RIAA slaps woman with $1.9 million fine for 32 songs

[Mental]

I've been more or less staying away from starting threads for a bit, but nobody posted this, and it seems like the kind of thing you all would enjoy discussing.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/min ... newssearch

I don't know what the jury was thinking. The RIAA lawyers must have been pretty persuasive in order for them to ruin a woman's financial life completely over 32 songs. Personally, I would love to beat the living shit out of whoever was responsible for this lawsuit. I supported the judgement against Pirate Bay - that was a server, a major site and responsible for probably millions of downloads of all sorts of things. But $1.9 MILLION over 32 songs? The RIAA executives in charge of this lawsuit should be killed.

So, I still disagree with piracy, and support cease-and-desist against major pirate servers, but apparently the worst things anyone here has ever said against the RIAA have been completely deserved and more. It's the financial equivalent of beating someone to death for stealing a loaf of bread. There are no words to express how I feel about this.

[Zeus]

They're just trying to make headlines by making an example out of this woman so regular people (ie. mothers) will stop thinking that it's OK to download songs and suggest to their kids to download instead of paying for it.

I'm going to go and download 32 albums just because.

[Mental]

Yeah, but this is just wrong.

I'd write a letter to the RIAA, but it wouldn't do any good. I just hope they go broke, and that whoever was responsible for this lawsuit gets locked in a small metal box in 80-degree heat for two days.

[RentCavalier]

It's funny 'cause last night I was relating the story to a friend of mine, and I agree that this is just abysmal.

The woman clearly can't pay for it. The RIAA clearly cannot prosecute everybody who downloads pirated music (I.E. us). So, basically, they're crucifying THIS woman because they can't get us. It's excessively cruel.

[Imakeholesinu]

didn't her prior cases against her get thrown out due to the courts just losing patients with the RIAA's lawyers and tactics? Basically this is just a form of bullying as they hit you with a huge lawsuit that never goes to court and then want to settle out of court?

[Julius Seeker]

It's the US court system that is responsible. It is the RIAA's job to try and eliminate piracy by any means possible.

[Zeus]

It's the US court system that is responsible. It is the RIAA's job to try and eliminate piracy by any means possible.

So you agree it would make sense for them to chose the most effective and economical way possible?

[Don]

It's the jury that decided the amount not the RIAA.

From what I read about, it seems like the jury thought she was lying and wasting their time which is why they slapped her very hard on the settlement. Note that this amount was much higher than what she had the first time, so she must have done something to really annoy the jury.

It appears that there was no way she could've won this even if the standard was 'beyond a reasonable doubt' which it obviously was not. The statutory punishment for copyright infringment is somewhere between $700 to $150K. It seems like she based her argument about some Internet lawyer help over some technicality that nobody cared about that turned out to be irrelevent anyway (sounds like she thought the standard for civil case was beyond a reasonable doubt instead of proponderance of evidence). In short, she was going to lose no matter what and somehow did a good job at alienating the entire jury and ended up with a very huge fine because the jury didn't like to have their time wasted.

[Mental]

It's still absurd, and the RIAA deserves every bit of their financial troubles, even if the music industry as a whole does not.

[SineSwiper]

Fine. She declares bankruptcy. Problem solved. Not to say that it wouldn't fuck up her credit, but the RIAA isn't going to get a penny out of her.

It's still absurd, and the RIAA deserves every bit of their financial troubles, even if the music industry as a whole does not.

The music industry DESERVES whatever mess they created! Several reason why:

1. Music artists make total shit compared to the money that the record companies make. In many cases, it's pennies for each CD ($15-20) sold.

2. Artists make even LESS money on iTunes, because Apple has continued the raping with the Big 7.

3. Artists get raped FURTHER by piling on every possible cost unto the artists. New artists could potentially get millions of dollars of debt that they need to pay back before they get any real money.

4. Record companies own ALL copyrights to the songs, and abuse them.

5. Record companies have often fucked over their artists completely by not paying them at all, spawning lawsuits from the artists to try to get a paycheck.

Don't believe me? Listen to Courtney Love, R.E.M., The Dixie Chicks, U2, Alanis Morrissette, Bush, Prince and Q-Tip

Here a just a few examples of what we're talking about:

Multiplatinum artists like TLC ("Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg," "Waterfalls" and "No Scrubs") and Toni Braxton ("Unbreak My Heart" and "Breathe Again") have been forced to declare bankruptcy because their recording contracts didn't pay them enough to survive.

Corrupt recording agreements forced the heirs of Jimi Hendrix ("Purple Haze," "All Along the Watchtower" and "Stone Free") to work menial jobs while his catalog generated millions of dollars each year for Universal Music.

Florence Ballard from the Supremes ("Where Did Our Love Go," "Stop in the Name of Love" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" are just 3 of the 10 #1 hits she sang on) was on welfare when she died.

Collective Soul earned almost no money from "Shine," one of the biggest alternative rock hits of the 90s when Atlantic paid almost all of their royalties to an outside production company.

Merle Haggard ("I Threw Away the Rose," "Sing Me Back Home" and "Today I Started Loving You Again") enjoyed a string of 37 top-ten country singles (including 23 #1 hits) in the 60s and 70s. Yet he never received a record royalty check until last year when he released an album on the indie punk-rock label Epitaph.

Even Elvis Presley, the biggest-selling artist of all time, died with an estate valued at not even $3 million.

[Mental]

Not a bad set of points. I still don't know that I feel the music industry as a whole ought to be completely condemned - not every contract is that exploitative nor every executive that cruel - but it's clear that the RIAA does not deserve to be supported any longer (and that's an understatement).

[SineSwiper]

True, I hear that the indie record labels treat the artists pretty well. I'd like to know what eMusic charges for their royalty rates, since they deal with nothing but indie labels.

I'm still not okay with the whole "labels own the songs" bullshit, though.

[Don]

I think if you look at the music model, they attempt to mold any people they sign up into some kind of superstar, when statistically it can't be the case everyone is a superstar. Yet some of these guys get paid a lot upfront to live like superstars, and when they turn out not to be one they end up owing the rest of their life to the labels because they already borrowed a ton of money ahead of time.

I don't see why music can't be like any other job where you get some kind of salary for producing normal work. If you're just an average musician you don't need all the most fancy equipment and stuff out there. You probably don't even need to go on tours and stuff if you're just an average musician. Save all the PR and hype and just get a decent living wage producing okay quality music instead of trying to strike it big knowing that most will never do.

[SineSwiper]

I think a lot of the indie artists understand this. Hell, many electronica artists are just one or two guys, so it makes it easier to split the profits.