Jammie Thomas challenges "monstrous" $1.92M P2P verdict - Ars Technica - The Diigo Meta page

• 16 Sep 09
  

  Amy Hopkins

  Second verdict given to woman who illegally download music from Kazaa.

  music_downloading

• 11 Jul 09
  

  Patrick O'Keefe
  • It was only a matter of time: Jammie Thomas-Rasset has asked the federal judge overseeing her file-sharing lawsuit to toss the $1.92 million damage award, reduce it to the statutory minimum of $18,000, or grant her a new trial.
  • It was only a matter of time: Jammie Thomas-Rasset has asked the federal judge overseeing her file-sharing lawsuit to toss the $1.92 million damage award, reduce it to the statutory minimum of $18,000, or grant her a new trial.
  • 5 more annotations...
  • • These shocking ratios—1:62,015 and 1:5,333—appear throughout the filing, though they're largely irrelevant.
    • Thomas-Rasset wasn't sued simply for violating the "reproduction right" found in the Copyright Act; she was also accused of violating the "distribution right" by putting the songs up on KaZaA for millions of others to download. How many people did so? No one knows—which is one sort of situation that statutory damages were created to address. The real ratios can never be known.
    • Calling the statutory damages "punitive" allows Thomas-Rasset's lawyers to link her case to BMW v. Gore, a 1996 case that said massive punitive awards beyond a certain ratio were unconstitutional (anything over 1:10 is generally suspect).
    • Finally, the lawyers make clear that Thomas-Rasset will move to exclude RIAA investigator MediaSentry's evidence on appeal. While Judge Davis allowed the evidence, pointing out that the company could hardly violate Minnesota's private detective rules when it had never operated in the state, Thomas-Rasset's team argues that MediaSentry broke private investigator rules in the states where it did operate (New Jersey and Maryland), and all of its evidence should be thrown out.
    • For their part, the record labels also filed a motion today, asking the judge to alter the judgment against Thomas-Rasset to include a permanent injunction against future copyright infringement. One suspects, however, that if a $1.92 million award isn't enough to make Thomas-Rasset stop sharing files, a permanent injunction won't be any more effective.
• 07 Jul 09
  

  Jonathan Bailey

  Minneso

  119 thomas riaa lawsuit mediasentry

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