Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman ordered to pay the record industry $220,000 USD for unauthorized sharing of music file is finally getting her chance to appeal the case, and may get to see the jury once more.
The issue at hand is whether the record industry needs to know prove that anyone even downloaded the songs Thomas made available or if her making them available is enough to warrant throwing the appeal out. Over the past few years the record industry has sued thousands upon thousands of would be file sharers and has argued that all they must prove is that the defendant put the music on file sharing networks.
File sharing fans, and the EFF, have argued that so far the only proven downloaders of the music were private investigators working for the record labels and trade groups such as the RIAA.
In October 2007, U.S. District Court Judge Michael J. Davis said that making copyrighted music available was illegal “regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.” Yesterday however, Davis admitted that may be a mistake. Citing a 1993 ruling from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, he noted that infringement “requires an actual dissemination of either copies or phonorecords.”
The judge also noted that a case used by the record companies during the original trial was vacated on April 29 and therefore no longer relevant.
“If we have to retry the case, we will do so without hesitation,” added a record industry lawyer.
To date record companies have sued over 30,000 people for unauthorized distribution of music online. Most of the defendants settle their cases for $3000-7000 USD but a few have fought back and taken the cases to court. Thomas was the first to make it to a jury trial. She was originally charged with offering 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network but at the trial the record companies only brought up 24 songs. When she lost, she was then told to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs, a hugely disproportionate number.
Result for: Downloaders
According to a new survey by the University of Hertfordshire, 14-24 year old iPod owners have on average 842 unauthorized songs on those iPods and download an average of 53 more each month.
The survey polled 1200 participants from that age range and that own iPods and found that nearly 70 percent download unauthorized music on a regular basis. 42 percent of those surveyed also admitted to uploading music to P2P networks.
The survey was commissioned by British Music Rights (BMR) and CEO Fergal Sharkey had this to add. “I was one of those people who went around the back of the bike shed with songs I had taped off the radio the night before. But this totally dwarfs that, and anything we expected,” he added of the results.
BMR has been campaigning to make legal music services more appealing and easy to use while at the same time making piracy less appealing. The group feels the best way to do this is to have ISPs offer unlimited music download services as an additional fee to a standard broadband package.
“The positive message is that 80 per cent of downloaders said they would pay for a legal subscription-based service, and they told us they would be willing to pay more than a few pounds a month,” added Sharkey.
Result for: Downloaders
Last week, the latest Nas album was leaked to P2P and other file sharing networks but it appears that the rapper is among the growing minority of music industry veterans that see the upside of piracy and leaked albums.
Nas’ business partner Anthony Saleh had this to say on the matter, “I don’t think the leak has hurt Nas in any way…the leak has helped those who have delivered on their albums with good music … If (fans) want to support it, they’ll go buy it.”
The upside of these leaks of course, is a boost in sales, by way of generating a buzz for the album. If the album is good, and the fans like it, the thinking is that they will eventually go out and buy it, or download it from an authorized vendor.
There is no way to skew that theory either, as it is backed up by pure data. Three of the top five biggest CDs over the last year have been hip-hop albums that were leaked weeks before the actual street date. These albums were the very popular “Graduation” by Kanye West, 50 Cent’s “Curtis” and Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III.”
Each of those albums hit the Internet at least 2 weeks before their street dates yet each have over one million units sales, a plateau that is getting harder and harder to achieve. “Graduation” has sold 2.1 million units, “Curtis” has sold 1.3 million units and the still very new “Tha Carter III” has sold 1.7 million units already. Universal Music Group has estimated that Lil Wayne’s album was pirated over 1 million times since its leak.
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