I suspect she wasn't fined for downloading 24 songs but for distributing the songs to others. Still, that's an excessive fine.
All legal systems that I know are completely broken because the consequences of losing are so different for the parties involved. For that woman, losing the case means total financial ruin for the rest of her life. If the RIAA had lost, it would be just a blip in their legal budget if anything.
In my view, the right way to set fines would be to ask, what percentage of their profit have record companies lost due to the actions of that woman. She should be fined that same percentage of her disposable income (excluding minimum wage).
I happen to live in Romania, which (still) has lower income. I'm also freelancing right now and not very hard, so my income this year is lower still.
So I could pretty much go up to your driveway, take your car, and if caught pay back $500 or less. Because of course this is what I can afford to pay.
No, there is a much simpler way. She should pay to the order of magnitude of the loss she caused RIAA. A bit more actually, for deterrence. Which could be something like $1 for each song downloaded and $1 for an estimate of each song uploaded from her computer. This is not the real damage, because of course not every song downloaded would have been bought, but as an order of magnitude it's pretty much ok. You don't need to go counting incomes to make it right.
The consequences for car theft are the same for everyone. If you go to prison, you lose x months of your life time. If Bill Gates goes to prison, he loses the same amount of time. Expressed in money, he's paying a few million dollars in lost productivity whilst you may only lose the equivalent of a few thousand dollars. I think that's fair.
Sorry, I should probably have said "hit your car with a sledgehammer", then the comparison would have been better. It's still confusing because of the whole virtual vs real goods - and I just slipped in a "theft" frame of mind even if it's not really correct at all. RIAA PR at work, I guess.
And if you're going down the "justice not blind" route, why even stop at income? "Your honour, I may have just killed a man but let me assure you that my high school years were very traumatic. I was bullied and got bad grades."
My point is that the law treats all individuals equally. Your link was interesting, but nowhere therein did I see any mention of this basic tenet changing when we move from a criminal to a civil case. Justice is portrayed as a blind person for a reason; and it doesn't matter an iota if you're talking about civil or criminal law.
And, in any case, the comment I was replying to used the example of car theft, which manifestly would involve a criminal case. My analogy is perfectly valid; it is you who ought be emabarrassed!
A purpose of fines & other punishment is to .deter
Very broadly speaking, two things go in to deterrence: (perceived) Chance of getting caught * (perceived) Cost of getting caught = deterence. To improve deterrence you need to increase one of these. There obviously isn't enough deterrence to stop illegal downloading/distribution. Higher fines are an easier option then more fines.
That would be a pretty good argument except for this woman's particular circumstances. She's a mother of 4 children and works at an Indian reservation. So chances are, she has very little disposable income, and wouldn't buy the songs otherwise. So what message is the RIAA trying to send by going after her? That they are ruthless bastards? They should go after people who can pay for the stuff.
They want people to either pay or not listen. Not listen & pay if you can. They want music to be the same as milk or shoes. You either buy it, or you don't have it.
They want the laws, which are on their side, to be enforced to the point where the great majority of people do not break them. That means harsher penalties, more penalties or both.
They don't want to send the message that they are ruthless bastards, necessarily. They want to send the message that the it is not in people's best interests to download free stuff. Doing this by making it risky in the way that speeding past a cop shop is risky (very likely to be caught), is too hard. So they opt for making it like not having fire insurance a one-in-a-lot chance of being ruined.
I don't agree with the law, with the ruling or their morals. I think that this kind of enforcement is immoral. Deterence is not the only thing behind enforcement of laws. Punishment/deterrence should not be concentrated in one person. It's like saving money on police patrols by catching only 1/4 of burglars we currently do but shooting them to make up the difference.
I'm just arguing that the RIAA are rational. Her capacity to pay doesn't interest them.
They're using her to send a message to people who can pay, the message being something like "if you steal our stuff, we'll make things very expensive for you".
The "excessive" penalty and the resulting publicity helps get that message out.
I'm not arguing that it's good to do that, but that is the idea. (Yes, whether it is good and whether it is effective are different questions that may have different answers.)
> That would be a pretty good argument except for this woman's particular circumstances.
Should her circumstances also be taken into account if she robs a bank?
Justice is personified as being blind for a reason. You break the law, you pay the price. There's no: you broke the law, but factor X and Y should increase our leniency. That's a recipe for chaos I'm afraid.
There's no: you broke the law, but factor X and Y should increase our leniency.
Actually you're completely wrong. The legal system is there to look at factors X and Y and determine if and how they should affect the ensuing penalties or awards.
Definitely. However, I don't see how financially destroying someone's life such that they might never recover from it is in any way a reasonable way to deal with a one-off copyright infringement on 2 dozen songs. My understanding is that she wasn't selling them or passing them off as her own.
ignoring the fine (it is excesive) the person I was replying to was inferring the RIAA should have chased her because she isn't well off. Which sounds like a poor argument to me :)
She did need a lesson - not one quite so extreme but still.
That's absolutely right. So you want to deter everyone according to the severity of the "crime", right? Why do you want to deter poor people more than rich people? The damage is the same. If you punish one person with life long poverty and the other with a small reduction of pocket money, you won't achieve what you want. I don't want wealthy people speeding just because they can afford it as their speeding is just as dangerous as everyone elses.
It comes down to the concept of cost that you are using. What is cost? Dollars? I don't think so. It's how much of your living time you have to spend in order to pay for something. That's what fines should be related to.
Finland, Norway issue speeding tickets based on a percentage of income, see e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3477285.stm where a €170,000 was issued in 2004. I don't know of any studies of the effects of that. But there's certainly a nice Schadenfreude effect when you invariably read about slightly rich guy in Finland getting a giant fine in just about every news publication in the world.
(If they made that the law in e.g. US I wonder if some sheriff's department would get the idea to have policemen exclusively to follow around wealthy drivers -- in the style of drug property seizures and overtuned red-light cameras)
I like that law. To avoid the kind of "social profiling" you describe you'd have to make sure that police don't have any incentive to make as much money as possible. Also, I suspect that rich people might sue and thus deter police from doing things like that.
And another point. I also want to deter companies from frivolous law suits. If big corp sues a small startup for patent infringement and that startup's existence is on the line, I want to be the suitor's existence to be on the line as well. Equals risks, that's what civil law suits require, otherwise it's a market and not justice.
However, you need to take into account that the studio will allege that there must be greater punishment to deter the crime than just the cost. Even at double or triple percent it's not close though obviously.
However, you need to take into account that the studio will allege that there must be greater punishment to deter the crime than just the cost. Even at double or triple percent it's not close though obviously.
True. You'd think though that eventually good old-fashioned common sense would come into play. We have murderers who get punished more proportionally than this.
"Thomas-Rasset had used Napster for a college course and had written a paper on it, arguing that it was legal. She also admitted that she followed the court case that shut Napster down and knew that it was not legal. Given her knowledge and experience with file-sharing, her claim never to have heard of KaZaA and never to have downloaded files might seem suspect."
Wouldn't it be possible to organise a DDOJ attack in Minesota?
If this makes jurisprudence, you could flood the tribunals by simply, massively admitting filesharing, couldn't you (I say "you" because I not from the US)?
Although I have lived in the US, and love it for many reasons, I have to say that this stuff is "Only in America"..Here is my rant on this..
US is all about the money, screwing up someone, suing someone and going to court. It is one big capitalistic system that hurts only the people worldwide. Everything is messed up, starting from IRS, government, army and politics, education, food, patents, and especially things like this - "copyright". Yes, my life goal is to make someone rich. How about some honor and doing something for the society without "profits first"?
I almost puked when I saw that John La Grou smart power outlet - we will save lives etc...and we filed many patents. Save lives? Give the technology as free, and build other means around it for sustaining own costs.
Should have Tesla patented his inventions with the US approach, most of the world would have been in the dark ages, where computer is not possible, Internet doesn't exist and healthcare is power-less. Should he have dictated the progress of the world? No. The world as we know it, is made from minds that think of social progress, not this invented thing called money. US dishonored Tesla, (most even think Tesla is a car now!!), and named a nice little corner in NYC, instead of teaching real values in schools.
Laws do support growth of startups indeed, but that is the side-effect which truly should be taken as an example. Everything else, plain wrong.
I do not think reproducing material or sharing is something that is wrong. People in the US just wrote that it is, while in nature of the Internet it is not. Let me guess, downloading youtube video is also illegal? Than sue my browser's cache.
I really feel sick when reading stuff like this, for goodness sake, this is not the first time nor the last, meaning something there is broken, so change it.
I am boycotting buying CDs from those retards calling themselves artists. They are all about the money, not art. Real artists do things for the love of it, not the money. And when I see that, I feel great donating my money directly to them to hear more of that.
Disclaimer: I am some nationality as Tesla, but that is no reason why I mention him. He is the most important scientist of all times.
All legal systems that I know are completely broken because the consequences of losing are so different for the parties involved. For that woman, losing the case means total financial ruin for the rest of her life. If the RIAA had lost, it would be just a blip in their legal budget if anything.
In my view, the right way to set fines would be to ask, what percentage of their profit have record companies lost due to the actions of that woman. She should be fined that same percentage of her disposable income (excluding minimum wage).