Jammie Appeals, Citing "Excessive" Damages 403
Peerless writes "Capitol v. Thomas defendant Jammie Thomas has officially appealed the RIAA's $222,000 copyright infringement award. She is seeking a retrial to determine the RIAA's actual damages, arguing that the jury's award was 'unconstitutionally excessive': 'Thomas would like to see the record companies forced to prove their actual damages due to downloading, a figure that Sony-BMG litigation head Jennifer Pariser testified that her company "had not stopped to calculate." In her motion, Thomas argues that the labels are contending that their actual damages are in the neighborhood of $20. Barring a new trial over the issue of damages, Thomas would like to see the reward knocked down three significant digits — from $222,000 to $151.20.'"
Re:Sig digs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:big numbers (Score:2, Informative)
From the sounds of it, Sony-BMG have no idea how much actual monetary damage she did them, and pulled a ridiculously large figure out of their ass.
Re:"unconstitutionally excessive"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:8th Amendment (Score:5, Informative)
She's citing the 14th. The penalty runs afoul of due process. See BMW v. Gore [wikipedia.org].
Re:Copyright is not a right (Score:3, Informative)
Correction (Score:3, Informative)
The JURY pulled the figure out of their collective asses.
The plaintiffs do not set the damages that are awarded to themselves. The judge/jury does that.
Re:From what it sounds like... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not virii or viri. (Score:5, Informative)
Not Quite (Score:3, Informative)
Note how everything is expressed in negatives, i.e. "shall not be infringed".
Re:From what it sounds like... (Score:5, Informative)
But then again, if you just want to sit around and make-up stuff to believe instead of actually reading up on some of all the research that's being done, be my guest. Hey, why don't you start a church?
Re:From what it sounds like... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry, perhaps you missed the part where I quoted statistics from your own study that seem to oppose your argument? As I said, I didn't have time to read the entire thing in detail, but there were several other sections that were not nearly as one-sided in their view as you're making out, either.
But since you don't seem to read your own links, here's another one for you from the summary you cited this time:
An explosion in research (mainly dependent on access to proprietary data) as a result of public interest in these issues means that we are now in a position to provide answers with some degree of certainty. The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing probably has some negative impact on traditional sales but the effect is appears to be quite small. The size of this effect is debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent years, but a figure of between 0 and 30% would be a reasonable consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 0-30% of the decline in sales not a 0-30% decline in sales). At the same time there is still substantial disagreement in the literature with the most impressive paper to date (Oberholzer and Strumpf 2005) estimating no impact from file-sharing.
I've even emphasized the important parts for the hard-of-reading. Clue: this clearly states that on the basis of all the studies to date, file-sharing is not an overall positive influence on sales. The only question is how much of a negative impact it has, and figures quoted in the literature cited work out to millions of dollars per week in some cases. And this is from a literature survey with a slight bias in its presentation!
It's not an appeal... (Score:5, Informative)
An appeal is to a higher court.
This is a motion directed toward the trial court.
Re:It's not virii or viri. (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on it.
Re:"unconstitutionally excessive"? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. You stated that you (1) don't understand why Americans refer to the constitution and (2) made fun of the fact that they do.
I'm just curious as to why there's a need to refer to it in seemingly every other trial.
You're interpreting the data incorrectly. People in the US refer to the Constitution in regular trials. They do refer to it frequently in trials that make the news. They do that because those tend to be the trials that involve issues that are controversial or legally unclear. The US legal system (like any other legal system) goes back to the constitution for principles that guide their decisions, not just in the US but also in Finland.
I'm perfectly aware that we have a constitution in Finland
I'm glad to hear it. However, you still don't seem to fully understand what constitutions are for or why they matter in controversial trials. I hope I've been able to clear that up for you a little.
And, yes, to answer your original question, it is a "cultural thing": it seems like civics really is more a part of public discourse and debate in the US than it is in Finland.
Re:Almost right. (Score:2, Informative)
Just as if you had a physics equation s = 1/2 * a * t
you don't have a single digit of precision from the 1 or the two, those are exact and don't degrade precision at all.
There are all sorts of things that would go wrong if you started applying precision techniques to integers of all things. After you learn the formulas, you people need to learn what they mean.
Now, maybe if someone counted the money and you had a measurement of $220k, that might have 2 significant digits. But if you define an amount of money as $220k at that number, it is that number, not a millionth of a penny more or less.
Simply put, try paying the IRS a $10,000 tax bill with less than $10k and see exactly how precise $10,000 is.
Of course what the poster really did mean was "orders of magnitude".
Re:"unconstitutionally excessive"? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the Constitution affirms a number of rights and freedoms which all people innately have, and defines bounds on the extent to which government may restrict those rights and freedoms.
In this particular case, the most applicable passage from the Constitution would likely be Amendment XIII: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The law, as written, allows copyright holders to collect statutory fines from infringers far greater than actual damages. But if the appeals court finds that such statutory fines can meet the Constitutional standard of "excessive", then the law providing for such fines will be found in violation of the Constitution, and overturned.
Re:"unconstitutionally excessive"? (Score:1, Informative)