CNet’s Declan McCullagh breaks down the trial and why the verdict came back as “guilty.”
Yesterday was kind of a sad day for the file-sharing community after a jury of twelve returned with a guilty verdict in the first ever illegal file-sharing case to see the inside of an actual courtroom.
The Jury ordered Jammie Thomas to pay some $9,250 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of illegally sharing on the KaZaA file-sharing network. This amounts to some $222,000 in total penalties, a figure sure to cause headaches until she appeals her case.
Interestingly enough, CNet’s Declan McCullagh has written an article that breaks down the 4 reasons why he thinks the jury sided with the RIAA and found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement to the tune of $220,000.
Now the article leans towards why it resulted in the penalty amount that it did, but I’m going to focus on the three reasons why according to him the RIAA won period .
“Four reasons why the RIAA won a jury verdict of $220,000”
1. The RIAA was able to match a username and IP address with Thomas.
2. The RIAA’s jury instructions.
Basically the RIAA told the jury that either downloading or uploading music is illegal, making it easier for them to get her coming or going so to speak.
- JURY INSTRUCTION NO. 14: The act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive reproduction right.
- JURY INSTRUCTION NO. 15: The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.
3. “Making available.”
Here all they had to do was prove she had music in KaZaA’s pesky “shared folder.” The RIAA didn’t have to prove that anybody actually downloaded anything from her only that people “could.” Kinda scary.
So it would seem that the verdict was pretty straightforward, but if you notice there’s some glaring loopholes that can be exploited here.
As Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs The People even noted, ”
I’m sorry to hear that Ms. Thomas lost, but I don’t think the case is over by a long shot;” he said “The verdict — based as it upon an entirely erroneous jury instruction going to the very heart of the case — will almost definitely be set aside on appeal.”
We can only hope so.
By the way, here’s nice refresher article called “Tips on how to not get busted for file-sharing” that I wrote a while back. As usual, you Usenet cats have nothing to worry about, but you Direct Connect users out there need to become more aware of the dangers and switch up now for heavens sake! Here’s a guide to BitTorrent to get you started.
Looking for more stuff to watch or download?
Tips on how to not get busted for file-sharing
Computer Security Expert Testifies that the RIAA Can’t Identify Users by IP Address
BREAKING: RIAA Wins First Jury-Trial, File-Sharer Loses $220,000
3 Quick Ways to Watch Movies for FREE!
3 quick ways to watch TV shows for FREE
BitTorrent torrent sites & search engines
uTorrent – A Beginner’s guide to BitTorrent downloading
Watch The Simpsons, The Office, Jackass, South Park, Lost, X-Men, and More, On-Demand For Free
News Tip? Comment? Suggestion? jared@zeropaid.com
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- RIAA Loses Ability to Appeal in Jammie Thomas Case
- EFF Takes on the RIAA in File-sharing Case
- BREAKING: RIAA Wins First Jury-Trial, File-Sharer Loses $220,000
- Judge in Tenenbaum Case to Jury – Defedant Guilty, Pick a Fine
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“As usual you Usenet cats have nothing to worry about but you Direct Connect people need to become more aware of the dangers and switch up for heavens sake! ”
Couldn’t agree more….ANY centralized p2p program and even some un centralized ones are in danger of comming under attack. .
heyyyy what about…soulseek? i use that…no 1 ever talks about that 1 and its underground..no 1 hardly talks or looks that up..neither does riaaa ppl talk about it either ..i dont really use gnutella or fastracck clients any ways..like morepheus limewire kazza shareeza..there all the same..and has the same files and..nuttin really i want..they have nuttin good any ways anymore..but soulseek does..and i use private trackers as well.. so ya
and thats y i dont use fastrack or gnutella..they have nuttin anymore lol hah i wouldnt complain about them they jsut suck now
o and fastrack and gnutella all of them p2p clients are all populer …like limwire and all them thats all ppl talk about and theyve been around so many years and thats no wunder y..the riaa ppl and stuff r just after them mostly..cuz there populer p2p networks so i dont use them..
Well you are STILL taking a chance with soul seek AND with private BT sites…both kinds have been raided by the FBI before. They are not as “safe” or underground as you think they are.
@no.5…EDIT….I was thinking of direct connect…NOT soulseek….sorry for the typo.
Soulseek is not entirely invisible. In late 2005 the IPRIA( I may have misspelled that acronymn)but the European version of the RIAA did go after user of Soulseek. That person was located in Wilmington NC. I recall it vividly as I personally knew a user of that application and ironically that person had recently moved to Wilmington and I was thinking ‘On no (—)had gotten busted’. In any case I recall reading about the incident online while researching Pirolet and the info came up as news article during a web search.
@StormNinja….was it the person you knew? Did you ever find out?
@Meyou123 Fortunately it was not my aquaintance. I ran into the person about a month or so after reading about it and was informed it was someone else.
I wonder what the songs were. Probly real gay.
Jury Directives uploading or download is illegal. Who wrote that law? If it’s their recordings I can see that should be true. That’s it really. They get 15 million (Elvis 2002 album source:Google) sales. Don’t know the copyright holders/artists share but it if get say only %1 that is one percent of 15000000 * 20 dollars which means they get : 3 million dollars. How many sales did this lady STOP? 1000 or so (let’s guess) so that’s 1000 * (0.1 – the money of each album) = 100 dollars fine if you ask me.
RIAA get a f*ckin’ grip of your senses!
I’ll bet it wasn’t Elvis. That’s a factor if you ask me. Did you fall out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down?
There is distribution costs. This wasn’t included in the pretend “fine”.
Actually she probably lost because old people aren’t tech savvy. So they think reformatting is a HUGE thing. I do it once every 6 months to a year. Mostly because Windows sucks and “defragmenting” doesn’t cut it. They also don’t know that routers all use the same IP so anyone wirelessly on your network will have the same ip as you do. So if we look at what they have ruled here. Any and all people out there not knowing how to password home routers should be sued for cleaning their computer hd or someone getting on their internet. Older people just don’t know much about the technological age. Hints RIAA NBC etc.
There is an appeal going for this case. You can help raise funds for her to fight these morons!
I’m donating something. Not much but it’s all i can afford at the moment. Somethings better than nothing right?
http://freejammie.com/
Two things: proxies and external hard drives. You don’t need to re-format. Using a proxy might slow things up a bit but they DO change your IP (I checked with Ghost Surf and others and they really do. Just go to What is my IP.com. Check without the proxy and then with. It does change it.
Then to be sure use an external hard drive to save your files (you can share from it to but only while you are monitoring it…not a good idea to keep it running 24-7.) Then when you are done remove the external drive. Now no illegal files are on your main hard drive.
Then to be really sure erase all evidence of your activity each time you go on by using Windows Washer or some other program that clears the memory.
The people who are getting caught are quite simply not paying attention.
They would still have evidence of you’re IP address though Burd? Don’t they legally make the ISPs spill the beans?
Burd if you can tell me an IP hiding app that actually works for BT or other filesharing vs. just browsing that’s what I’m interested in. The reason you are seeing the IP change on sites like What is my IP is that you are using your browser BIG difference! Unless you actually find downloads that are on a website then this does you NO good.
Anyone know how they “proved” that a wireless router couldn’t be involved? (Besides paying off the judge and jury).
Here is some info from the MediaSenty leak not long ago:
“Here is a summary of UMG’s torrent testing for this week. The effectiveness for Amy Winehouse is at 40% compared to 37% last week. Colbie Caillat is at 90% from 78% and Common increased to 73% from 63%. However Lyle Lovett dropped to 96% from 100% last week. Everything seems to be positive except for the drop…” This basically describes the percentage of files that were decoys that appear when a user searches. For some files only decoys were available. An example is the screenshot where the top 10 results for Kanye West’s Good Morning were all fake file. An email about this said: “I’m seeing our decoys flood right now for “kanye west good morning.” The top 10 results are us. The attached screen cap shows what it looks like on my laptop right now. The file is real for 45 seconds then goes to crap and sounds skippy glitchy etc.”
If I’m reading this correct at times they are flooding with “decoy” files and sometimes the rate is at 100% of the files available are fake.
This alone casts serious doubt as if the RIAA can really determine if a file is truly the copyright piece in question or just something with a fake name etc.