Jury Hands Down Decision in First RIAA Case
By Sean P. Aune
The jury only took four hours to come to its judgment in the Capital Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas case, and while not as bad as it could have been, it still was a distinct victory for one side.
Ars Technica, again, had the most in-depth reporting of the case, and covered everything from the morning on. After a morning debate over jury rule #14, which dealt with defining “sharing” vs “distributing”, the case was handed over to the jury for deliberation.
The jury was only out for four hours before they returned with a decision that Ms. Thomas was indeed guilty of copyright infringement. While the plaintiffs had been asking for $150,000 per song that was found to infringe on copyrights, the jury decided on a sum of $9,250 per song for a total of $222,000.
After the judgement was handed down, Ms. Thomas and her counsel quickly departed the courthouse with only a “no comment” to the press, and the jury was escorted out by court employees so they could avoid the press. The only people to make comments were the plaintiffs which included this warning:
“This does send a message, we hope, that both downloading and distributing music is no joke.”
Ms. Thomas can appeal the case if she chooses, but there has been no announcement as of yet.
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October 4th, 2007
This case’s appeal is going to put a busted ostrich egg in the face of both the judge AND the RIAA. The instructions were clearly outside of the scope of the law, and on top of that, the RIAA never actually proved that DAMAGES occurred. Also, why has no one argued that the DOWNLOADER is responsible for infringement rather than the person “making available?” In the real world, if you make a copy of a CD for someone else, you’re infringing, but if someone makes a copy of a copyrighted item that you, the library, or a rental chain like Blockbuster lends or rents to them, THEY have committed the infringement. There is no feasible way to defeat this analogy. The actual copyright violation occurs not because of the (potentially accidental) availability of the file, but rather because the downloader, copier, or ripper willingly and intentionally chose to make a duplication of the file that would not fall under a fair use exemption.
The jury has essentially made you liable for infringement if your friend borrows a CD from you and decides to rip it without your knowledge or consent before returning it.
I would expect Blockbuster to file an amicus brief for the appeal, because if this ruling is allowed to stand, Blockbuster is “making available” a TON of copyrighted media, and they commit copyright infringement with every rental that chooses to duplicate the rented item. They made it available, after all.
The utter stupidity of the instructions is easily found when the implications of those instructions are applied to all situations that would fall under the wording of those instructions, and that’s why this is going to be one hell of an EASY appeal.
April 16th, 2008
This is pretty ridiculous, really…
April 16th, 2008
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *cough cough* This is SO going to lose on appeal. The racism in this case is amazingly rampant.