Single Mom Fined $ 1.92 Million for 24 Songs

Juries are stupid.

 

Can you run out of IP owned by you?

Answer: No. Supply and demand don't apply.

So they'd find another excuse.

Such as the case of an unpopular, has-been artist singing in Finnish (Finland is a country of 6 million) having had a recent album of his pirated off a server for ten million times. A single server.

They'd just lie. That's certainly something they do already.

 

Tada.

Supply and demand doesn't apply to prices in cases where copies of the IP is the sold property.

 

The only condition where supply and demand don't apply are situations where either side is infinite or zero. Obviously with commercial IP this won't be the case. Supply is allways controlled by the owner and demand by the consumer. I fail to see how this basic law of economics would not apply. The potential quantity may very well be endless but that has little relevance to the situation. Of course if piracy was considered unrestricted the supply might be considered to be endless, in which case the market price would plummet towards zero, which would basically wreck the market. Even in this case we'd have to assume that piracy is indeed fully unrestricted, meaning that no one would have any moral or practical obstacles with copying and distributing software.

EDIT: However you could argue that the price in software industry is determined by monopoly-like conditions where the produced quantity equals the marginalcosts, and the producers thus optimize their revenue. Even then though there's still an equilibrum (much like BTA said above) and the laws of supply and demand still apply.

 

BTA,
T2,
I still disagree with your apparent view that the woman deserved what she got because she (and/or her lawyers) played stupid and fumbled her case.

Put pointedly, I get the impression that matters of law in the US have to a considerable extent degenerated into an entertaining spectator sport, in which the individual skill displayed in court decides on whether somebody deserves a judgement or not. Perhaps law on TV and according law commentary have contributed to that, but that goes well beyond the scope of my post.

My point is far more simple: The woman didn't cause 1.92 million dollar damage. She got sentenced to pay that amount of money anyway. That should give one pause.

Carrying blame for playing stupid in court doesn't justify her paying that much more than what she actually caused in damage. That is all the more obvious in light of the much lower sum the companies offered here as a settlement. So what is her 'punishment' for then, for impertinently pestering the court with insisting on a decision and causing jury and judge extra hours? Give me a break

The question is not whether she played smart in and out of court and thus deserved the judgment, but whether the resulting judgment is proportionate and thus justified. IMO a disproportional punishment can never be justified, much less in what's apparently a civil law case. As the law allows for such judgements to be passed the question for the utility and fairness of the law itself and its practical application is warranted.

I say that for the following reason: Under German law we do have the principle of 'natural restitution', which means that damages are limited to the damage caused. You get compensated, not enriched. That has had the result that damages claims have not seen the extraordinary extravaganzas the US legal system keeps entertaining us with. We don't have an instrument like punitive damage, that last I looked can be up to 30 times the damage caused. That is disproportional. In German civil law you 'pay your bills', i.e. the damage that you caused, not what the court or a jury think you deserve. I think that's a very sensible and reasonable approach.

 

That's what I don't understand about these lawsuits. On the one hand there's the claim the companies have lost millions and should be paid that in damage, on the other hand they happily accept settlements for a few thousands. When you're Sony or EMI or any big record company, what's $18,000 (or $100,000 for that matter) going to do? The fact they're so willing to accept settlements and take an amount of money, any amount, makes them look incredibly hypocritical, not to mention even greedier than they already look.

I agree she was stupid for turning down the settlement offer (and for pirating these songs in the first place), but I find the RIAA's greed to be disgusting.

 

That's a very good point Ragusa made: punitive damages as a concept is impractical. It lends itself to widespread abuse.
The record companies know full well how unjust the ruling is, that's why they appear to be so magnanimous in their position. It is expected of them at this point, and morally strengthens their rather unjust victory. If they adopted a hard-line stance now, it would just be an extra push to get the laws changed.

 

Here's the thing, though. As long as the settlements are low like that, they're likely to happen whenever there's any kind of case (aside from the occasional idiots). Multiply that $18,000 across all the different individual cases, and you can come up to a pretty hefty total.

 

$18,000 isn't much to the record companies -- it's "throw-away" money. But they know it's quite significant to pirates.

 

The RIAA are idiots... I thought we already had that part covered?

 

According to the article the jury could have ordered her to pay between $750 and $150,000 per song. At a minimum she would have had to pay $ 18,000 for the 24 songs. At $ 1,92 million means she could have put 2650 files on Kazaa for $ 750 each, or, as the jury determined, 24 songs for $80,000 each. Based on what criteria the juries determined their finding remains a mystery to me. Jury discretion? Rolling dice? Determining the lady was obstinate or a poor player and therefor multiplying 750 by 'about 100'? It underlines as sound the reasoning behind US companies shunning juries and agreeing in their contracts to settle their cases in court without a jury: Gambling you want to do in a casino.

I looked around a bit in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and, Sec. 1204. Criminal offenses and penalties states that ...

Mind you, that's a criminal act that requires greater criminal energy than just putting 24 files on Kazaa. And iirc the lady is a first offender, still she gets about twice the fine a repeat offender would have to pay for actively cracking a copy protection. Apparently we have the odd situation that criminal law here is less Draconian as far as fines are concerned than the according civil law case. As apparently RIAA has been offering a settlement, I assume it is a civil law suit.

On the civil law side a violation of copyright also means that the plaintiff has a right to demand from the other party to cease to infringe on their property right. If a violation of property rights causes damage - that damage is to be compensated. If the damage is hard to calculate, tough for the plaintiff who sues a property rights violator, but that is a problem that any plaintiff faces as it is part of the essentials of every damages case. I can't quite see why the difficulty of proving damages in web related property right infringements lessens the burden of proof a plaintiff faces, or ought to face.

The actual crime of piracy is something else, and belongs to the realm of criminal law. Fines for crimes go to the exchequer and not to the damaged party, as it is, as a reflection of the monopoly of force, the states prerogative to punish, and not in the prerogative, much less the right, of an individual.

To me it appears that US copyright law, by allowing punitive damages in damages in addition to fines under criminal law conflates criminal law with protection of property rights, and basically allows for double punishment for the same crime. That approach is incoherent and defies legal logic, except perhaps for the rule of thumb that 'more helps better'. I find it egregious.

 

BTA,
you don't get my twist. It is not necessarily wrong, it just appears arbitrary and unpredictable, which is worse.

As for her being punished twice: Piracy is a criminal offence, for which she is likely to stand trial in a criminal court. The RIAA lawsuit is a second trial, a civil law lawsuit, where the damages under considerations of punitive damage are likely higher than the potential fines in a criminal lawsuit. I see the double punishment in that both are not exclusive (i.e. no punitive damage when there is a criminal penalty (i.e. where punishment has already been dealt out); that is not the case as punitive damage is an instrument that, the the best of my knowledge, is applied universally). I see this as a questionable conflation of criminal law and civil law and a muddling of prerogatives.

It is obviously so that common law has conceived punitive damages as an instrument for extraordinary cases where normal damages would be insufficient and thus unfair. It has then, thanks to case law and cunning lawyers, been applied universally on all civil law damages in the US, ordinary or extraordinary, until it has reached an amount that can be up to thirty times the damage caused. British common law has that instrument too, but they assign far lesser amounts of money under that. The use of punitive damages in the US is excessive, and in combination with the quota litis it is probably the primary reason that drives legal costs and damages in the US.