RIAA filesharing target Jammie Thomas wins retrial

By that logic....

If I possess a balaclava and a crowbar I'm guilty of theft.

Making available != distributing copyrighted material.

My god.

What a lot of wasted money on utter futile lawsuites.

ha ha

They will find it difficult to prove that the files were downloaded.

sould be fun.

copyright lasts to long...

Someone invents a cure for cancer and gets exclusive rights to make a profit from it for 15 years. Someone writes a song about it and gets exclusive rights to make a profit for a lifetime plus.

Not exactly what I'd call a fair reward. I agree with rewarding people for what they created but the length of time a copyright lasts is wholly disproportionate to the effort and creativity involved.

Re:By that logic....

And also by the same login, if I have hairy palms then I'm guilty of wanking.........oh wait......

I do agree that you can't base damages on "assumed" loss of profits. They should have to show how many times each shared song was downloaded and then base the damages on that. The figure they came up with was just plain ridiculous.

@Maybe common sense will win after all

Why do we share? So others can benefit from something without having to pay for a whole second identical item. We expect the others to return the favour. "Share and share alike." It's been drummed into us since Primary School.

Secondly, we need to recognise that music is art. Art doesn't have a cost past what materials were consumed / rented / bought to produce it, and that's the bare minimum price. In this day and age, it is entirely possible to (almost) professionally produce an album with about $3000 in equipment. A decent PC with 4-channel audio input, instruments, microphones, and a mixer. If you don't want to outlay the whole lot yourself, you can rent a recording studio once you've had a play with a cheap microphone and Audacity after shifting your home PC into the garage for a couple of hours.

Past this point, distribution has become next to free, thanks to the advent of P2P tech, cloud storage, and social networking. We have the ability to look at THOUSANDS of similar artists' work with a simple google search, or even by looking at a fan's myspace friends.

All we need is to get out of the mindset that an album is a product. It's not, it's an art piece, and art can make a LOT of money for the artist. All that is needed is exposure, and you can get that for free nowerdays just by being good.

You look at Trent Reznor; He made 1.5m on *300* limited edition vinyl records, just because he signed them and put in some custom artwork! The WHOLE album was CC licensed and free to download anyway!

Boggles my mind...

This burden of proof thing ...

... is really crippling my efforts to nail people to the wall because I don't like them.

Totally unreasonable.

Requiring proof of actual transfers

It's about time.

Requiring proof is, in my mind, supposed to be the basic necessity to condemn someone in a court of Justice. That this requirement has not been met until now is a shocking display of the lobbying power of that most-distasteful organization that is the Recording Industry Ass. of America.

And I seriously hope it will indeed cripple the diarrhetic flow of frivolous lawsuits against grandmas without computers and little girls in Primary school.

It is only logical that if you intend to get a $200,000 fine against someone who earns less than $50,000 a year, you should prove your ass off that you are indeed right and entitled to it.

The RIAA has done nothing of the sort. It has, however, amply proven that it can fire off lawsuits against anyone for the tiniest, weakest sliver of suspicion, and expect to be handsomely paid for its lack of work.

Death to RIAA !

Let's ignore the rediculous penalty...

...and focus on the crime. Is there anyway that all the people who have posted comments such as "You mean you have to be able to *prove* that the person you accuse of stealing has actually, you know, *stolen* something?" are so naiive about file sharing. I mean you install your file sharing client put a bunch of files in a folder and wait. What you are waiting for is for someone to come along and download files which you may or may not legally own. Once those files are on the downloaders machine they no longer legally own them so both parties have taken part in copyright theft. You would have to be supremely stupid to not understand how file sharing works. So the very act of placing copyrighted material in the shared folder is sufficient proof of the intention to commit the act of copyright theft. If the rights holder happens to get there before the crime can happen then that is all well and good.

"If I possess a balaclava and a crowbar I'm guilty of theft." No! But if you are at the top of a ladder in the middle of the night outside a house you have no connection with and you are wearing your balaclava and carrying the crowbar then you can bet that plod is not gonig to wait for you to actually break in.

Re: Let's ignore the ridiculous penalty...

I'm still not sure what's being stolen here but if it's a crime then due process and proof should be required. Before all the patriots and their scumbag new labour(spit) allies had their way that was how the justice system operated. What's special about these RIAA arse holes are they like exempt from justice. I don't have file sharing software on any box on my network (to my knowledge) but there is a chance even with anti virus that the box has been seeded by some hacker. I'm sick of twats who either work for some branch of government or have like big business corrupted same trying to enforce summary punishment without recourse or adequate checks and balances.

@Ash

Why do artists "create"? Because they want people to feel uplifted. They want to be known. They want the girls.

They don't want to get a proper job,

All as right as your misrepresentation of why we share.

We share because that's what HUMANS DO.