century choosing, instead to rely on a business model that became non-extant the day the Internet became the new way to share information. If they had of then we’d still have Napster and the other file sharing services they’ve shut down and even if they charged a nickel a song download they’d have been rolling in money. They have no physical proof, as their ‘experts’ have no idea how to read what’s on a hard drive as has been proven in court, as well as their ‘experts’ testimony having been shown as flawed and disallowed and they still try to shove it down the court’s throat. Trying to indoctrinate school children with propaganda that file sharing is wrong and downloading is stealing as well as bribing and threatening schools and ISP’s to become their enforcement arm are basically tactics of a group that is running scared and becoming more and more aware everyday that their end is nigh.
May 13th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
“fighting back is a mistake. theres really too much evidence against the woman”
What evidence? The RIAA BS?
Each time I see a RIAA pay troll I have to use him to send a message to his master so here It go:
We don’t need parasites in our society and we are comming for you with the pest killer.
RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 13th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
If I was sued by these guys I will never settle and I will never pay anything to them.
NEVER!!
May 13th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
“1. The Court hereby VACATES the verdict rendered in this case by the ury and grants Defendant a new trial to commence on a date to be et by the Court after consultation with the parties.”
Is a ury anything like a jury? And how does a court eat a date?
“What evidence? The RIAA BS?”
How about the fact that they saw someone using the name “tereastar” sharing songs on Kazaa and Thomas’s email name just happened to be “tereastar”? I’m not saying I agree that what she did should be treated like a crime, but how would you explain that the Kazaa name and her email name were the same?
May 13th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
“How about the fact that they saw someone using the name “tereastar” sharing songs on Kazaa and Thomas’s email name just happened to be “tereastar”? I’m not saying I agree that what she did should be treated like a crime, but how would you explain that the Kazaa name and her email name were the same?”
Err, coincidence?
May 13th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
“How about the fact that they saw someone using the name “tereastar” sharing songs on Kazaa and Thomas’s email name just happened to be “tereastar”? I’m not saying I agree that what she did should be treated like a crime, but how would you explain that the Kazaa name and her email name were the same?”
Err, how about the fact the Kazaa program automatically uses the computer’s administrative account name as it’s default and it was shown in court that “tereastar” was the name of the administrative account?
Check your facts troll before you comment some more. You might not look like such an ignorant idiot next time you post.
May 13th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
*You* are the troll and an idiot.
It’s still a COINCIDENCE isn’t it? Or can only one admin account in the whole wide world have that name? It changes nothing.
Fucking RIAA shill.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
With the risk of feeding a troll, I would like to make one comment.
Anyone with a decent amount of knowledge of the internet, knows that it is easy to leave false information (ever heard of spam?) and that it is also near impossible to “prove” who actually was downloading/ uploading a file from/to the internet, unless you have video surveillance of that person and the actual screen of the person’s computer.
In fact, with the help of a simple trojan worm program, that any script kiddie or federal agent can download from the net, you can even boot up a person’s computer while they are not using the computer, and use that computer to send spam(with that person’s email address), DDOS a web site, and even download child pornography to implicate that the person enjoys child pornography.
Just wait until the time when you receive an email from a lawyer of one of the **AAs, telling you that you owe them tens of thousands of dollars, just because their “expert” witnesses (with either very limited or selective internet knowledge) found that an infringing content came from YOUR ip address, and that the application used YOUR email address, then you wouldn’t be so quick in agreeing with these blood sucking leaches.
Just my two cents
May 13th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
” fighting back is a mistake. theres really too much evidence against the woman ”
Well, david .. Still stinging after the crash of your latest capital venture eh ?
So, What evidence .. precisely ?
Have the RIAA lawyers shown that anyone other than their agent ( who cannot be considered an infringer )
downloaded anything from that user ?
No .. they can’t.
They are relying on the false assumption that if the file can be seen on a list, it has been ‘made available’ …
the very ‘fact’ that Judge Davis declared as his manifest error.
See the point ?
No evidence.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
i am going to have all of my friends that use p2p us the name dbann or other similar
guess you’re in trouble d, after all a name is proof right ?
names
May 13th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
” Err, coincidence? ”
considering the number of people with PC’s in the entire world that use files sharing networks, yes.
If that’s all that is needed ,well, here comes the next new fun PC game.
Frame your neighbor.
fun fun fun
May 14th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
What the hell kind of a name is “Triston,” anyway?
Yeah, off-topic, I know….