Run into some old friends from another group or board? Want to do a little schmoozing, talk over old times? Or just some off topic stuff, then this is the place.
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AFP) – A US jury has ordered a 32-year-old woman to pay nearly two million dollars in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs over the Internet in a high-profile digital piracy case.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from the Minnesota town of Brainerd, was found liable of violating music copyrights for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network to download the songs.
The jury took just under five hours on Thursday to reach its verdict.
It ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay 1.92 million dollars -- or 80,000 dollars per song -- to six record companies:
The verdict will probably get thrown out again but still....
What they stick you for isn't downloading songs, it's uploading them.
Most of the time download software like Kazaa puts everything you download into a certain directory ... it then "serves" that directory to whoever might want to download. That's where people get busted.
S197 wrote:
The verdict will probably get thrown out again but still....
The thing is...
She could have settled for $3000. And the RIAA had her dead to rights. Despite the new hot-shot lawyer she got, she was pretty much cooked before she got to court.
S197 wrote:I'm sure more people will settle now. Still, paying $80,000 in damages for something you can buy for $0.99? That's outrageous.
It's not about the .99. It's about the tens, hundreds, or possibly thousands of people who downloaded the song with her as at least one of their sources.
Demi wrote:
It's not about the .99. It's about the tens, hundreds, or possibly thousands of people who downloaded the song with her as at least one of their sources.
It ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay 1.92 million dollars -- or 80,000 dollars per song -- to six record companies: Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings.
In his closing arguments on Thursday, attorney Timothy Reynolds said Thomas-Rasset had made copyrighted music available to "millions on the Internet" through Kazaa.
Not sure about first judge, but it had to be part of the consideration for the judge and jury.
People need to get with the times. p2p programs are unnecessary now. Plus anyone who uses something like Kazaa is just asking for trouble (not to mention the spyware it comes packaged with)
For those in the know, nowadays it's all about doing google searches for blogspot posts. i.e. "artist name album title blogspot"
A book company, known for putting out absurdly overpriced role-playing books, most notably Dungeons and Dragons books.
If they stick somebody for 8 grand for dollar songs I think they sell me and my family into slavery in a Dwarven mine for hijacking 25, 30, 35+ dollar books.
Thanks for telling me about that blogspot thing, though.
