Woman Ordered to Pay $222,000 in File-Sharing Case

[RamboLiberal]

Source: ABC News

In the first lawsuit over file sharing to make it to court, a jury ordered a woman who record labels claimed illegally shared songs to pay the labels $222,000.

The lawsuit, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the record label lobbying organization, accused Jammie Thomas of sharing more than 1,700 songs on the now defunct peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa. The suit contended that Thomas violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by distributing songs for free that belonged to the record labels.

"We welcome the jury's decision," the RIAA said in an e-mailed statement following the decision. "The law here is clear, as are the consequences for breaking it. As with all our cases, we seek to resolve them quickly in a fair and reasonable manner.

"When the evidence is clear, we will continue to bring legal actions against those individuals who have broken the law," the statement continued. "This program is important to securing a level playing field for legal online music services and helping ensure that record companies are able to invest in new bands of tomorrow."



Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3691170&page=1

[populistdriven]

1. Thanks RIAA and the Politicians who Help them!!!

WJC Pres. Statement on signing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-53449111.html


50 Politicians Who Take Campaign Money From The RIAA

http://consumerist.com/consumer/worst-company-in-america/contact-information-for-50-politicians-who-take-campaign-money-from-the-riaa-264638.php

Dist 19-FL WEXLER, ROBERT DEM
$9,000
Dist 21-TX SMITH, LAMAR REP
$7,500
Senate-UT HATCH, ORRIN G REP
$6,000
Senate-PA SPECTER, ARLEN REP
$5,000
Senate-AK STEVENS, THEODORE F REP
$5,000
Senate-NE NELSON, E BENJAMIN DEM
$5,000
Senate-CA FEINSTEIN, DIANNE DEM
$4,000
Dist 45-CA BONO, MARY REP
$4,000
Senate-FL NELSON, BILL DEM
$4,500
Dist 08-FL KELLER, RICHARD A REP
$4,054
Dist 07-NJ FERGUSON, MIKE REP
$4,000
Dist 28-CA BERMAN, HOWARD L DEM
$3,500
Dist 29-CA SCHIFF, ADAM DEM
$3,000
Dist 30-CA WAXMAN, HENRY A. DEM
$3,000
Dist 07-MO BLUNT, ROY REP
$3,100
Dist 06-TN GORDON, BARTON JENNINGS DEM
$3,000
Dist 06-VA GOODLATTE, ROBERT W. REP
$3,500
Senate-IL OBAMA, BARACK DEM
$2,000
Dist 14-IL HASTERT, DENNIS J. REP
$2,000
Dist 07-MA MARKEY, EDWARD J MR. DEM
$2,000
Dist 05-MD HOYER, STENY HAMILTON DEM
$2,000
Dist 14-MI CONYERS, JOHN JR. DEM
$2,000
Dist 03-MS PICKERING, CHARLES W REP
$2,000
Senate-NY CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM DEM
$2,000
Senate-TN CORKER, ROBERT P JR REP
$2,000
Dist 07-TN BLACKBURN, MARSHA REP
$2,000
Dist 06-TX BARTON, JOE LINUS REP
$2,000
Senate-AL SHELBY, RICHARD C REP
$1,000
Senate- AR
PRYOR, MARK LUNSFORD DEM
$1,000
Dist 10- CA
TAUSCHER, ELLEN O DEM
$1,000
Dist 22- CA
MCCARTHY, KEVIN
REP
$1,000
Dist 49-CA ISSA, DARRELL EDWARD REP
$1,000
Dist 14-FL MACK, CONNIE REP
$1,500
Dist 05-IL EMANUEL, RAHM DEM
$1,000
Senate-LA VITTER, DAVID REP
$1,000
Dist 06-MI UPTON, FREDERICK STEPHEN REP
$1,000
Senate-MS LOTT, TRENT REP
$1,000
Dist 06-NC COBLE, JOHN HOWARD REP
$1,000
Dist 09-NC MYRICK, SUE REP
$1,000
Dist 02-NE TERRY, LEE REP
$1,811
Dist 07-NY CROWLEY, JOSEPH DEM
$1,000
Dist 10-NY TOWNS, EDOLPHUS DEM
$1,500
Dist 28-NY SLAUGHTER, LOUISE M DEM
$1,000
Dist 05-OH GILLMOR, PAUL E REP
$1,000
Dist 01-OK SULLIVAN, JOHN REP
$1,000
Dist 02-OR WALDEN, GREGORY PAUL REP
$1,000
Dist 01-WA INSLEE, JAY R DEM
$1,000
Senate-SD THUNE, JOHN REP
$1,000
Dist 05-TN COOPER, JAMES H. S. DEM
$1,500

[roguevalley]

24. I imagine this will be like getting blood out of a turnip. Good god.

who has that kinda dough?

[jaybeat]

2. The only thing worse than companies who sue their customers

is juries that go along with them!

:wtf:

[populistdriven]

3. I had hopes that in Duluth there would be a reasonable jury

I hope we never see that wretched Sensenbrenner/Conyers Analog Hole legislation again.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2006/020606backspin.html

[EClark5483]

4. I'm still trying to figure out how it's stealing if

Sony®™ Music has an artist I like, and I download their music on my Sony®™ Viao, and burn it on my Sony®™ CD burner using my Sony®™ blank CD's and the cd copying software provided by Sony®™, and play it on my Sony®™ car stereos mp3 player.

If the RIAA does not want me distributing tracks, they should not try selling me the equipment to do so. Sue me if they must, but I want a refund on all the products of theirs I bought just to listen to said media, and punitive damages for selling me illegal hardware.

I've been stealing..oops, I mean downloading music since 97. I have only purchased 1 cd since then. Nickelback (Sony artist BTW). The only reason I bought their CD was to support the artists. All my other music is downloaded and used, like I said, in my mp3 player.

Why were mp3 players invented? To circumvent piracy? Hell no... to make a quick buck.

This case is just another BS story of greedy RIAA execs all pissed off that a consumer isn't lining their pocket by buying a CD.. Hey bud, what about all that other shit you sold me just to listen to this illegal stuff that would have been confined to my PC otherwise?

[populistdriven]

5. If you look at the last line of Bill's Signing Statement, it is tragically ironic

The DMCA has been mostly used to ruin the finances of lower income Americans.

"Through enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have done our best to protect from digital piracy the copyright industries that comprise the leading export of the United States.

William J. Clinton

The White House, October 28, 1998."

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-53449111.html

[high density]

9. Yeah the DMCA stopped all that piracy in Asia!

I mean, it has stopped that piracy... right? I assume that they must have succeeded in stopping all of that piracy, given that they've now got the time to target individuals in the USA.

[Javaman]

21. A buddy of mine travels to Malaysia almost monthly...

There are literary dozens and dozens of shops selling nothing but bootlegged stuff.

It's a million if not billion dollar industry over there. and yet the crooked music bastards here go after someone that downloaded 1700 songs.

Just unreal.

[Celebration]

6. No doubt

She is being made a scapegoat. Still, there are good reasons to have strong copyright laws, and good reasons to enforce them.

[starroute]

10. And there are even better reasons to have leaky ones

I don't have the links at my fingertips, but it isn't hard to find the arguments online. In the Middle Ages, when knowledge was closely held trade secrets of the guilds, progress stagnated. It was only when all that locked-up knowledge got loose that the modern era was able to begin.

Copyright itself is a trade-off -- a way of convincing those who have control of artistic and scientific innovations not to hoard them for themselves alone. But the whole idea is to provide a steady flow of new knowledge into the public domain, and that isn't happening. The current copyright system is broken and has become dedicated to locking up creative work for 50, 75, potentially as much as 150 years after its creation.

Even beyond copyright, there's a need for a certain leakiness. Fair use is a recognized form of permissible leakiness -- one that allows critics and reviewers to discuss existing works, and other artists to reference them.

But even technically illegal forms of leakiness are vital to keep the system moving along. For example, the software that 15-year-olds are pirating today is likely to be the same software they buy and get their employers to buy 10 or 15 years from now. Substitute "developing nations" and the same equation applies. (This is why many people say Microsoft is cutting its own throat with its attempts to lock down its users to legitimate copies of its programs.)

Somehow the music industry has become so fixated on "mine, mine, mine" that it no longer understands any of this. For example, it regularly forces the takedown of song lyrics and chord tablatures -- no doubt reasoning that if teenagers can learn to sing and play a song themselves they won't feel any need to buy it on CD. It's doing its best to kill Net radio so that it can protect its ability to determine which songs will be played and which will go unheard, in preference to allowing people to actually decide what they want to hear.

All of this is the result of the notion that strong copyright laws are somehow an unmitigated blessing, and that bankrupting anybody who violates then is necessarily a good thing for artists and other creators.

I suppose there were people who felt the same way about the Dred Scott decision. But they were on the wrong side of history, and so is the RIAA.

[Occulus]

22. I must disagree, given the situation that reared its head just today

Copy protection is not only unnecessary- at least for games, as blockbusters like Oblivion and Galactic Civilizations II conclusively prove- it is thoroughly useless and often completely counterproductive. I recently bought Bioshock (and I'm almost through it! Tonight we may dine on ham and jammies!); my roommate just today bought the Shivering Isles expansion pack for Oblivion. Both games have the 2K Games logo on the box; they are the developer of Bioshock and are also involved with this expansion of Oblivion.


Bioshock is honestly really awesome; it's a bit like a kick in the nuts that lasts. Sadly, it has an undisclosed piece of malware on the DVD called SecuRom. The malware is present to prevent people from making illegal copies of the game. I use the term "malware" for a reason. Keep reading...

"Great," some of you may be thinking, "wonderful. They're taking a proactive step to protect their intellectual property rights." The problem is, while that may be their goal, the presence of SecuRom is undisclosed, both on the box and in the End User License Agreement (EULA). It is never mentioned, and the user gets no option to cancel the install because they've discovered the game uses SecuRom prior to installing it.

As if that were not bad enough, the version of SecuRom they are using takes a hardware fingerprint and sends it of... somewhere, in order to verify the install is genuine, and then downloads a file needed to complete the installation from a 2K server. On top of all this, SecuRom installs itself into the Windows registry- silently- and does not remove itself when BioShock is removed.

The cherry on the sundae? You're only allowed five installs of the game. No, not on five separate computers.

Five installs. Period.

You can ask them nicely for more than that- they themselves raised it due to user complaints... from an original two installs- but there's no guarantee at all they'll give you more, even though they claim to happily do so. I think it was a PC Gamer reviewer that castigated 2K in his review because he couldn't test it on all the hardware he needed to- which involves installing the game many, many times on many, many different PC configurations.

Some users are unable to play the game at all because of SecuRom even weeks after purchase, and another user on 2K's own forums tells of how he was trying to make a drive image to backup his hard disk, and the mere presence of SecuRom on the drive was enough to bring an end to the attempt. SecuRom also doesn't play well with virus scanners (they see it as a system intrusion... hmmm.....) and a utility called Process Explorer, which apparently can be used to find and shut down hidden system processes.

Several users on the 2K forums have filed complaints with the FTC. I'm considering just that myself.

Yesterday, my roommate went out and bought an expansion for Oblivion called "Shivering Isles". Once again, a 2K game, but the original Oblivion DVD doesn't include SecuRom and, somehow, managed to become one of the best PC role playing games ever. "Wonderful," we thought, "since Oblivion has no form of copy protection at all, it stands to reason that this expansion won't, either."

Wrong. Shivering Isles uses.... wait for it.... SecuRom. And get this: it seems to use a version that either doesn't work with Bioshock's version of SecuRom, or is in fact broken outright out of the box. And guess what? SecuRom isn't disclosed on the exterior of this expansion, and- surprise!- causes the expansion pack he bought to be uninstallable. Users on the forums provide several "fixes" which are mildly to hideously technical for the average PC users (things like making a .iso from a DVD and mounting it on a virtual drive aren't things average users often learn how to do). 2K quite literally stole my roommate's cash, and as he is on a fixed income he is not amused. I'm helping him to try and get it to even install, but the sad irony here is that to do so I'm probably going to have to technically break the law... to use a legitimately purchased product.

An even sadder irony is, those who completely broke the law and downloaded cracked pirate copies of both Bioshock and the Oblivion expansion aren't having any of these issues because cracked copies, by definition, strip the copy protections from the install process. Had we "stolen" the Oblivion expansion, my roommate wouldn't be out $20. Triple that for me if I had downloaded Bioshock instead of paying for it with my hard-earned cash- even though I myself had no problems with that game.

I don't think I'll be buying any games from 2K ever again. This is twice now that I've seen them install undisclosed third-party software that is known to cause problems, they are not providing a remove tool, SecuRom is uncooperative on the subject of removing their software (i.e., once it's there, it's there)...

We need to make this shit illegal. the only people being hurt are the legitimate, paying customers. When it takes about a week for a cracked copy to appear, one wonders if the prices would be lower if they didn't pay for the SecuRom license in the first place. I know if my roommate had broken the law instead of being a paying customer, he'd have a working copy instead of a $20 coaster.

[Solon]

23. As far as I can tell, copy protections for software an an inconvenience at best, and a security...

risk at worst. My experience with it has been as an inconvenience, I bought GTA: San Andreas, before the "Hot Coffee" fiasco came out, for my PC. Single DVD, inserted it in my DVD drive, did a full install, then tried to run it, no dice, wouldn't recognize its own DVD that's in my drive. So I went to Rockstar's website, and it said that you need a firmware update for your DVD drive to make the copy protection work. So I went to Sony's website(before the Sony copy protection/hack fiasco), and looked for the firmware update, problem was, my drive was practically brand new, and there was NO firmware update for the drive.

So I decided to say fuck it, broke federal law and downloaded a "no disc" crack of the San Andreas binary. The fact that I had to bother doing this is just atrocious. Compare this to yet another of my games, Neverwinter Nights, another retail game, and a good RPG itself. I installed it on both Linux and Windows, and since its latest official update, it doesn't even BOTHER checking whether a disk is even in my damned DVD drive. Under Linux, it never checked, and I never had problems with it under Windows when related to disc checks.

The problem is that laws such as the DMCA are roadblocks to legitimate customers of software and hardware products, to be frank about it, I should do what I want, when I want, with any product I legitimately buy. Another excellent example would be DeCSS for Linux, for some reason Windows has some technical problems with TV-Out, to be frank, its a damned inconvenience to set up, I blame Nvidia for that, but under Linux, it runs much better and logically than under Windows(separate X-Windows session under the TV-Screen). So, for convenience's sake, I play DVD movies under Linux, and the ONLY way to do that is to break federal law. That tells you that something is seriously wrong with the law.

[starroute]

26. My son had a similar problem a couple of years ago

It was with one of the Star Wars games. He bought a legitimate copy, tried everything imaginable, and it still refused to run.

He finally called technical support, and they told him to -- wait for it -- uninstall his CD drive and mail it to Germany so they could study it.

At that point, he downloaded a cracked version. Played fine, no hassles, happy ending.

[Solon]

27. The only problem with downloading some of that cracked stuff...

is the risk of downloading something that is virus or malware infected. Always get a virus checker and scan those files, it'll save you a lot of hassle.

[nodehopper]

14. yes, like patents on AIDS drugs.

[everydayis911]

7. Thank God they caught her

The poor RIAA loses money everyday you little bastards steal music :sarcasm: "Damn you iPod" I feel the same if they didn't lure people to easier ways to copy music then this shit wouldn't happen. But this jury should check their own computers before they find someone guilty of committing the same crime their 14 year old is.

[high density]

8. Sounds like she got screwed

The RIAA couldn't prove that anybody downloaded the files. Where's the copyright infringement if there is no proof that the sharing took place?

What next, random people convicted of murder simply because they own a gun or a knife?

[DUyellow]

11. i say we donate some money to her

[Xenotime]

16. That's a good idea...you know she would vote dem.

[ButterflyBlood]

17. Yeah. If you want to reach her, here's her myspace

http://myspace.com/tereastarr

[mark414]

12. maybe if the labels would put out a product worth paying for,

people would be willing to fork over the cash

on that note, at least 50% of my music collection would have never, ever been purchased (or even heard of), if it weren't for "illegally" downloaded music

[MadBadger]

13. Im trying to figure out how 1700 songs equals 222,000 dollars

Im pretty sure songs arent more than 100 dollars a piece.

[Mojambo]

15. 220 thousand... Whew! That should JUST keep the record companies out of bankruptcy!

Close one!

Fuck the RIAA. Support independent music.

[Jaap]

18. Bills, bills, bills..

..(Destiny's Child) was one of the songs she shared..

[Gravel2008]

19. The RIAA are pure SCUM. I piss on them and their pathetic little law

In the end, they will lose. File sharing cannot be stopped. This shit is "home-taping is killing music" all over again. Get with the times or get out of my fucking way, RIAA.

[annabanana]

20. A Phyrric Victory

All they did was piss off customers. My kid and their friends just torrent everything now anyway. Is is apparently past time for a brand new business model.

Performance centered.

[populistdriven]

25. I hope Clinton sees that "RIAA" is the most hated company in America not Halliburton.

[superconnected]

28. The gal said she only had 24 songs on her site and she said on the news that they brought nobody

forward to prove that anybody had downloaded any of the songs.

She said she didn't think she could get in trouble because they couldn't prove anybody downloaded anything.

I'm soooo against this and the riaa scum.

[Progressive Friend]

29. To hell with the RIAA

And the jury.