Quote:
Originally Posted by gideongallery
well that part of the problem, i don't think this case is legitimate on the bases that she did buy those 24 songs.
According to the evidence those songs appeared on cd she did buy, the version she had on her computer were ones that happened to be ripped by a pirate group but that does change the point she paid for those songs already. She could have just as easily ripped them from her bought cds.
The point is i have been a system administrator for a large university so i am fully aware that there are two types of backup, the sms (system managment server) creates ghost images of the base pc (all the os and software installed) and a second server that stores the backups of the private data of the individual pc.
Arguing that reaquiring a differently sourced version of the copyright material is automatically a copyright violation would make those servers illegal too. there is to much established doctrine under the law that contridicts that statement.
Which is again the main reason i believe this has more to do with them knocking down bogus precedents rather than just go for the easier winning arguements (bankruptcy, backup/recovery, bad instruction that ignores fair use etc).
if anything the outrage at this absurd judgements when these easier to win arguements are finally made will be used to fuel the extension of fair use to cover "filesharing for personal use" something which i personally think would go to far. But is getting ever more likely with each passing bad judgement
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I will agree with you that the judgment in this case it crazy. That is just way too much money to award them in this case. I have no idea if they have a way of knowing how many times those songs were shared, but if not I don't think you can just assume it was 80,000+ times each (I picked that number because you could buy those songs for $1 each and the RIAA was awarded 80K per song so maybe the jury assumed she shared each on 80K times, but I don't really know for sure what they were thinking.)
I have heard that she downloaded these songs and I have also heard that she bought them on CD seperatly. I don't know which is true.
Here is my personal opinion on how it should work.
1. If you download a song you have not paid for in some way that is wrong and illegal.
2. If you take a song you own (either through paid download or purchased CD) and you share it via p2p or torrent that is wrong and should be illegal. I don't buy the argument that people are only sharing a tiny bit of the file so it isn't illegal because they aren't sharing the full file. I also don't buy that uploading it to a torrent is "backing up via the cloud." To me it is encouraging pirating because there are going to be many people out there who are now downloading your stuff when they haven't paid for it. There are tons of ways to back stuff up without uploading it a torrent or p2p program.
3. The most obvious is if you download something you haven't paid for then you share it. To me this should be the most harshly penalized because you are taking something you don't own and distributing it to others.
For me that is it. I don't think asking people to purchase the music they want to own and then not share it with tens of thousands (if not millions) of other people via p2p and torrents is too much to ask.