A music publisher illegally passed themselves as owners of over 500 songs authored by my father, copyright registered 80 of those songs as owners, fraudulently licensed many of the songs and collected (also illegally) over $2,000,000 (current value) in royalties. We the children of the composer, the legal owners of the songs, sued the so called music publisher and only obtained a $16,000 damage award (whiles spending far more in over unrecouped legal expenses) from an American federal judge. The judge did not bother to have the vast majority of the illegally collected collected royalties returned or paid to us nor order the illegal copyright registrations removed. As a result the songs are still registered as belonging to the music publisher. The details can be found here: gvenega.com. Click on “The theft of the music…”

Now, how does the massive for-profit theft of songs and fraud (illegal licenses issued constitute fraud) of described above compare to the crime of downloading 24 songs?

Why was a damage sentence $16,000 for stealing over 500 songs and causing over $2,000,000 in real damages (our losses in never received royalties) and, on the other hand, $1,900.00 for downloading 24 songs and no real damages, proven or otherwise?

Who is responsible for the disparities in copyright cases sentencing?

One would think it is the US Supreme court, right?
Forget it, they are too busy protecting the the courts.
Its a another case of rabbits watching the carrot patch.

Clearly, Jammie Thomas has many arguments to bring to appeal, as shown by Ray Beckerman and should prevail.

The long term solution to end the torture of innocent victims is to have an appeal court that is independent for the court system with a jury of non lawyers of proven inteligeence or education named for a very short period of times, or perhaps for a single case only. That may lead to the elimination of dumb laws and ridiculous sentencing.

Are you talking about copyright law or the justice system? Unless you can come up with an infallible way to read minds, the justice system will always be badly broken. If you’re talking about copyright and privacy laws, well it’s been 10 years now and I still haven’t seen any changes for the better. Lot’s of talk but very little action. All things considered I’d say we’re actually worse off now than we were in the beginning.

We live in a capitalist society which means those with all the money have all the power and thus get to make the rules. It has been this way since the beginning of time and always will be. The universe is full of self evident truths, the most important of which being that it’s far from perfect and completely unfair. That is the “real world” we all live in. See, Ray Beckerman has it backwards. Only in some parallel universe where everything is fair and perfect would things ever have worked out the way they should have. Oh you can believe in a better tomorrow all you want. Go ahead and do whatever it takes to keep that little bubble of reality you’ve built around yourself afloat. After all, hope (even if false) is the only way to stay sane in this crazy ass world. But make no mistake, so long as mankind exists history will forever repeat itself. There will always be bullies and the bullied. There will always be the cruel and the downtrodden. There will always be lust, greed and all the other sins. No amount of arguing or law making will ever change human nature and the only thing that will ever be certain in life is uncertainty. So start fortifying your position now and pray you have enough ammunition because I guarantee that the shit is going to hit the proverbial fan eventually. It always does.

All of this has to do with courts and lawyers which have no regard for fairness. It can be named corruption in some cases. This because who knows who was seated behind a computer when downloading occurred. Directv mailed out some 175,000 letters and sued 30,000 people. In the case Directv V. Treworgy, Directv admitted that there may have been 10% mistakes. OK, I was a mistake but had to pay out huge sums of money anyway. But today I have a different feeling for the court and attorney’s. In fact the next time I am a witness or a juror, I can no longer extend any credibility to our system of justice. So the effects here are not only on the victim of a false lawsuit but the justice system will take a hit lasting years from this. But then judges and lawyers don’t really care unless it is there own family which becomes a victim of corporate crime. Then they will want a juror or witness who places credibility in the justice system.

Remember $80,000 per song because that is what the consumer is owed if the CD you buy doesn’t seem to work.

http://theft-by-copyright-owner.com/default.htm

I’m not agreeing with that.
The internet means open communication.
The power is drifting into the hands of the user and we WILL come up with something better.

We the good people of this earth from all the sides should band together and change that! We need to get rid of our terrosits! Togethers! Now!

Radical, huh?

As a kind of sub-comment, IMHO, what this idea that we can buy a recording, and then it’s ours, implies is: there is such as thing as ‘enough’.

Cheers!

Who’s going to pay a musician to sing in a recording studio? The audience is going to pay for the recording that they want, not the warm feeling that the musician has sung in a studio. Having paid for the recording, people can then make (and sell – if they can) all the copies of it they want.

The audience is the new record label, the new publisher – and given they’ve bought and now own the recording, they can do what the heck they want with it.

So, I’d say the recording is extremely valuable. What isn’t of value are copies of it.

Bingo. “Intellectual work” is a service, not a product. A concert is in intellectual work. Singing in a recording studio is an intellectual work. The recording of this work is a product; it is a product with an inherent value roughly equal to that of air.

More like paid shill.

Still it is interesting that people such as this ‘reasonable’ comment poster are out there. It means the kartells, as John has called them, are worried.

Just my depreciated 25 cents.

Anybody remember the now-defunct website/company Fairtunes.com? It emerged during the downfall of the original Napster. Basically you said to them, “Hey I want to pay this band $3.” So they accepted PayPal or other payment, then cut the band a check for $3. I believe that the About.com people bought the company, and then ran it into the ground within a year or two.

Nice idea. Why don’t artists simply have a “Donate” button on their webpages?

Is he saying that even in the cases he’s handled, the defense has been “underlawyered”? If so, I wouldn’t hire him if I were unfortunate enough to be sued for filesharing.

Plus, was thomas underrepresented? Seems like she had a high profile litigator working for free on this case. Maybe he needed more time to prepare?

Let’s face it: these cases don’t proceed in bizarro-world; they’re happening here on this earth in this country in this dimension. The judges can’t all be biased and paid off or misled. In fact, didn’t the thomas judge say the first verdict was too high and so he ordered a retrial? And the new jury socked this poor lady again.

Seems like tenenbaum has a high profile defense and a sympathetic judge as well. But even that judge is apparently fed up with the way the whole thing is going to tenenbaum’s detriment. If I were him, I guess I’d give up rather than have the riaa potentially own my future.

If beckerman is right, the folks who want to combat this would get a serious lawyer and a sympathetic defendant teed up to carry a case through– not have nutty professors and obviously lying defendants just make the law worse at every turn. (I mean, what would have happened if thomas said, “yeah I had kazaa, I didn’t realize the files on my computer were available to everyone
and I don’t think I should have to pay a ton of money for this mistake” as opposed to “kazaa? Never heard of it. No idea why my username was used by someone from my bedroom computer for this. I didn’t do it, but maybe my kids or exboyfriend did”?)

That would allow the “cystallization of issues.”

“a means of exchanging intellectual work for money will demonstrate itself superior to the exchange of copies for money”

Yup.

Cheers!

Applying the law more kindly is the best you can hope from lawyers.

When the law is corrupt, none of the above can or will help you.

There are only two forces that can fix corrupt law. 1) The People, 2) Economics

So, we can look forward to two inevitabilities:
1) the people will abolish copyright
2) a means of exchanging intellectual work for money will demonstrate itself superior to the exchange of copies for money

So why do the RIAA lawyers get away with it ?
Will a lawyer dare come out and answer that question directly rather than evade a direct answer ?