LOL, so how about, you know, going without it?  Mind-blowing, I know.  I want an Aston Martin.  I can not afford said car.  Therefore I will steal it... Wait, what?  Get over your self-righteous self.

She broke the law.  Stop.  Nothing you say can change that simple fact.  She brought this down upon herself.  You don't like the law, lobby to get it changed.  Just be aware of the consequences of what would happen if they were.  Like the Pirate Party in Europe.  If they get the changes they want through what the hell do you think the music/software industry will do?  They may conclude it is no longer in their interest to stay in Europe.  Then who suffers?

this is why you shouldn't do drugs kids

The jury does not actually set the number, they just sit there and say Guilty or Not Guilty.

The Judge is the one who actually sets sentencing.

Though i really have to agree, $80,000 per song just way too much, i think it would have been more effective to make it a couple of thousand dollars per song, maybe $500 idn, and then collect. i mean, charging someone $1.92 million and not collecting is like finding them guilty of manslaughter and letting them go for time served or with a fine

I have to say that this woman should have still been punished but the amount here is outrageous. It is greedy. And where is that money going anyway? to the record company? yes. to some already rich celebrity whos going to waste it? yes. It just kinda goes to show that this is greed at a higher level than ive ever hoped to see here. Just think about whst those ppl are going to do with that money. Is it going to charity? no. its going into their pockets. its sad, i would have said community service and a fine, but this is over-the-top

Well the money won't go anywhere General.  It's highly unlikely they'll even try to collect when they said they would have been fine with 3-5k in the first place and when they no there's no way that women could ever produce that kind of money.  Honestly Vivendi seems to have been pretty reasonable throughout all of it, the court is the party which acted irresponsibly.

Maybe this case will draw attention to the letter of the law and spark some positive legislative changes.

Given how file sharing services usually work, requiring the entire song to be shared at the same time to qualify as infringement would make infringement impossible to prove. Such services almost never upload entire songs at one time, it is usually fragments from multiple sources which are then reassembled at the receiving end. Trying to prove that any individual uploaded fragments which could be reassembled into the full song is a task beyond impossible - and it could be programmed around, simply by having the program randomly select a fragment of the song that is never uploaded. The missing fragment could be obtained from other users whose program chose a different fragment to never upload.

The usual "fair use" exceptions for short clips simply don't apply when the only intent of the clips is to allow others access to the work without permission or compensation.

I don't believe I have ever said it was justified, or that I expect it to stand; if fact quite the opposite. I am assuming either the judge will reduce the amount in the final ruling or that the case will be settled, as the RIAA has repeatedly offered to do.

The factors involved are the nature of the work, the purpose of the infringement, number of offenses, and damages caused. In this particular case, the jury was also acting on the perceived character of the defendant (willing to shuffle blame onto her kids and/or boyfriend, the hard drive that got mysteriously destroyed shortly after she was informed of the pending suit, various inconsistencies in her story, etc). My personal choice for judgement would have been maybe $10k, with at least a portion of the RIAA legal fees, which would far exceed that $10k.

The original intent of the jury of peers was to insure that evidence used to convict someone be of a reasonable nature to convince a person's neighbors that the person actually was guilty - at the time, the odds of you personally knowing jury members was quite high. It also helped insure that individual prejudice by the judge would no tbe the deciding factor in cases. Then again, that was also back when the law code was quite simple and mostly illiterate farmers could have the relevant laws explained to them easily. The more I see of the jury system the more I am convinced that this system screws over more people than it helps. People's fates are all too often decided by people who pay more attention to CSI than the law. Usually that works in the defendant's favor, but apparently not in this case.

I knew they had offered several times to settle, but never saw a number.

Actually, the main reason she's getting hammered is that she broke the law and refuses to admit it. Taking the offered settlement would have cost her far less and ended the matter months ago. In that sense, yes she brought it down on herself.

The second part is true, the first is not. The $80,000 per song is the amount recommended by the jury, but the judge has the final say in the matter. From what I can tell, he has yet to give that final word.

That is the stated goal of her defense team. Not only that, but to retroactively reverse all the other settlements the RIAA has gotten by suing people like this. I wouldn't be surprised to see them suceed on the legislative change, but I don't expect any change to past settlements. All the previous settlements were on the order of the settlement offer this defendant got, just everyone else has been smart enough to take it.

Have you ever read Runaway Jury by John Grisham? there is/was a practise of rigging juries to get the result you want. you go in for an interview and when they ask you questions to see if you are elligible or not. they sometimes also pick you because you said, oh, i definitly think if you break the law you should be punished, full stop, and because thats the result they want they pick you, if you say, the end justifies the means, and they want conviction, they probably wont choose you.

i think its pathetic. i really think there should be a common-sense clause in the law that states at the jury or judges discretion, a law can be 'bent' or ignored, if the situation demands it. its like saying, i ran the red light because if i didnt that big ole' boulder coming behind me trying to crush me would have killed me.

but did you run the red light sir?

well yes, but if i hadnt i-

thats all thanks no further questions.

and strictly speaking, he broke the law, he needs to pay the fine.

there is precedent (sort of) a self-defense plea in a murder case is like, yeah, she did kill him, but if she hadnt she'd have died herself so out of the two i guess its better to have her.

but still, the amount of fine tooth combing they go through to make ABSOLUTELY SURE there was NO OTHER WAY to have saved her life without killing him is just insulting. the man wanted to commit murder... and you are still worried about the sanctity of his life/soul?

the Jewish have a saying: Thou shall not eat pork, but if you are dying of hunger in the desert and a pig walks past, theres no need to stand on tradition.

basically, yeah, there are these laws, but i think god will understand if you had to kill him to save yourself

sorry, [/rant] now

There are such provisions in the law. A man arrested for murder here last week was released when further investigation substantiated his claim that he fatally stabbed the "victim" while the guy was assaulting a woman in front of him. Self defense or coming to the aid of a third person are grounds for a "justified homicide" ruling. In this incident it hadn't even gotten to trial yet, the prosecutor simply dropped the charges.

I have also heard of a woman getting off a drunk driving charge because she was fleeing the scene of an assault where she reasonably believed her life was in danger, and driving even while intoxicated was a reasonable response to the situation.

In this case, though, there are no such extenuating circumstances. No one was threatened with bodily harm if she didn't share songs over KaZaA. It was done only for her gain, or the gain of others, at the expense of the record companies. The jury judgement is excessive, but a fairly hefty judgement of some sort is virtually assured.

well duh. i wasnt saying the precedent for dropping a homicide charge should apply to downloading music, i was saying though, that instead of blindly following the law, in all cases, someone needs to take a step back and think. what the sam f**k are we doing? i mean really, what sort of message is sent by fining her nearly $2 million for 24 songs? especially if the company does not even intent to collect...

its like, in Australia, we had this bird flu scare. they said on the news the airports are going to put infra-red scanners at all customs points so anyone with a fever will be detected and tested. but they said right up front, ITS NOT FOOLPROOF, its only going to catch a percentage, but its a start.

2-3 weeks later we get some dickhead expert smugly saying: the customs officials are idiots, it does not pick up every case. um... yeah, but we always knew that?

big, grandiose band-aid fix which keeps the people off the backs of the politicians until they can come up with their next sleight of hand trick

same thing here. i mean i hadnt even heard of this fine until now, but i really have no respect for the courts or the record companies if they decide to 'make an example' of someone, just so they can keep up appearances

i think charging her a few thousands of dollars and collecting would have been worthwhile. and what would have been better would be to put that money right into anti-pirating efforts (technology, advertising, etc)

instead, the government etc did what it usually does. big glamourous band-aid fixes and scare tactics

yay democracy =P

okay, thats not fair, i prefer democracy to other styles of government, but seriously, how can we trust those we elect to lead and govern us if they are going to look after themselves before us?

I know this was posted a few days ago but when i say it i was like WTF!?

What strikes me as funny is that we hear every day how we should be responsible for things we put on the internet, on myspace and facebook and all those other sites. If people dont want their songs to be stolen....dont put them online. Granted, you can easily buy a CD at a store then copy the music to your computer and then put it on the internet, but many musicians put their own music online.

If the poor lady should have been forced to pay anything, it should have been the cost of the product she stole, God knows those 24 songs weren't worth that much money. Even if it was because of punitive damages, you can collect punitive damages if the defendant committed whatever action with the intent of causing harm. I'm sure this lady wasnt SO grieved by the music industry that she sought to cripple them financially and shame them so ignominiously by downloading 24 songs off the internet. Hardly seems like a reasonable grounds for punitive damages

I don't know how many times I've said this. IT WASN'T THE GOVERNMENT. It was the jury, 12 people whose only qualification is that they aren't legal professionals. Yes, the law allows for massive damages in such cases, but those are supposed to apply to violations that deserve them; had she been selling rather than sharing and making a profit from them this amount might have been justified. The law  also provides for far smaller damages for lesser offenses; although it is important to note that for copyright infringement, no knowledge of the infraction is required to be held liable. You can quite literally be sued for something you didn't know you did, or you knew you did but didn't know was illegal.

From the RIAA's perspective, this was the second-worst possible outcome of the case. Worst case was her being cleared despite (from what I can tell, anyway) completely damning evidence. This case would then have been used in every other case they ever filed. This outcome was bad enough, painting what had otherwise been quiet settlements into public perception of massive strong-arm tactics. Yes, they have a really big stick to wave at those they sue, but all previous cases they collected on were settled long before they ever went this far.

And if this was the second-worst outcome for RIAA, it was second best for the defense team (not the defendant, bu ther legal team). Now they get to show the country the tyranical RIAA using the big stick to beat a defenseless single mother. Great for their cause, not so good for their client

Technically, there are no punative damages in this case, but the set statutory damages are intentionally set to be high enough to be punative in their own right.

The problem with your proposal is that it provides no disincentive for her or anyone else to discontinue pirating. If the only thing that happens is you have to pay for the song, there is no reason to NOT pirate; at worst, it would cost you exactly the purchase price. This is the equivalent of saying the penalty for shoplifting should just be paying for the item if you get caught, or the penalty for speeding to be having the cop keep you stopped just long enough to be late to whatever you were speeding to.

^  Sounds good to me.  

As I said earlier: You cannot catch ALL of the criminals, so you HAVE to charge the ones you do catch outrageously in order to deter others from doing said crime.

Also, again, you CANNOT change what has already happened, and shedding tears over it is nothing but a waste of time and energy.

Koda0 (^)

Now I am somewhat indifferent either way as I don't download music, the few albums I know I want I purchase for the rediculious price retail stores want, thankfully it's a small handful of albums a year.

That said, incidents like this make me VERY glad to live in a country like Canada where thus far the government hasen't allowed the companies to perform such absurd acts, privacy and the ISP's obligation to protect consumer privacy reigns supreme... at least for now anyways.

As rediculious as this is, maybe it will inspire others to think twice about doing it, no matter how criminal the record companies/RIAA may be. Also as someone else pointed out, in this case the jury was largly responsible for the outrageous ending, however in many other cases it is the companies.

I'm fairly certain your privacy laws are about the same as ours: if enough evidence of illegal activities is presented to a judge, he can order the ISP to identify the consumer or risk being charged with contempt or as an accessory.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tories-seek-to-widen-police-access-online/article1187507/

For Chevyboy

Not at all, file sharing allows for *accessibility* principles which are completely different than obtaining an OBJECT -- physical, solid like a CD engraved with songs.

The technology was implemented with very particular weaknesses that opened up theft activities & opportunities.

What the industries (plural) are doing is trying to figure out who's responsible for LETTING people download free items; clearly in my mind, the ISP providers. And by going the Justice ways and seeking penalty payments FROM people, they still fail at sueing the right "device".

How is it that the guns manufacturer isn't as much an incentive to killing than murderers using *it*? Knowing this analogy; file sharing *PROGRAMS* are left or kept online (by ISP) to be used or not by people.

Thus, record companies should seek damages from "tools" created by programmers & supported (or tolerated, btw) by ANY and all international communication companies rather than the public since we PAY for internet access.

That's a completely false analogy, at least as applied to the US. The vast majority of guns used in crime are purchased legally, and the gun seller is prosecuted only when clear negligence can be proven. As with any other tool that can be used to kill someone, the ultimate responsibility for the act lies with the user.

The ISPs, as far as I know, are held nearly blameless - assuming they cooperate with investigations as mentioned previously. Your ISP cannot be expected to monitor every byte that goes into or out of your computer; and if they somehow could, people would be screaming Big Brother and suing for violation of privacy (with good reason).

Now if you want to argue for disabling the websites and indexing services such as KaZaA or The Pirate Bay, this is a valid argument. Unfortunately, as The Pirate Bay recently showed, when threatened with prosecution they jump borders to a country where they can operate without such laws. Governments still address them when possible (napster and grokster both come to mind), but overall the only people available to persue are the end users. In the end, they are responsible for what they download. "Just because I could" is not a valid defense.

Not so, and by far.

The Canadian health care system is paid exclusively & entirely by the Canadian workforce with our income taxes, federal & provincial. Even in Québec, we have been (since the mid 60's, IIRC) investing HUGE amounts of specific benefits pulled off our salaries to cover any and all costs of OUR local health care systems. Every attempts at privatization failed and will continue to fail. The universal public system we have paid and are paying for is not for sale to ANYBODY.

There have been illegal patients who even received treatments here FREE by identity theft and false "cards" over the years. It's called border crossing for a week or more (we nicknamed that stuff, tourists healing) and snatch fake documents from criminals. When caught, we jail them as you do in the US.

Research here is done in Universities for the most part... and, i'll even claim that many Canadian innovations were bought or financed by pharmaceutical corporations (be it US based, for profits or not).

Laws do not create profits, ingenuity or decisions by people does.

Partners in crime when abusive penalties are enforced by Law.

How about actual costs of the products in question plus the company's legal fees. ie.: the cost of the product plus the extra costs the owner incurred to make to get the money the culprit owed them. I think it works the some way for debt collection agencies, and it gives a nice comparison: the culprit simply owed the company money for the files downloaded and failed to pay up, so the company simply set things in motion to collect the money owed for the products the culprit obtained. 

The amount of typical legal fees should be more than enough to function as the deterrent part, and the value of the files is reasonable, so there is no reason to cry foul over excessive punishement. (the real pain coming from cost of the trouble the company had to go through because the culprit would not pay up normally. ie. the part they brought on themselves)

Now compare the price your system pays for American prescription drugs to what we pay. The actual cost of the prescription drugs your system depends on is subsidized by the American people. Your government commits price fixing on a criminal scale, dictating exactly what they are willing to pay for drugs, with the threat of simply ignoring patents if a company doesn't accept the set price. That is why, in 2000 (chosen because I found numbers for that year fastest) R&D spending on drugs was 34 times higher in the US compared to Canada. Hell, Canada has the lowest R&D spending of the 8 countries they compared.

You probably don't have the news report the outrage from the drug companies whenever someone suggests reimportation as a solution to the precription drug price problems the US has. It's bad enough they have to supply a nation ~10% the population of the US at break-even prices, if the US went to that type of pricing most companies would not be able to finance future research. For a good comparison of what would happen, look at how Carter did when he fixed gas prices in the 70's.

http://www.pmprb-cepmb.gc.ca/CMFiles/ss-0217e14HCB-492003-5262.pdf Take a look at figure 1 on page 11, and remember these numbers are from a Canadian government source.

This is quite simply bullshit. Ingenuity and hard work are also required, but a favorable legal environment is the difference between a company being profitable or not. Labor regulations, taxes, environmental codes, and litigation potential are all huge factors in the success or failure of any buisiness, certainly one in an industry as highly regulated as drugs.

Zyxpsilon, I think you may not know what an ISP is. They are not the web site hosting the the file sharing service, they are the network hub your computer connects to for access to the internet. To hold the ISP responsible for allowing piracy would require them to have both the capability and legal authority to inspect every file that travels to and from every computer on their network.

Holding the WEBSITE responsible is a different matter, as they do have this authority and capacity (ro at least the capacity to remove illegal files when discovered). But as I said earlier, they tend to move their servers somewhere out o fthe jurisdiction of whoever is trying to shut them down, or they start other servers that have to be tracked down from scratch. They are a worthwhile goal for prosecution, but it is not physically possible to wipe them all out.