I just want to remind folks to never buy any music from any artist and/or label who has signed with the RIAA.They are assholes and in more than one way and to stop them we must hurt them in their wallets.

THere are thousands of independent artists like myself who are perfectly willing to give you free music and who will never sign with a corporate label or the RIAA.
I have a ton of free 320k mp3 of my art at
www.bigmeathammer.com go to the archives page.

Excessive??!!! I think so!!

Again I have to say this; Rich Industrial Assholes of America. It's not like they need the 1.92M,care about it, or need the compensation, they just want to scare people away from file sharing, because with fillers, and a very outdated and flimsy marketing model they can't keep up with digital distribution and instead of updating their business model, all they do is up the copyright protection until what they sell becomes useless.
Like the statement from the lawyer, the plaintiff (RIAA) failed to prove that the damages were significant to the company, considering she was neither commercially using it (selling what she downloaded) or doing something like running a server to upload it millions of times again.

How about $1? She might just pay that one.

They claim she shared 1708 songs. at $1.50 (more than iTunes value of the songs likely) * 1708 = $2,562.

So if she bought every song she illegally downloaded and redistributed, the verdict wouldn't come near what they are asking. This is absurd. The judgment should be reduced 500x. Plain and simple.

My question is why is she responsible for the actions of others? What happens when the other people get caught who downloaded the 1,700 songs??? Do they get more money? It doesn't seem to fair to get both the uploader and the downloader.

Maybe you consider the legal fees, but I wouldn't because I think these guys are as close to crooks as you can get.

Poor unlucky guy! Unlike us he got caught . 1.92 mill for 24 songs is just outrageous. I don't see any song that could be worth 80,000 with the crap artist have been making lately. If i were to buy a disc i might listen to 1 or 2 songs max the rest i could care less about.

Reading comprehension for the win.

That's the problem, their business model **WORKED** like this. If we put 5 low quality songs on an album, 2 good ones, and 3 decent ones we have a full album. And JUST so they can listen to those good songs they'll pay us the full ammount for the album. And now no one pays for albums, we filter out the crap and pay per song (99c-129c whatever) and they blame their money loss on piracy, which although it does cost them, but not nearly as much as their cheap marketing. They made a lot of money the cheap way, and now they are getting F*'d for it, so they use all the money they have to blame it on someone else and hire good prosecution so they can get these big cases settled their way. It's not right.

True, but its been one hell of a day for me.

JTR is a moron. She was offered a settlement for $5,000 by the RIAA at least twice, possibly three times. Now she's asking a judge to reduce the 1.92m to $18,000?

Good job, crack legal team.

^seriously now, isn't 5000$ for 24 songs still insanely excessive? Tell me if that happened to you that you wouldn't try to fight it.

You know what baffles me, is who are these jurists? Do they not have the same access to the same information that we have? Do they not possess the same common sense as must of us posters that see the same unethical malice witch hunt that the RIAA has been putting forth all these years? It astounds me that in America people still live like sheep following and believing what anyone in the smallest role of authority tell'em. RIAA/MPAA are not losing money from file sharing, you can't lose what you didn't have to begin with!

An idiot jury of our peers decided that $80,000 per song was fair, not the RIAA. The legal teams must have scoured the country looking for the biggest morons they could find and assembled them for jury duty. If I am in the jury and the other folks decide that $80,000 a song is fair then we have a stuck jury because I'm not signing off on it. Not one sane person in the jury. I wouldn't have settled for $80,000 TOTAL.

Please not that although the RIAA is full of scum bag POS morons they did try to offer this lady $3,000 (total) to settle out of court and she wanted none of it. Just stupidity all around. Stupidity from almost everyone involved. A glowing example of a failing legal system.

Itunes music sucks too (as far as money for the artist). My uncle put his music on itunes (Tim Hadler, he does country music) and he gets paid literally pennies for each song sold. So itunes makes around 95% for holding files on a server and allowing people to search for it...??? That's a lot of BS if you ask me. Anyways my point is (to make this go with this article lol) music tyrants are all a load of BS.

I would tell them to f--k off....

He's lucky. I've got a friend who produced a movie, has Warner distributing it for the last 3 years, and hasn't received a dime. They don't seem to know how many they've sold yet. THREE YEARS and they haven't figured it out? How do they stay in business if their accounting is so bad?!? (Hint - it's easy to make a profit if you don't pay expenses.)

So... um... did someone roll up the paper the eigth amendment was written on and use it smoke weed...? There has to be some reason this rediculous fine was even thought up....

The 8th amendment doesn't apply to civil lawsuits. Only criminal.

The problem is that most likely during jury selection anyone with a bias either way was taken out. So if any potential juror admitted to having file shared before, (or even knowing someone who did) they were most likely taken out of consideration. Therefore really only leaving people who look at it blindly and just say "Well it's against the law....put them in hell." That and people who don't even understand file sharing/what actually happened. I'm sure the prosecution made it sound very conniving and made her sound like she had planned out some grand escapade for free song downloading.

+1
Because we have no rights in civil court? That doesn't seem quite right somehow.

Seriously is anybody actually reading the case presented to them?
"Durrrrrr..24 albums, huh? Uuhhhhh, the nice guy down the street sold me an album for $80,000 once so errr (let's see) 1.92 million sounds right".

Glad I never got caught! I have 9,299 MP3s. At 80k a song that would mean a fine of $743,920,000.

Sue them for $80k per minute of footage sold.


I hope you're a rich kid.

If a song averages 4 minuets long, that's almost 26 continuous days of music. How much of it have you actually listened to? Are there anywhere near 9,000 decent songs in the world? Even at $.99 each, that's enough stolen property to buy a small car. Do you have OCD? The RIAA are ridiculous idiots, but so are a lot of the pirates.

it's as simple as this... DUE THE CRIME, PAY THE FINE! stop crying... YOU GOT CAUGHT!

Not trying to defend the RIAA here but folks' logic of comparing simply the cost of a song or an album to the award (normalized per song or per album) is wrong. I assume that RIAA was claiming that the songs were shared with many users so the damage is not simply the cost of the song but the cost of the song times the number of people it was illegally shared with.

Now I have all sorts of problems with the RIAA's claims on piracy damages and how it's calculated, but most people on this board are using bad logic by merely looking at the cost of the song to analyze the judgment. (Though I agree the judgment is obviously excessive)

STFU MAF-RIAA

I think there should be a class action lawsuit against the RIAA. After all the crap songs that we were forced to buy over the years packaged on a CD with one song that we wanted to buy, the RIAA should pay us back. Based on the logic in this lawsuit, we wouldn't have to show actual damages. With the math involved here, we could probably get billions of dollars.

Not likely to happen, but it's really what they deserve at this point.

you know - I wonder if the comparison could made to like say if McDonalds only sold McNuggets with 2 large cokes and 3 large fries and one of their pies and that was the ONLY way you could buy McNuggets. is that a fair comparison? and if so do you think people would ever buy McNuggets or that it would even fly and consumers wouldn't be immediately griping and complaining?

maybe someone should ask that to the simpleton jurists that get picked.

I still think the woman is a retard for not taking the $3k settlement out of court offered to her before. Now she wishes she could get it down to $18k!

Doing illegal stuff like this is one thing....but acting like a belligerent ass when you get caught red handed is just plain dumb.