$222,000

by Tim Lee on October 4, 2007 · Comments

As predicted, Ms. Thomas lost her file-sharing case and was ordered to pay more than $200 grand to the recording industry. As much as I dislike a lot of what the RIAA does, I can’t work up too much sympathy for the woman.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that $222,000 seems like an excessive amount of money to fine someone for sharing 24 songs. It’s a basic principle of law that damage awards should have some reasonable relationship to the harm caused by the defendant, and it seems highly implausible that making a single song available online could have caused the recording industry anywhere close to $9,250 in lost revenue. Of course, under copyright law, the jury could have fined her 15 times that amount, which would have been completely absurd.

Update: I can’t find details for Minnesota, but just for purposes of comparison, shoplifting less than $500 of merchandise in New Jersey will get you a $10,000 fine. In Massachusetts it’s $1000, and the same is true of Connecticut. Of course, you can also get jail time for shoplifting even small amounts, but I believe that would require a criminal trial and a higher burden of proof. Most of the seem to have a ceiling around $150,000 in fines for stealing merchandise in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Comments Posted in: Copyright

  • Ed Foster has an excellent post on the inequity of this verdict. He reports "The comparisons between two news stories last week struck me as rather telling. You probably saw some of the coverage about a jury decision ordering a Minnesota woman to pay $220,000 for infringing copyright on 24 songs. But you may have missed the FTC's announcement of its successful action against a spyware outfit that's going to cost the offenders $330,000 ... of the $3,595,925 in illicit revenue they earned from their scam. Gee, what message does that send?
    ...
    In other words, both copyright and spyware laws are designed to protect corporate interests, not to protect us.
  • Exactly my sentiments:

    “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.
    Hey RIAA, get a clue! Do you really think Joe Sixpack believes that a $222,000 fine is “fair and reasonable”?

    By the way, you have just:

    1. Sued your own customer,
    2. Made yourself look like a bully,
    3. Made the DMCA enormously less popular,
    4. Strengthened the case for copyright reform

    So just like Dirty Harry said: Go ahead, make my day. The RIAA has engaged in plenty of obfuscation and smoke and mirrors of their own. That is about to end, thanks to the RIAA’s attitude towards their own customers. Thankfully, there are a great many places where you can get great music without supporting the RIAA.

    Just who is the RIAA anyway? They really don’t want you to know, as they are engaging in a highly unpopular and undemocratic activity, so they obfuscate. Look at their website for the answer? Do you think you will find that information on their website? surprise surprise–you will not! But have no fear-wikipedia has unearthed the truth (again!)
    So who are the real members of the RIAA? There are really four members, the others are just there for show, so the RIAA can appear to be something other than the mouthpiece and legal bully for the four large corporations that pay all the bills. Those four are:

    * EMI
    * Sony BMG Music Entertainment
    * Universal Music Group
    * Warner Music Group

    And what is the RIAA doing?

    As the blog Recording Industry vs The People says (and I could have hard put it better myself) people “have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for having computers whose internet accounts were believed to have been used to access peer-to-peer file sharing. In these cases, a cartel of multinational corporations collude to abuse our judicial system, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children.”
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