Posted on 06/19/2009 11:20:15 AM PDT by STARWISE
In what turned out to be a nightmare for the defendant, a federal jury on Thursday ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs. Record companies were awarded $80,000 per song, for a total of $1.92 million.
This is the second time Thomas-Rasset went to trial on the matter. The single mother from Minnesota had planned to appeal the first ruling that came down from a different federal court in October 2007. But the judge in that case decided he had given the jury erroneous instructions and a new trial was ordered.
Thomas-Rasset may wish she had settled for the original verdict. The recompense for sharing copyright-protected music online in the first trial was only $220,000. Either way, she has said publicly that the record labels can't collect money she doesn't have.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Aren’t there laws designed to protect individuals from such excessive litigation?
The court did enforce the laws against theft and copyright violation.
So had she stole the CD she would have got a misdemeanor charge of shoplifting ........?
RIAAsshats have quite the racket going on as well......she didn’t even steal the packaging or the media and they up the price by one point somethin mil.......LOL !
She’s a criminal ....and they caught her good !
Has anyone gone after them for all the CD’s they sold in the 80’s that seem to have degraded due the faulty media they sold em on. Even my old 8 tracks, cassettes and LP’s (33’s and 78’s) still play albeit a weee bit scratchy here and there.
Oh well.....most of the time I listen to xm radio anyway.
Sorry
;^)
Prosecutor pick on the poor and those least able to defend themselves.
Why was it necessary that the headline identify her as single mother? Do single mothers have special rights?
?
I wonder what she would have gotten if she killed someone while robbing a store of a big handful of CDs?
Why is this a nightmare? It's not like she'll ever pay a penny of it. Now those $3500 settlements are more frightening. People can grudgingly scrounge up that kind of cash and bite the bullet to make the RIAA go away. $1.92 million? Might as well have been a billion. This kind of verdict will just encourage more downloading. What are they gonna do? Sue me for a million bucks? Good luck collecting that!
LOL.
Intellectual property laws are especially designed to make lawyers and copyright holders richer and the rest of us poorer.
The individuals on the federal jury that awarded RIAA that enormous sum of money were obviously not fully informed of their own power as jurors.
Abuses such as this will continue until either a) the law is changed, or b) juries nullify the law.
Their aren't.
Or maybe they thought that a woman who could buy songs for 99 cents, but instead stole them and put them on the web where thousands of other people could steal them, should have to pay a per-song fee for all the people who stole them instead of paying 99 cents.
If you stole 80,000 CDs from a store, and handed them out to 80,000 people on the street, that would be a crime comparable to what she did.
Compare this to the punishment Donte’ Stallworth is receiving for killing a pedestrian while driving drunk.
But he’s sorry, and has money.
Single mom.
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