RIAA gets pound of flesh in court case win
I just finished reading this Ars Technica article detailing the case Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, where a jury delivered 24 guilty counts of infringement after four hours of deliberation and two days of testimony. Because the infringement was determined willful, they awarded $9,250 in statutory damages per song, for a total of $222,000 in damages.
Jammie Thomas, a single mother, was identified by MAC and IP address, and her KaZaa username tereastarr which she used with other websites. Interestingly, the plaintiff’s made the argument that the “eclectic musical tastes” reflected in the KaZaa shared music folder were consistent with Jammie Thomas’s actual tastes.
The New York Times reports the actually scary, precedent-setting part of this case:
Michael J. Davis of Federal District Court, ruled in the industry’s favor on a hotly contested technical question, saying that for jurors to find her liable, the record labels did not have to prove that songs on Ms. Thomas’s computer had actually been transmitted to others online. Rather, the act of making them available could be viewed as infringement, the judge ruled.
I hope this is appealed, as loaning a CD to a friend is also an act of making “music available for copying,” and the precedent is both technically incorrect and stifling to freedoms Americans take for granted.