According to the RIAA, the answer is: nearly $4 million dollars.
A Principled Mom
A while ago, the RIAA came down like a ton of bricks on a White Plains, NY mom:
t was Easter Sunday, and Patricia Santangelo was in church with her kids when she says the music recording industry peeked into her computer and decided to take her to court.
Santangelo says she has never downloaded a single song on her computer, but the industry didn't see it that way. The woman from Wappingers Falls, about 80 miles north of New York City, is among the more than 16,000 people who have been sued for allegedly pirating music through file-sharing computer networks.
"I assumed that when I explained to them who I was and that I wasn't a computer downloader, it would just go away," she said in an interview. "I didn't really understand what it all meant. But they just kept insisting on a financial settlement."
The industry is demanding thousands of dollars to settle the case, but Santangelo, unlike the 3,700 defendants who have already settled, says she will stand on principle and fight the lawsuit.
Not content to stop there, the industry also sued (I kid you not) two of her children. (Surely all three couldn't have been involved in downloading songs by "Incubus"?) The case is still open.
Today
A verdict is expected today in an RIAA prosecution attempt against a 30-year-old woman who lives in Duluth Minnesota. As in the aforementioned case, it isn't clear who actually downloaded the (25) songs in question.
Formerly in copyright law, it was always important to show that the copyrighted materials had been illegally distributed. After all, if I sing "Happy Birthday" in my living room, the copyright owner can't reasonably claim to have been harmed: it's only when I start selling the sheet music, or my "Happy Birthday: My 10 Favorite Renditions" CD that harm can be alleged.
But no more, apparently:
The federal judge in the Jammie Thomas trial ruled Thursday that the Recording Industry Association of America does not have to prove that anybody actually made copies of the copyrighted material she is accused of distributing on Kazaa in 2005.
U.S. District Judge Michael Davis will instruct jurors soon that they may find Thomas is liable "regardless of whether or not distribution has been shown."
The RIAA argues that Thomas downloaded some 1,700 songs, though they are charging her with only 25 violations. Thomas has admitted she has illegally created CD to give to her friends from her own music, but steadfastly denies she knows anything about Kazaa, the file-sharing service she is accused of using. Her defense suggests her computer may have been hacked.
Questions
The punishment for theft in ancient Jewish law was that the thief had to pay back twice what was stolen. Here we have a case where the industry doesn't even have to prove wrondoing. And would "nearly $4 million in fines" be an appropriate punishment, even if we knew, for a fact, she was guilty?
Update: Thomas has been found guilty:
A Minnesota woman must pay $220,000 to six of the top music labels after a federal jury found on Thursday that she violated their copyright....
Many of the 26,000 persons sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) since 2003 have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. Thomas, who could not be reached for comment, has always maintained her innocence.
She's either extremely principled, or not very bright, as she could have settled for a few thousand dollars. I very much hope she is, in fact, guilty, given the travesty this would be otherwise. (And even if she's guilty, the penalty still strikes me as absurd.)
But this raises an awful thought: This case aside, who's more likely to go to court? Someone who believes they're innocent, or someone who believes they're guilty? I would guess, then, that the system is harder on very good people than on very bad ones.
Though it seems odd to suggest that someone's computer was hacked to use Kazaa...
Hackers desire Zombie PCs for a variety of purposes: malicious attacks on other computers, sending SPAM, unauthorized web servers to distribute malware associated with phishing messages, etc.
The primary intent was probably not the Kazaa use. But if I were a hacker, and knew the RIAA was in a litigous mood, I certainly wouldn't use my own computer.
And indeed, all the songs were placed on a network drive. A bit odd of her to do something that stupid, eh? Download illegal files from Kazaa and then redistribute them free, and unencrypted, to the entire internet from a shared drive, for the whole world (including the RIAA) to see?
Sounds fishy to me.
I know the music industry is scrambling trying to figure out the future of the music distribution but this kind of stuff is just stupid.
Metallica started this a long time ago. I guess it's never going to end. It's gotten to the point where it's illegal for me to make a copy of a cd I purchased to leave in my car.
I would agree that I was wrong if I copied my entire music library and sold it to people. But what's the point of buying music if you don't actually own it. I don't even really own the massive Itunes library in my computer. I have purchased the right to access it.
It's obvious that it's not difficult or impossible for hackers to "steal" IP addresses to do what ever they want done. What the RIAA is doing is bullying people into paying them money whether they have proof or not that any wrong has been committed. It's even more pathetic that they seem to be going after quite a few children. This wasn't the only case where I'd seen children involved.
The justice system is truly broken if you can be prosecuted without any real evidence.
This is why I don't buy CDs anymore. I can't stand to support the RIAA. Though it seems odd to suggest that someone's computer was hacked to use Kazaa. Or was her wireless network hacked and someone else used her broadband?
Either way, this is garbage. The RIAA was trying to get federal money to launch these suits a while back. I don't know if they succeeded.
Posted by: Ryan W. on October 4, 2007 11:09 AM