Can torrent sites be prosecuted.

[213374U]

How can you stop doing something you haven't been doing in the first place?

 

Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement.

[Hiro Protagonist]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading

 

Maybe people will stop stealing stuff when they read about this?

 

I don't think that's going to stop people. I'm guessing a lot of people will have a cavalier attitude and think, "sue me, I don't have any money anyway".

[Gorgon]

Poor woman.

[Enoch]

The RIAA lawsuits were all about PR from the beginning. They know there is a hard-core of pirates out there who aren't going to be effectively intimidated. But there are also lots of marginal pirates like the defendant in this case-- just a middle-aged woman with a computer who wants to listen to Journey's greatest hits. The news coverage of verdicts like this gets the message out to these users that there are consequences. It also helps to quash the silly belief that people have about juries always having sympathy for 'the little guy' and being willing to ignore clear violations of the law if the common perception of the law is that it need not be taken seriously. (This same belief is why some people occasionally take speeding tickets to trial. They usually lose, too.)

 

@ Hiro-- True, most people don't have anywhere near the cash necessary to pay this kind of verdict. But they usually can scrape together the couple grand that the RIAA asks for in settlement of the suit. For most people, that's a far smarter move than going to trial and then going through a bankruptcy to wipe out the judgment debt when they lose.

[Humodour]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading

 

Maybe people will stop stealing stuff when they read about this?

 

Those fines are unconstitutional in America. I won't get into the legalities of it, but they're unlikely to be upheld when she appeals.

 

We're talking fines larger than the combined sales of the album she shared, even though probably only a handful of people downloaded it off her - clearly that's not valid 'compensation'. And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology.

[Enoch]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading

 

Maybe people will stop stealing stuff when they read about this?

 

Those fines are unconstitutional in America. I won't get into the legalities of it, but they're unlikely to be upheld when she appeals.

 

We're talking fines larger than the combined sales of the album she shared, even though probably only a handful of people downloaded it off her - clearly that's not valid 'compensation'. And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology.

They're not fines. This was a private suit for damages, not a prosecution. The range of permissible damages is defined in the Copyright Act, and the determination within that range is left to the jury. They are deliberately set higher than their likely cost to the plaintiff, to provide extra discouragement and make sure that nobody ever can profit by violating the Act while counting the consequent suit as a cost of doing business. (This is much the same way that Antitrust awards are always tripled.)

 

Edit: She already appealed once, and won. The appeals court found that the instructions given to the jury were faulty. Then, on the new trial with the correct jury instructions, the new jury found higher liability than the first.

Edited June 20, 2009 by Enoch

[213374U]

Those fines are unconstitutional in America. I won't get into the legalities of it, but they're unlikely to be upheld when she appeals.

Oh, come now. We're grownups here. A little legalese isn't going to kill anyone.

 

So please, explain how exactly the verdict violates the US Constitution. I'm by no means an expert, so don't assume I know anything. Precedents would help, too.

 

 

And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology.

That's a really poor defense and would hardly stand in court. "Why, Your Honor, how could I possibly had known that file-sharing software was in fact designed to share files?" Anyone trying to pass that off as an excuse should be fined for a deliberate insult to intelligence.

[Hurlshort]

Poor woman.

 

I don't have much sympathy for her when she could have settled for around $3500 at the start of this. While that's a pretty penny, it's not going to bankrupt anyone.

 

There really isn't much of a gray area here. When you download media, or make available for download, when that media isn't being offered for free, it is theft. You are stealing from the creator and the publisher, who have all put time and money into creating that product. I'm not sure why people have such a hard time understanding that.

[alanschu]

Cue numbers man hehe

[213374U]

I'm not sure why people have such a hard time understanding that.

Because there's nothing to understand. The action being discussed does simply not comform to either the vernacular or legal legal definitions, both of which involve taking physical control of whatever's being stolen. In the case of copyright violation, what's being debated is the loss of potential sales (which, by definition, cannot be proven), and the damages derived thereof.

 

Seriously, people need to stop using "theft" to describe what's in actuality copyright infringement, to take advantage of the social stigma attached to thievery in order to achieve a precarious sense of moral superiority.

 

Don't you think if copyright infringement was so obviously theft, there would be no need for it to be codified separately?

[Gorgon]

But now she is going bankrupt, and for something that 99 % of the internet using world has done at one point or another, that same 99% having the luxury of not ending up a test case with an bottomless amount of legal resources arrayed against them.

[Calax]

... if I were the defendant in this case I'd probably as for the judge to decide rather than a jury, then hammer home that overall you only owed the record company 48 bucks.

[Lare Kikkeli]

Poor woman.

There really isn't much of a gray area here. When you download media, or make available for download, when that media isn't being offered for free, it is theft. You are stealing from the creator and the publisher, who have all put time and money into creating that product. I'm not sure why people have such a hard time understanding that.

 

No thats not true, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. Its like calling someone who wants to have sex with teenagers a pedophile or killing an animal murder. It's not the same thing despite how many times you say it.

[Enoch]

While it certainly is true that statutory Copyright Infringement and common-law theft are not the same thing, the two are equally illegal, and illegal for very similar moral/logical reasons. I don't see how rhetorically conflating the two is particularly objectionable.

[213374U]

I don't see how rhetorically conflating the two is particularly objectionable.

Isn't it enough for you that in this case "rhetorically" actually means "disingenuously"? It is an equivocation and it serves no purpose other than affect opinions on the issue being discussed by means other than arguments and logic - specifically, by exploiting how language affects the way we think.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics

[Enoch]

"Rhetorically," as I used it was intended to mean as part of an attempt to convince via verbal/written communication. As such, it's a perfectly normal practice to try to get the audience to associate one concept the audience may not know well or have ambivalent feelings towards (copyright infringement) with a directly analogous (but admittedly not identical) concept that they have deep-seated feelings about (theft). It's only disingenuous when the analogy between the two concepts is less than what the author implies. Here, the analogy between the two is near-perfect-- the only difference between copyright infringement and theft from a logical and moral point of view is that the former involves a more indirect, but no less real, harm to the victim of the illegal act. (i.e., instead of being deprived of direct possession, they are deprived of their legal right to control as they see fit the dissemination and distribution of their creation and to extract what payment the market will bear for it.)

[Maria Caliban]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading

 

Maybe people will stop stealing stuff when they read about this?

 

Wow. My respect for the American legal system suffers another massive blow.

 

I'm not sure why people have such a hard time understanding that.

Because there's nothing to understand. The action being discussed does simply not comform to either the vernacular or legal legal definitions, both of which involve taking physical control of whatever's being stolen. In the case of copyright violation, what's being debated is the loss of potential sales (which, by definition, cannot be proven), and the damages derived thereof.

 

It's obviously not theft. If I broke into a person's house and stole two CDs, no one would make me pay 1.9 million dollars. It’s possible I wouldn’t even get jail time.

Edited June 21, 2009 by Maria Caliban

[Humodour]

Those fines are unconstitutional in America. I won't get into the legalities of it, but they're unlikely to be upheld when she appeals.

Oh, come now. We're grownups here. A little legalese isn't going to kill anyone.

 

So please, explain how exactly the verdict violates the US Constitution. I'm by no means an expert, so don't assume I know anything. Precedents would help, too.

 

Sure. The jury accused her of 'wilful' violation. Wilful in this sense means essentially 'with malicious intent to cause damage to the copyright holders' and is distinct from what she obviously did: caused a loss of a sale, which caps out at damages of, from memory, $30,000 per infringement (as opposed to the cap of $150,000 for wilful violation). Moreover, the album itself was the sale lost, not each individual song, so the calculation of per song is also dubious.

 

And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology.

That's a really poor defense and would hardly stand in court. "Why, Your Honor, how could I possibly had known that file-sharing software was in fact designed to share files?" Anyone trying to pass that off as an excuse should be fined for a deliberate insult to intelligence.

 

That's incorrect. Most people see downloads on the internet as a one-way thing, which they largely are. I can tell you as somebody who sets up internet and ethernet connections for people as a part-time job that almost every single one of them is clueless that file sharing programmes go both ways. They think it's file sharing in the classic sense: everyone downloads files from a central repository kind enough to 'share' them. Some of the more savvy college kids are actually aware it goes both ways. I'm sorry that you think that's 'unintelligent' behaviour, but the fact is it's far more likely to be simple technical ingorance.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading

 

Maybe people will stop stealing stuff when they read about this?

 

Those fines are unconstitutional in America. I won't get into the legalities of it, but they're unlikely to be upheld when she appeals.

 

We're talking fines larger than the combined sales of the album she shared, even though probably only a handful of people downloaded it off her - clearly that's not valid 'compensation'. And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology.

They're not fines. This was a private suit for damages, not a prosecution. The range of permissible damages is defined in the Copyright Act, and the determination within that range is left to the jury. They are deliberately set higher than their likely cost to the plaintiff, to provide extra discouragement and make sure that nobody ever can profit by violating the Act while counting the consequent suit as a cost of doing business. (This is much the same way that Antitrust awards are always tripled.)

 

Yes, tripled - multiplied by 3, not multiplied by 80,000. The 'discouragement' defence is perfectly reasonable for a typical copyright case, it's just a pity (for you, and the RIAA) that it's not a viable defence here.

 

And you're wrong, AFAIK - she appealed the initial ruling, not the amount of the initial ruling, no?

[Lare Kikkeli]

Heh, looks like my post got deleted by a moderator for whatever reason. Oh well.

[Maria Caliban]

Heh, looks like my post got deleted by a moderator for whatever reason. Oh well.

 

If the mods wiped your post from existence, they would have sent you a PM. Is it possible that it never got posted or you posted it to a different thread?

[Hiro Protagonist]

And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology.

That's a really poor defense and would hardly stand in court. "Why, Your Honor, how could I possibly had known that file-sharing software was in fact designed to share files?" Anyone trying to pass that off as an excuse should be fined for a deliberate insult to intelligence.

That's incorrect. Most people see downloads on the internet as a one-way thing, which they largely are. I can tell you as somebody who sets up internet and ethernet connections for people as a part-time job that almost every single one of them is clueless that file sharing programmes go both ways. They think it's file sharing in the classic sense: everyone downloads files from a central repository kind enough to 'share' them. Some of the more savvy college kids are actually aware it goes both ways. I'm sorry that you think that's 'unintelligent' behaviour, but the fact is it's far more likely to be simple technical ingorance.

 

 

That's quite true. A couple of people from my work wanted me to set up a torrent client on their laptops so they can download 'stuff'. I said to them, It's not just you downloading from someone, people will be downloading from you too. You should have seen the shock on their faces. Why? How can people download from me? Do they get inside my computer? etc...

Edited June 21, 2009 by Hiro Protagonist

[213374U]

It's only disingenuous when the analogy between the two concepts is less than what the author implies. Here, the analogy between the two is near-perfect-- the only difference between copyright infringement and theft from a logical and moral point of view is that the former involves a more indirect, but no less real, harm to the victim of the illegal act. (i.e., instead of being deprived of direct possession, they are deprived of their legal right to control as they see fit the dissemination and distribution of their creation and to extract what payment the market will bear for it.)

I respect your opinion and you could probably skool me on the jurisprudence behind it, but in the end, an opinion is all you have to establish that a direct analogy between copyright infringement and theft can be established - the underlying reasons leave plenty of room for debate. But even if I were to accept the analogy, it does not warrant that an appeal to emotion sophism is used to "convince" others of your point of view. That is disingenuous. Anyone using "theft" to describe something that is quite obviously something else is trying to avoid getting into a debate about the legitimacy, viability and extent of enforcement of the rights over intellectual property on the internet; a debate that's nowhere near as simple as one about simple semantics; they are ultimately trying to pass off their opinion as fact.

 

 

Sure. The jury accused her of 'wilful' violation. Wilful in this sense means essentially 'with malicious intent to cause damage to the copyright holders' and is distinct from what she obviously did: caused a loss of a sale, which caps out at damages of, from memory, $30,000 per infringement (as opposed to the cap of $150,000 for wilful violation). Moreover, the album itself was the sale lost, not each individual song, so the calculation of per song is also dubious.

Yes, but how is this unconstitutional? Illegal isn't the same as unconstitutional. Further, this isn't a criminal trial, and the requirements for proving intent are not necessarily so strict, I think Enoch pointed this out already.

 

Why are you so vehemently convinced that the ruling violates the US Constitution? Again, my specific knowledge of the US Constitution is null, so any links you can produce that show how the verdict contravenes part(s) of the Constitution would pretty much settle the matter.

 

 

That's incorrect. Most people see downloads on the internet as a one-way thing, which they largely are. I can tell you as somebody who sets up internet and ethernet connections for people as a part-time job that almost every single one of them is clueless that file sharing programmes go both ways. They think it's file sharing in the classic sense: everyone downloads files from a central repository kind enough to 'share' them. Some of the more savvy college kids are actually aware it goes both ways. I'm sorry that you think that's 'unintelligent' behaviour, but the fact is it's far more likely to be simple technical ingorance.

As I said, it's a very poor defense. Kazaa advertises not only as a file-sharing app, but as a peer-to-peer system. So one would have to be a certified retard to think that the files they are getting come from central servers. It's debatable whether that negates intent at all... and it does not change the fact that stupidity (or technical ignorance) does not preclude liability. Edited June 21, 2009 by Gorth
On request of the poster

[Maria Caliban]

My mother uses youtube frequently. Yesterday I told her if she wanted to watch a video without it stopping every couple of seconds, she should hit the pause button and let it finish buffering/downloading.

 

I then had to explain to her where the pause button was and what I meant by buffering. This is something millions of people know but my mother does not. Is it because she's stupid? No. It's because she's not computer literate.

 

I've had conversations with adults would didn't understand why they couldn't access their g-mail while they were offline. They had no mental distinction between a server, their browser, and their hard drive: it

[213374U]

My mother uses youtube frequently. Yesterday I told her if she wanted to watch a video without it stopping every couple of seconds, she should hit the pause button and let it finish buffering/downloading.

 

I then had to explain to her where the pause button was and what I meant by buffering. This is something millions of people know but my mother does not. Is it because she's stupid? No. It's because she's not computer literate.

 

I've had conversations with adults would didn't understand why they couldn't access their g-mail while they were offline. They had no mental distinction between a server, their browser, and their hard drive: it

[Lare Kikkeli]

Obviously actually debating the pros and cons of filesharing is a bannable offense here, so carry on with your bashing of a single mother whos had her life ruined by a couple of low quality mp3s.

 

edit: Think about this: she would have gotten off with a slap on the wrist had she actually shoplifted these CDs

Edited June 21, 2009 by Lare Kikkeli