They should be going after people who re-sell stolen music and movies. Near my office there’sn itinerant marketplace that sets up all Tuesdays and Wednesdays. There are at least 5 different stands selling pirated music CDs (around US$1.25) aand pirated DVDs (from $2 to $10) They even sell movies that are still in theaters. In the subway you can buy MP3 CDs with hundreds of stolen songs for under one US Dollar.
Miovas that ruling is absurd and offensive. It is not justice in any sense of the word. She is being fined 80k a song when she could purchase them on iTunes for a dollar.
I suspect she wasn’t fined that much because she could have bought them for a dollar a piece, she was fined that much because thousands of others who downloaded them from her DID NOT spend a dollar piece for each song from a legal venue in which they MIGHT have otherwise. She’s not paying for what she didn’t buy, she’s paying for what she distributed and potentially denied the rights holders from making from legitimate sales.
I recognize it as a lot of money, but I’m reluctant to say that it is “absurd and offensive” because I’m not sure what the actual loss was to the plaintiffs. The companies had actually tried to settle with here before for considerably less, and still offer her the opportunity to settle for a lot less. The problem seems to be that she won’t own up to being responsible for her actions. Tough cookies for her then.
$80,000 a song? Seems arbitrary, and thus has no place in the courts.
It’s possible that it seems arbitrary because we don’t know what evidence was presented in court in terms of the damages she caused in lost sales from the companies. Are you familiar with all the evidence that was presented by the RIAA? They didn’t sue her because she stole them without paying for them, they sued her because she distributed them as well.
They should be going after people who re-sell stolen music and movies. Near my office there’sn itinerant marketplace that sets up all Tuesdays and Wednesdays. There are at least 5 different stands selling pirated music CDs (around US$1.25) aand pirated DVDs (from $2 to $10) They even sell movies that are still in theaters. In the subway you can buy MP3 CDs with hundreds of stolen songs for under one US Dollar.
This is rampant here in Maldives and Sri Lanka (probably India and even the whole of South Eastern Asia). But the sellers have actual shops, not just stands in a marketplace. But there are no ways at all to get legitimate copies of music or movies (at least here in Maldives) because airport security confiscates all the discs (under the assumption that it’s porn, or too graphic etc). I just can’t figure out why the police don’t bust the illegal sellers in the shops. Nobody else seems to know either.