P2P judge trims student's fine by 90 per cent

Smoke and mirrors.

This is all just smoke and mirrors.

The RIassA is desperately trying to hide the fact that they no longer control the distribution channels for recorded entertainment.

I'm not commenting on right or wrong here, mind ... But the fact is that once something can be digitized, and then is made available on TheInternet[1], the cats are out of the worm can, and no amount of stuffing will allow the stable door to be shut and locked with zero "damage" to the folks who formerly controlled said distribution channels.

Copyright law needs to be re-written, given the current reality. Unfortunately, it probably will not be, at least not in my life time.

[1] Whatever that is ...

Put him in jail like any other criminal

If he can't or won't pay then it's time to go to the slammer for five years like any other criminal. He knew exactly what he was doing when he committed the crime.

Reminds me of tax avoiders.

His defense reminds me of tax avoidance scams where people don't like paying taxes so they try to come up with some convoluted legal loophole that in their mind makes the entire tax system illegal.

Fits the crime

Just like how you can get sent to jail longer for robbing a bank than killing someone. Money talks and bullshit walks.

okay so he was caught and should be punished

that seems fair enough to me.

But punished to the tune of $67,500?

Even at 1 tenth of the previous fine, it's still extortion plain and simple. That's enough money to buy all the music you could listen to in several lifetimes. And they're not going to get the money anyway because he doesn't have it. So what have they achieved other than make themselves look petty yet again.

I see piracy as an inefficiency. There are inefficiencies in every business. Take farming, some of your crops are always going to be eaten by pests. This has to be dealt with of course but there is a law of diminishing returns. The last 5% of weeds and pests are so difficult and expensive to remove that to even try will cost you more than that 5% of your crops is even worth. So why bother? To make an example to the other pests? They don't care.

artistic harm

..is essentially zero. Riaa, i simply can't take this seriously, when you yourselves ensure your contracts pay artists nearly nothing based on actual sales. Hell, they still have a clause to take a (large) percentage off the top for cylinder record breakage!

re: treat them like criminals. First, this is a civil case as far as i know. Second, criminals who can't pay fines get to pay it off indefinitely. When i was in traffic court (also not criminal...) one person was given a $100 fine who was broke, they were permitted to pay *$1* a month.

lastly, what bad lawyering. I've been following this case, the judge favored the defendents but they made 1 good argument (fair use) then blew it, and a lot of poor lawyering otherwise. They simply didn't make a case.

Loot

"Only" $67,500? Hmm. If American students are as impoverished as our UK variety, how is he going to come up with THAT sort of money, anyway?

Just wrong.

RIAA decided to mass produce bad music and sell it for too much money. We have another way now, and they can't handle it. Guess what? No one liked listening to the radio stations all owned by the same company, and forcing the crappy lowest common denominator music on us. Worked fine for the industry, because there was no other choice.

Most good bands will stream their music for free on myspace on their official site or whatever, they know that they will gain fans this way and if they lose a few sales to people who don't buy their albums, they will get their money in other ways.

I download a lot of albums, but I see a lot of shows, and I buy a lot of albums on vinyl, too. They have nice art, and are nice collectors items. Downloading music has only made me a bigger fan and allowed me to give money to the artists. Do I pay for everything I listen to? No... but I listen to a LOT more than I used to, and I definitely spend more money in total. If I had to go back to how things were 12 years ago, I wouldn't be able to be a music fan.

I used to be a lot more sympathetic to the RIAA, but their actions in the last few years have shown me just what an evil cartel they are, and how they are well entrenched in the government. This ridiculous fine is just a prime example.

If I could go into Tesco and make a copy of a potato, I WOULD. Then I would go home and make some chips with it! Hopefully I wouldn't be slapped with a 60k fine!

@Robert Hill

I must say that your attitude in defense of the RIAA riles me up.

You adamantly bring forth the artists as an excuse for RIAA's extortionate maneuvers. We all know that it is not about the artists, and no artist is going to see one cent of this fine because RIAA is fucking artists over at every turn.

You claim that artists are clamoring to sign up with labels. It is true that young groups waiting to be recognized may accept to sign up with Big Records, but it is also true that, in doing so, they give up their rights to their songs - which, in turn, ensures that RIAA is the only one who gets the proceeds of fines and exploitation.

If artists are clamoring to be under RIAA rule, please explain why so many artists that have suceeded (Madonna, Michael Jackson, ...) have created their OWN publishing house ? Because they have understood how the industry works and want to turn it to their own advantage.

In other words, successful artists do not need to accept being screwed by RIAA. It's the unsuccessful ones who accept being shafted for a chance at glory.

That hardly sounds like an industry worth defending to me.

The problem is.....

.....that the "damages" awarded in these cases (or at least claimed) are totally disproportionate to the actual losses. It assumes that every downloader counts as "lost revenue" when in truth, the majority would probably never buy the song anyway if they had to pay for it. I used to download music mainly for the purpose of finding the correct mix of a song (or the best mix for a workout rather) and then buy the best one, but with so many online facilities now which can determine this for me (even Spotify is great for this too), I no longer need to.

In this case, the judgement was awarded more out of spite for the defendants attitude, but it's still totally pointless. Rather than a massive fine which he can not possibly pay off, work out an approximation of the real damages and make that the fine. I'm not suggesting he should get off with just a small fine though, make him work off the punishment as community service or something similar.

I'm not trying to argue that filesharing is right, but handing out ridiculous fines is just a waste of time.

@skelband - RE:All seems a bit pointless

"If the guy can't pay 67k then what is the point exactly?"

Damages are not supposed to be awarded on the basis of being able to pay, they are supposed to be awarded on the grounds of damage incurred (with a little wriggle room natch.). The amount that will actually be paid will be settled at a different hearing, which will take into consideration the amount that can be paid.

Whether you agree with the findings or not is not relevant wrt discussing damage award amounts - if it is decided that $X has been suffered then $X has been suffered, regardless of whether the perpetrator is a tramp or Bill Gates.

However, most importantly, these hearings are setting precedent. So you need to understand how these things work.

As there is little direct case law on the books the responses, arguments and findings in these early cases will be used as the basis for further hearings and findings (remember the US has a common law system which relies heavily on precedent) in future copyright infringement cases.

Ultimately the RIAA etc. want big paydirt. They want to sue people like Google, Yahoo, AOL even Microsoft and Apple if they can get away with it. That is where the real money is. People claim the industry model is dead, and they may have a point, however the future preferred model would be for YouTube, Facebook, Apple and similar to distribute their IP for them whilst the receive big cheques.

However, as we have seen with Viacom, trying to sue the big guys is expensive and extremely difficult. So the best bet is to start small - students, old people, children - the sort of people that will either cave in and pay up (legitimising the "crime" and "damages") or will go to court trying to stick-it-to-the-man and who will obviously lose - as we have seen.

The advantage of this model (for the industry) is that victory is almost certainly assured as the subjects are almost guaranteed to be incompetent, whiny, arrogant, dishonest and most importantly guilty. Each extra victory strengthens the case law and weakens the public defense of the freetards*

The disadvantages are that these people cannot pay big money. The industry needs big damages awards otherwise they can't make any real money off the big guys, but the danger is that juries will award low damages or judges will cut them - this will also likely set a precedent but not one the industry wants.

The RIAA doesn't really give a fuck if you download and share a couple of albums over your P2P system of choice - they know that they would probably not get most of the sales they claim to have lost whilst also being faced with the suggestive evidence that P2Pers spend more on music than non-P2Pers** and will almost certainly do so later in life when they graduate school and get jobs.

The RIAA want a piece of Google and a share in each MP3 player sold - common or garden freetards are just a stepping stone to getting there. Which is why they must have large damages set now. Don't be surprised if they then go all public spirited and merciful and "let off" infringers with a token amount they actually can pay.

*Every time a Jammie Thomas or a Joel Tenenbaum spouts absolute bollocks, lies, destroys evidence and generally whines like a little girl whilst clearly guilty it just turns public opinion away from file sharers. Already the media is against you (obviously, it is their business model after all) and a lot of people blindly do what The Sun, or Fox News or whatever tell them anyway.

**Seems logical in many cases, on one hand I do not P2P stuff, but equally I haven't bought any music for years (and I mean years) - If I tried before I buyed I might well discover new music I liked, at which point I would be happy to pay for it. If I didn't like it I would delete it.

Street Performance

In the information age, if you make music publicly available a digital format, it's basically the modern equivalent of street performance.

The RIAA is like a gang 20 of thugs hired by a street perfomer who round up and demand payment of $5 by any passer-by who stops to listen, even for 3 seconds, or else they get their teeth knocked out.

It's a crowded street corner of course and most of the passers-by still slip through the thugs' net. A few people who stop genuinely feel obliged to throw money into the hat after they enjoyed the perfomance. But many do so even if they didn't enjoy the performance, because they fear the thugs who are lurking around. The more youthful and street-wise among the passers-by are usually agile enough to outrun the thugs.

Every now and then the thugs will pick out a random spectator from the crowd, extort $1000, and then beat him uncoscious in front of everybody to set an example. Apart from scattering the crowd of spectators this doesn't have much of the desired effect.

Note that he's a law student

So just graduate get a job and pay it off in 6 months, using money stolen from widows and orphans.

Stealing or Forgery

I would have thought the crime of copying and making available to others somebody's artistic work is more akin to forgery than stealing.

What I want to know is, what would be the penalty if I bought a licensed print of of a modern art work say 'A Bigger Splash'. Then made a scan of the print and made it available for anyone to download and print out if the wished? Surely the crime of forgery would be committed when somebody actually printed the digital file.

Any lawyers here?

Damages amount

A fair few people here have the wrong end of the stick here. It's a fine, folks. As the judge says explicitly, it's not just damages, it's also a punishment for how egregious the crime was, which in Tenenbaum's case is self-confessed, premeditated, long-term and utterly blatant. If you go to court saying "yes I did it, no I don't care, and I'd do it again tomorrow" then you can fairly expect the judge to be unsympathetic.

Oh, and Arweet, get yourself a solid smack with a cluestick. Illegally downloading files is in no way the equivalent of listening to someone doing a public performance. Illegally *uploading* files (as Tenenbaum did) even less so.

For sure, some artists use their recordings as loss-leaders to get people into gigs. Fair enough if that works for them - but in this case they have made a conscious choice to do this with the songs that they've written and recorded. This does not give anyone else the right to do this without the artist's permission. I've heard a fair number of pissed-off struggling songwriters saying that someone has taken it upon themselves to upload the songwriter's latest album, and subsequent sales have tanked. When you're getting less than minimum wage from your music anyway, the extra money you might make from selling recordings is a very big deal.

No, they don't have a right to a living from their music. But if you piss all over their prospects and they can't afford to carry on playing professionally as a result, they *will* jack it in and work at Asda, and you've just destroyed their ability to make any more of the very music that you're downloading. Sure they'll probably do a few gigs down their local pub. But recording a pro-quality album of new material every year or two, and gigging that material round the clubs in whatever country you're from? It ain't happening when you're working full-time in Asda.

I have no great love for any of the major record labels - I agree that mostly they are all making a lot of profit off artists who aren't seeing much of it. But the artists concerned would still rather get some money than nothing at all. And there are plenty of artists who aren't involved with major labels who are still getting ripped off by people uploading their stuff, under the mistaken belief that this is sticking it to the faceless megacorps.

@Magnus

It'd be a start. But if you do that, it'd put you in a minority of one, out of a downloading population of several hundred million - no bugger else seems to care about paying money back to the artists. Like Arweet, they regard illegally-uploaded content as something they can use without any cost to themselves or consequences to anyone else.