What a joke
A lady from Minnesota has been fined $222,000 for making 24 songs available to download over the internet. That's $9,250 per song. The Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) wanted to pursue her for 1702 songs. That would have been $15,743,500 at that rate. And the jury could have gone up to $150,000 per song. That would have been $255,300,000 according to my abacus. Let's make that point again. She could have been fined over two hundred and fifty million dollars - over a quarter of a billion dollars. For having some songs publically accessible on her computer.
Let's look at this from a couple of different angles.
First point is that they don't actually have any concrete evidence it was this lady who made them available. And they don't have any evidence that anyone actually downloaded them either.
Second point is that each song must have a nominal value of about $1 retail value. A CD typically contains, say, 12 songs and costs about $12. So $1 per song. For a fine of $9250 per song, that would allege that each song was uploaded 9250 times to make the fine correct. Assume each song is about 3MB in size. This gives a total upload of 650GB of data. That's a lot. And as the RIAA wanted 1702 songs, that would work out to be 45 terabytes of data uploaded. And given the typical upload stream is only about 512Mb/s (megabits, not megabytes, remembering that broadband upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds) we have to do some horrible maths to work out how long it would have taken. In a minute, you could upload 30MB. In an hour, 1800MB. In a day, 43GB. In a week, 301GB. In a month, 1.2TB. At that rate, it'd take about 3 years to upload that amount of data, if it ran solidly at max throughput 24/7. I rather imagine her ISP would have cut her off before then... So, either my maths are wrong, or the fine is grossly disproportinate.
But - get this - they don't have to prove that any songs were actually transferred to allege that copyright infringement took place. That they were made available is enough. That, frankly, is staggeringly wrong. Firstly, it should be those downloading them that are breaking the law, as they are knowingly copying something that is under copyright. Secondly, this leaves literally everybody in the entire world liable for this charge. If, say, I went over to see my brother and borrowed a CD that I then copy, he is liable for up to a $150,000 fine per track on that CD. If I go to his house, borrow a CD without even asking because I see it there, he is still liable for it as he made it available by not locking it in a safe or something.
The likes of Blockbuster, Lovefilm, and even my local library share out movies and CDs. They even charge for it! Ms Thomas was not profiting from this, but these other companies are. Therefore we can expect Blockbuster to now be sued for not only making copyrighted material available to share but also for profiting from this illegal enterprise. The fine on that one would have to encompass all money that ever existed or ever will exist. Ok, I know they have rental licensed copies, but that doesn't take away the fact that they are making them available for people to copy.
This is a ridiculous outcome and has set an extremely dangerous precendent.
Let's look at this from a couple of different angles.
First point is that they don't actually have any concrete evidence it was this lady who made them available. And they don't have any evidence that anyone actually downloaded them either.
Second point is that each song must have a nominal value of about $1 retail value. A CD typically contains, say, 12 songs and costs about $12. So $1 per song. For a fine of $9250 per song, that would allege that each song was uploaded 9250 times to make the fine correct. Assume each song is about 3MB in size. This gives a total upload of 650GB of data. That's a lot. And as the RIAA wanted 1702 songs, that would work out to be 45 terabytes of data uploaded. And given the typical upload stream is only about 512Mb/s (megabits, not megabytes, remembering that broadband upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds) we have to do some horrible maths to work out how long it would have taken. In a minute, you could upload 30MB. In an hour, 1800MB. In a day, 43GB. In a week, 301GB. In a month, 1.2TB. At that rate, it'd take about 3 years to upload that amount of data, if it ran solidly at max throughput 24/7. I rather imagine her ISP would have cut her off before then... So, either my maths are wrong, or the fine is grossly disproportinate.
But - get this - they don't have to prove that any songs were actually transferred to allege that copyright infringement took place. That they were made available is enough. That, frankly, is staggeringly wrong. Firstly, it should be those downloading them that are breaking the law, as they are knowingly copying something that is under copyright. Secondly, this leaves literally everybody in the entire world liable for this charge. If, say, I went over to see my brother and borrowed a CD that I then copy, he is liable for up to a $150,000 fine per track on that CD. If I go to his house, borrow a CD without even asking because I see it there, he is still liable for it as he made it available by not locking it in a safe or something.
The likes of Blockbuster, Lovefilm, and even my local library share out movies and CDs. They even charge for it! Ms Thomas was not profiting from this, but these other companies are. Therefore we can expect Blockbuster to now be sued for not only making copyrighted material available to share but also for profiting from this illegal enterprise. The fine on that one would have to encompass all money that ever existed or ever will exist. Ok, I know they have rental licensed copies, but that doesn't take away the fact that they are making them available for people to copy.
This is a ridiculous outcome and has set an extremely dangerous precendent.
posted by Nej at
11:09 am
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