Woman fined $1.9 million for 24 illegal song downloadsFollow

Yep.

It's much easier to prove on something like BitTorrent. Azureus keeps a nice detailed record of my share ratio, and if you download a torrent, chances are you also uploaded at least part of the file.

But Kazaa was just straight peer to peer connections.

So it IS the same thing, just in a different degree.

One is municipal and the other is private, would be the biggest difference I see. There'd be a ********* if a city government charged anything like the same amount of money.

5,000x as harsh a fine is different enough for me.

I assume that, if the album is printed on a commercial label, the artist is buying from the label for the purpose of reselling at the show. So I guess they make the couple bucks over wholesale instead of Best Buy getting it, but they're not pocketing $15 per sale.

Likewise, I've noticed that many "Buy our CD" links on musicians' pages actually take you to some retail merchant site such as Amazon.

Later this month I bet she's in bankruptcy court turning this ~2 million penalty into a $400 check to the RIAA.

At least that way they'd actually get some money.

This is why I have always disabled uploads whenever using any type of p2p program. Torrents however, are different. :3



In 2004 I'm pretty sure a lot of people still used kazaa.

Edited, Jun 20th 2009 4:29am by Deadgye

It seems the point of this story is being missed: Juries are full of fucking morons.

I cant say for bands that are on a well known record label, but I know Mr. DSD used to be in charge of selling his bands CDs via Amazon. At least with Amazon they have a set % cut they will take and the artists have the ability to price their music to what they want in order to bring in the net they want. I know with Mr DSD's band the amount they were getting back was enough to cover the costs of recording and creating the CDs, plus a little left over to put in the bank for future tours or recordings.

Thats ******* amazing, just got done with a Business focused law class, and a good part of the last section of the class was focusing on how the supreme court felt that punitive damages should only be in a 1-10 ratio to the actual damages based on reprehensibility.

Example: You sell a car and fail to notify the new owners of an engine problem you didn't know about, the car breaks down on the high way and causes a crash. The actual damage was 20,000 dollars and they sue you. The court should award between 20k to 60k in punitive damages if at all.

Example 2: You own a car dealership and sell lemons when you know they are lemons. Causes crash and you get hit with 100k to 200k in punitive damages.

In this case 24 songs is about 24 bucks in actual damages, at most 1000 bucks if you shared them for a while, which idk if they can blame you for other people downloading them from you. So punitive damages of about 200,000 times actual damages....yeah that ******* makes sense.

I understanding making an example, but since everyone has done it at some point in their life. Its like giving 1 random pot head 25-life.