Nate Anderson via Ars Technica; Thomas verdict: willful infringement, $1.92 million penalty:
"A new lawyer, a new jury, and a new trial were not enough to save Jammie Thomas-Rasset. In a repeat of the verdict from her first federal trial, Thomas-Rasset was found liable for willfully infringing all 24 copyrights controlled by the four major record labels at issue in the case. The jury awarded the labels damages totaling a whopping $1.92 million. As the dollar amount was read in court, Thomas-Rasset gasped and her eyes widened...
[Defense Attorney Kiwi] Camara acknowledged the [record labels] settlement offer and said that his side would certainly investigate it, but he made clear that he intends to file numerous motions if Thomas-Rasset wants to continue the fight. Motions on the constitutionality of such massive damages and other issues can still be filed with the judge, and then there's the entire matter of an appeal.
Thomas-Rasset sounds inclined to fight on. The case was "one for the RIAA, not the end of the war," she said.
As for Camara, he intends to press ahead with his class-action lawsuit against the recording industry, in which he will take up the daunting task of trying to claw back all the money that the recording industry has collected in the course of its legal campaign to date.
A vigorous defense from Kiwi Camara and Joe Sibley was not enough to sway the jury, which had only to find that a preponderance of the evidence pointed to Thomas-Rasset. The evidence clearly pointed to her machine, even correctly identifying the MAC address of both her cable modem and her computer's Ethernet port. When combined with the facts about her hard drive replacement (and her failure to disclose those facts to the investigators), her "tereastarr" username, and the new theories that she offered yesterday for the first time in more than three years, jurors clearly remained unconvinced by her protestations of innocence.
Camara suspects that the jury thought Thomas-Rasset was a liar and were "angry about it," thus leading to the $80,000 per-song damages.
The case is a reminder that in civil trials, simply raising some doubt about liability is not enough; lawyers need to raise lots of doubt to win the case, and Camara and Sibley were unable to do so here.
The jury found Thomas-Rasset's conduct to be willful, which means that statutory damages under the Copyright Act can range from $750 per infringement up to $150,000. In his closing statement, defense lawyer Joe Sibley made clear that even the minimum award would run $18,000 (24 songs x $750 = $18,000), an amount that he said was unfair and crippling to Thomas-Rasset. The jury decided that the per-song penalty would be $80,000, for a total damage award of $1.92 million, over $1.7 million more than the award in her first trial."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-retrial-verdict.ars
Showing posts with label disproportionate damages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disproportionate damages. Show all posts
Friday, June 19, 2009
Music Labels Win $2 Million in Web Case; New York Times, 6/18/09
Bloomberg News via New York Times: Music Labels Win $2 Million in Web Case:
"The Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, and other record labels were awarded $1.92 million on Thursday in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of swapping music over the Kazaa Internet service.
The federal jury in Minneapolis said the woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd, should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs that were posted on the site so others could download them.
The first time the case went to trial, in 2007, a jury awarded $9,250 a song, or $222,000."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/business/media/19music.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=jammie%20thomas&st=cse
"The Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, and other record labels were awarded $1.92 million on Thursday in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of swapping music over the Kazaa Internet service.
The federal jury in Minneapolis said the woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd, should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs that were posted on the site so others could download them.
The first time the case went to trial, in 2007, a jury awarded $9,250 a song, or $222,000."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/business/media/19music.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=jammie%20thomas&st=cse
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Jammie Thomas takes the stand, admits to major misstep; Ars Technica, 6/16/09
Nate Anderson via Ars Technica; Jammie Thomas takes the stand, admits to major misstep:
"Did she do it? That's for the jury to decide. But the bigger question is whether the process itself—the threat of life-altering damage awards, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, the time and exposure of a federal trial—is truly a proportional, equitable response to online copyright infringement?
Not even the judge who must preside over this case believes that the answer to that question is "yes." Writing an unusually pointed order granting Thomas-Rasset a new trial last year, Judge Michael Davis, Chief Justice of the Minnesota District Court, wrote these extraordinary words:
While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs’ claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far‐reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent...
The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer‐ to‐peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court. The Court begins its analysis by recognizing the unique nature of this case. The defendant is an individual, a consumer. She is not a business. She sought no profit from her acts... The Court does not condone Thomas’s actions, but it would be a farce to say that a single mother’s acts of using Kazaa are the equivalent, for example, to the acts of global financial firms illegally infringing on copyrights in order to profit...
Despite his opinion, Davis may well preside over another guilty verdict this week; if so, he won't be able to throw it out thanks to a "making available" jury instruction this time around—a fact that perhaps accounts for his perpetual grumpy frown during the trial."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-takes-the-stand-admits-to-major-misstep.ars
"Did she do it? That's for the jury to decide. But the bigger question is whether the process itself—the threat of life-altering damage awards, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, the time and exposure of a federal trial—is truly a proportional, equitable response to online copyright infringement?
Not even the judge who must preside over this case believes that the answer to that question is "yes." Writing an unusually pointed order granting Thomas-Rasset a new trial last year, Judge Michael Davis, Chief Justice of the Minnesota District Court, wrote these extraordinary words:
While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs’ claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far‐reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent...
The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer‐ to‐peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court. The Court begins its analysis by recognizing the unique nature of this case. The defendant is an individual, a consumer. She is not a business. She sought no profit from her acts... The Court does not condone Thomas’s actions, but it would be a farce to say that a single mother’s acts of using Kazaa are the equivalent, for example, to the acts of global financial firms illegally infringing on copyrights in order to profit...
Despite his opinion, Davis may well preside over another guilty verdict this week; if so, he won't be able to throw it out thanks to a "making available" jury instruction this time around—a fact that perhaps accounts for his perpetual grumpy frown during the trial."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-takes-the-stand-admits-to-major-misstep.ars
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