P2P File Sharer to Pay RIAA $80,000 Per Song

So Dante Stallworth pays $200,000 for driving drunk, speeding, and killing a man plus he gets 30 days in jail. This girl downloads 24 songs and gets $2,000,000 and no days in jail. What a lovely justice system we have here. If only she had killed a human being she could have gotten off much much easier.

Something to note here that isn't in this article is that the RIAA tried repeatedly to settle with this girl out of court for as little as $3,000. $3,000 might seem like a lot of money but the RIAA had evidence of over 1,700 songs being downloaded or shared which comes out to about $1.70 a song. The girl refused to settle out of court and took her chances in court. The RIAA didn't didn't hand down the judgment of $80,000 a song, a jury of OUR peers did. The girl and whoever was in the jury both need not reproduce.

its pretty messed up when your life can be destroyed for downloading 24 songs

You won't scare me RIAA!! *clicks* "The Beatles" Discography. At $80k a song I should be a dead man by sunrise.

Oh yeah, and I find it hard to believe a public jury would charge someone so much for downloading music, especially 24 songs, unless he/she (a she named Thomas?) was an as*h*le.

it's a civil case, they really can't collect the money unless she willfully hands it over.

What does it matter? The judgment is a complete farce since there is no way she will be able to pay that amount anyway. WHY!?!?!?!

It is a meaningless judgment. First, it will be appealed and likely retried. Second, when they eventually get a real judgment, the defendant will just file for bankruptcy. The only solace I take from this is that in order to bring this case and then retry it when the first verdict was overturned, and then to battle the inevitable appeal, the RIAA will have spent several hundred thousand dollar to end up with an empty judgment.

A THG user already posted this on forums, the fact is the company doesn't want people to download their stuff, it's not that they actually want the money, need it, or care about it, they want other people to go "HOLY #$%^ I don't want that to happen to me" and not download illegally. But really every goes "OMFG RIAA is one big A#%#$%$!"

They are trying to create something they can build off for future suits. If they get away with it once then they will be able to do it over and over and occasionally collect.

Jury was bought. What kind of jury in their right mind would actually give a verdict of $80k/song?

I would have taken the settlement; mailing each $ in individual bags of dog $%!&.

If they want their money their gonna have to dig for it...

wow...*clicks itunes library, multiplies $80k by number of songs*...*gasps*

@ $80k/song i'd be paying $4,625,520,000 that would be a FML

Remember guys the Jury only decides Guilty or Not-Guilty, the judge hands down the punishment.

Its all bullshit anyway, their just doing it for a legal precedent. Think about it guys, a very large majority of our reps and senators, also out President and our Sec Of State are lawyers. You cant let Lawyers make the laws they will jut make laws that will insure further employment for lawyers. This means making laws that A: Send more people to jail and B: Make it easier to sue people for unrealistic amounts of money.

And that's why I don't buy CD's anymore. If I do, it's used, thus no money to the RIAA.

oh no i heard a song on the radio for free - you aint getting $80000 from me

Yep this is pretty much what is going through my head.

radio pays for those songs apache_lives

RIAA is not the music industry. They are merely lawyers suing to protect the music industries copyrights.

So none of the judgment money awarded will ever go to the people who are actually "hurt" by downloading songs (as if they actually feel it... another debate though later). It will fill lawyers pockets. They are going out and doing this "charity work" so they can make tons of money. (note the quotes...)

However, many bands that are "starving artists" make so little of CDs and MP3 sales that they often give away their music (or encourage pirating it) so you will come to concerts and buy stuff they really make money off of . . . like tickets and t-shirts. Fans make bands more money than CDs ever will.

The big artists who do most of the b****ing never will notice the missing 50-60k$ they lose to piracy, since they gross millions. (it doesn't make it right. It's merely to show that no artists are hurt in the actual pirating of stuff)

The people who it really hurts are suits sitting behind desks doing almost nothing but essentially speculating (like Oil Speculators, but different). Music execs.

It's people like them that are driving up the price of the music and trying so desperately to keep their antiquated business model so they keep rolling in money.

Piracy is the only way to try and collapse this dinosaur. In the long run, it'll be better for artists as they will be more able to sell directly to their customers instead.

The laws in the US are bent on making lawyers rich. This is just an example of it. Another related one is the video capture card industry. If a company produced a product that could decode cable's blocks or use HDMI to capture high definition digital content, the TV/Movie industry would flip their lid and sue them out of business.

How many producers, actors, directors, and other people associated with the product are hurt? Zero. See above.

My dad has been a professional photographer for nearly 30 years (about 15? using a digital setup... maybe more or less, not 100% sure. More than 10.). 10 or so years ago when scanners became big, people started buying fewer pictures. This isn't a coincidence. They simply took the pictures home, scanned them, and made however many copies they wanted. It was that simple. And truth be told, it was their right. How is printed media/visual media (like images on the internet) any different? Where is all of the anger when you see people "pirating" images using google image search? How many graphics artists actually pay for the images they post into signatures? I think you can see where this is going. . .

Other than ridicule (and plagiarism charges in school), what about copying publications or ideas? Is that illegal? Where are the suits for that?

The laws governing media (except visual art, which can be ripped without repercussion) are archaic and need changing, desperately. The technology has evolved too fast for them.

Ars Technica left out a detail. From another article:

This woman is stupid for not paying the previous fine. I don't condone the outrageous fine the RIAA have issued her with now but I have no sympathy for an idiot who knows she's up against some of the greediest people in the country and doesn't take the easy way out.

The copyright on the Beatles expired already. You can legally download and distribute them now.

Jesus, they just dont want to GET IT.

You Cant Stop Piracy fss...

Okay it seems that a lot of people are confused with this but the RIAA did not fine this girl anything nor do they have the power to fine this girl. A jury of our peers was given a ballpark range of $750 per song to $150,000 per song and chose a number right near the middle with $80,000 per song. Not trying to beat a dead horse or defend the RIAA but they wanted no part of the $80,000 a song judgment, admitted that they had no intentions of collection $2 million, and tried SEVERAL times to settle outside of the courtroom for $3,000 total. I think the outrage from many people on this site here is exactly why the RIAA isn't happy with the outcome of this case.

hmm. im at $244,720,000. i wonder if i have to pay extra for actually getting 320Kps files instead of 128kps nonsense...

I don't understand why people are bragging about ripping off intellectual property by way of illegally downloading. Do you think that it makes you look cool to multiple your hundreds of illegally obtained songs by $80,000 and post your astronomical numbers? Good for you, you enjoy downloading someone else's hard work for free. You might think you are hurting the RIAA when you do this, and you are, but the musician isn't getting his small chunk from a possible sale either. If you want to download music go ahead and do I really don't care but you look like a bunch of idiots posting this huge dollar figures boasting about how many artists you have ripped off.

tayb, a large majority of illegal music downloads are by people who would not have paid for it anyways. Therefor, no potential sales were lost in those cases.

There are people who would have bought it, but now download because they can and it happens a lot.

and the people who first uploaded the songs she downloaded paid for them? so now where is your 2-second thought logic

[This woman is stupid for not paying the previous fine. I don't condone the outrageous fine the RIAA have issued her with now but I have no sympathy for an idiot who knows she's up against some of the greediest people in the country and doesn't take the easy way out.

Why pay em anything? let em try and sue me.

What it boils down to is, piracy not going to go away. Make your product and sell it, if it's good wether game, movie or music, it will sell. Stop putting money into bad security(games are doing this more and more, all iTunes music is DRM free pretty much) and it's win win. People will always buy your stuff if it's even decent and worth getting so I don't know what people are worried about.

tayb, i may have an astronomical number but i still buy music off of itunes and i buy cds from band sites if itunes doesnt have what i'm looking for. its not that i like ripping artists off, its that i got sick of getting ripped off. i used to spend upwards of $20 for a cd because i heard a song that i liked on the radio which was on it, just to find out the the rest of the album was complete shit. by downloading a song i can preview the entire song instead of a 30 second clip. if i like what i hear, i'll pay for it. i just seem to find a lot of shitty music and i dont care for deleteing anything unless it really sucks because i'm certainly not about to run out of disk space on my hard drive.