10/04/2007, 8:20pm, EDT
Thursday, October 4thLabels win $220K lawsuit for music sharing
In a major win for record companies seeking to establish precedent for prosecuting those who trade copyrighted material on the Internet, a federal jury awarded six firms $222,000 in damages from a Minnesota woman who shared music online. Jammie Thomas, 30, was ordered to pay $9,250 for each of 24 songs that were part of the case. The complaint alleged that she had shared 1,702 copyright-violating songs online. The Associated Press quotes Richard Gabriel, lead attorney for the music companies: "This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK."
As the first lawsuit of its kind to go to trial (others were settled out-of-court for much less), it accuses Thomas of downloading songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas claimed she didn't have a Kazaa account, and denied any wrongdoing. Her lawyer said that the companies never proved "Jammie Thomas, a human being, got on her keyboard and sent out these things."
Earlier this week, Sony BMG's current stance on piracy labeled even typical fair use practices as illegal, according to testimony from one of the company's legal experts in the Thomas anti-piracy lawsuit. Litigation head Jennifer Pariser remarked during the case that any instance of copying songs from one medium to another was considered stealing, regardless of whether the listener had already bought the music or a common understanding of fair use, which is not enshrined in law but has been established as a legal precedent. Among the record companies involved in the suit are Sony, Arista, Interscope, UMG, Capitol Inc. and Warner Bros.
Record companies have filed about 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 over file-sharing.
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12 jurors took 5 hours to find her guilty. They obviously though the evidence was solid - her IP address, her modem’s MAC address, her UserID... case closed.
CVB
Musicians, dump your record companies and sell your music on your own!
I am sure this will not put a dent in the illegal practice, BUT am waiting for the vermin to explain their practice of not only stealing, but then sharing so they can make criminals of their friends and relatives.
I don't like Sony's stance on fair use, however. If I own a CD, I should be allowed to rip it to my iPod.
second. . . anybody see a bankruptcy filing in the future?
They'll get nothing close to that in terms of money, but they certainly did get the message across. Seems they got exactly what they wanted.
third. . .stealing music is justifiable because it makes you feel cool. I don't really believe that, but so many people were asking for some justification, I thought I'd toss one out there.
Seriously though, it seems to me that the record companies can fight these battles until they are blue in the face, they will eventually have to recognize that a different model is needed. Many indies actually like to have their music heard, and not because each play or cd purchase earns them a specific amount of money, but because that's why they made it, and because the more people that hear it, the more will (theoretically) want to hear it, and the more will buy it. The internet allows for much freer transfer of data, and the old requirements of the brinck and mortar store with hard copy cds is getting far less relevant.
The record companies want to have the same pricing model as has always existed, without actually providing the necessary service they used to provide.
All that being said, people can share their music illegally, and the record companies are perfectly in their rights to spank them with a lawsuit when they do.