This! Its completely mental to spend money on lawyers for this. Its a losing proposition, even if the win cases and collect money, The RIAA themselves have stated they have lost money suing people for illegal downloads. Even more is the fact even if they drive it off the net people will still share music it will just happen off line as it did before the Internet came to be. The Time to prevent this from happening is long past, it ended when cassette recorders became cheap and easily acquired and the record companies did nothing to prevent the music from being copied from the Cassettes they put out and their failure to keep up with technology only reinforces the fact they epically blew it. Now days with current tech its even easier to get a free copy of a song, not going to list the ways as i am sure we all know them. Inconclusion its too late to put the cork back in the bottle once the genie has left, and inthis case it left a long time ago.
While it doesn't specify for the second trial, the fact the judge overturned the award (and dropped it to $54K) suggests that one was a jury trial too. So it's the juries in these cases that are levying these massive awards. Even if the record companies did go in and say "we want $63K per song", that doesn't mean the juries have to award it. Hell... ...so, given that their offer was less than half the second judge's order, they can't have been pushing that hard for over $60K per song. Sounds like a good step would be some rules to prevent juries from handing out these sorts of (in the words of the judge in the second trial) "monstrous and shocking" awards.
Is this an example case to scare the public? YOU could be next. She should go buy the albums to the songs she's downloaded (used/ with cash) and pretend she's owned them the whole time. Probably won't help the defense much but it'll make her more of a victim that some big dog may want to help out.
I´m glad this sort of stuff doesn´t happen here. If the cops and courts where to sue people who download stuff here, they would be more clogged than they already are, not to mention justice here moves slooooowwwly.
You mean how he over turned the ruling and lowered the amount as Scantron pointed out in his post where he quoted parts of the article after he had read it http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/general-discussion/336224-heavy-handed.html#post5359446 is what makes the judge mental deficient?
Hah! Nothing! I am wrong. It happens when I try to use big words. I think the judge should have thrown it out of the courtroom. It is a $10k fine to hit a road worker while speeding here. Guess downloading songs is nearly as bad. I kind of agree with the 2nd or 3rd post on the yahoo article. $100+$24 for the songs and they'd be good to go. While this is a good way for that company to make people think about downloading stuff before they do, it'll tarnish their image a bit. Then again, the lady declined the 25k deal so.....
juries are loaded with morons. I see the words "jury nullification" need to be understood by a larger percentage of the populace. But I think we've all learned a valuable lesson here: steal tangible items. If caught, you won't pay much and if you keep it a misdemeanor it's effectively not damaging to you. Tick-tock RIAA. They know their business model is going to die inside of the next 10-15 years, but it seems they literally have no idea how to prevent it or change. - Coeloptera
they always try to hit one person really hard with fines, and then use him/her as an example to the rest. But wtf? Why go after the end-users? you will never fine everyone, and people will continue to do these downloads. Go after the source of the issue, not the end.
So is meddling with a consumer's rootkit to keep them from transferring a song they actually paid for to their computer. - Coeloptera
All I can say is that the floodgates in the U.S. are wide open... and it's ridiculous. The $1.5 Million is an award of damages. However, when you're calculating damages there's something called remoteness. The only way you could get to this ridiculous sum would be to assume that she downloaded $24 worth of songs and then, by sharing them, tracking their proliferation. Essentially, it was have to amount to something 1.5 million downloads resulting from her sharing (assuming that, say, two people downloaded all the songs off her, then two people downloaded and shared, and so on until you get 1.5 million people). However, tracking it that far into the chain, to me, fails remoteness. It's simply too remote to make a legitimate expectation to pay damages. Ultimately, the only penalty that makes sense is for this woman to pay the $24 plus a nominal punitive amount. In law school we're taught how to calculate damages. $24 worth of songs resulting in $1.5 Million in damages is completely ludicrous from a legal as well as a common sense standpoint. Assuming they calculated the damages as I described above it just strikes me as being far too remote. What American courts think they're doing is completely beyond my understanding, and I'm in my final year of law school! It ultimately makes a mockery of the courts and of justice.