The RIAA won against Jammie Thomas but that success may not be repeated
By Jonathan Schlaffer
You may be familiar with our coverage of just about everything involving Jammie Thomas but what we have not touched on yet is exactly why the RIAA was able to win the case. In many cases the RIAA urges the accused to settle out of court for a couple thousand dollars and be done with it but when it comes to going to court, the RIAA will only go with cases that it knows it can win without a doubt.
Enter the Jammie Thomas case, which was a slam dunk for the prosecution. ArsTechnica points out the reasons that it was so easy for the prosecution to convince the jury that she was guilty.
The most obvious is that she used the online alias “terrastarr” for some 14 years, I don’t know about you but the only reason to use the same user name for 14 years is to keep in touch with friends and you never, ever use that name for other sites, ever.
Terrarstarr became her user name for her Windows XP account and her Match.com profile with a picture of her Windows XP start menu. That, actually, none of this is a very intelligent thing to do, under any circumstance.
The defense attorney tried to argue that there might have been more than one computer in the house or more than one user on the computer. The problem with that was the ISPs records showed the same device was plugged into the cable modem months before and after the file sharing took place.
A router was not used, remember those not intelligent things to do, add that to the list.
When the MP3 files were examined, the ID3 tags showed the alias of the person who had uploaded the file. I don’t know anyone that when a file is downloaded that doesn’t bother to edit the ID3 tag and remove unnecessary tags. The not intelligent things to do list just gets longer and longer.
Somehow the RIAA was able to prove that Thomas was a tech-savvy individual, I don’t know how, though. It seems that being tech-savvy is reduced to knowing how to use Microsoft Office, playing online games and working behind a computer for most of the day.
By my definition, that’s hardly tech-savvy. Any real tech-savvy person would have used a router and possibly some spoofing techniques as well as editing the ID3 tags and not using the same online identity for different sites much less posting images of it. On a scale of being tech-savvy, Thomas is about as far from it as it is possible to get.
The real threats are people that know how to cover their tracks and they are not likely to be caught, if you are currently doing anything that Ms. Thomas did, it’s best that you just stay off of P2P applications because you aren’t as smart as you think.
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Stumble It!
October 9th, 2007
If you want to battle the copyright holders, start with Sony because they are most vulnerable. Boycott everything Playstation. Return ones you already have for necessary or unnecessary warranty service. They will fold because their investment in Playstation is too great to risk