Comment by nikster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikster | Hacker News Reader

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>When did they back peddle? All the cases I heard of where >someone decided not to settle and went to court, the RIAA >went along and crushed them.'

proof?

>Most cases settled because most people the RIAA went after >were guilty, and knew it, and realized the the minimum >damages they would owe if they lost in court were quite a >bit higher than the RIAA's settlement offer.

That's exactly what they want you to believe. That's why they pursue these lawsuits. It's good old FUD. They can't sue everyone, but they are hoping to sue a handful and scare millions into obedience. It's pretty damn successful at that, too. I know many people who won't download anything for fear of a million Dollar lawsuit.

In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they catch me downloading. But somehow, somewhere, things went awry and people are getting sued for absurd amounts of money. That alone should be a tell tale sign that this is nothing but a big scam. Dressing it in fine legal language doesn't change that.

The RIAA is the enemy of the people, plain and simple. It's a corrupt organization which mainly benefits itself, and marginally benefits the artists it's claiming to represent. Because there is very little legitimacy to anything they do, they need to make lots of loud noise - that's the only way they can survive, after all.

Nothing good can come from electing what we must assume is a puppet for this organization into an important office in the US government.

>In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they catch me downloading.

I would like to preface this by saying that I don't like the RIAA. The damages they can sue for ARE disproportionate and copyright law is currently massively unbalanced (e.g. never-ending copyright since the 1920s).

BUT, have you actually thought about what suing for $20/film would mean? To recover any meaningful losses hundreds of thousands of people would have to be sued at once - unless civil law is radically changed this would not be economical, effectively making copyrights non-enforceable. Not to mention that "downloading" isn't actually covered by copyright law AFAIK and it's the uploading (distributing) part they are suing for.

Also, note that enforcement in cases of property theft isn't proportional either - it's not "pay for the thing you stole and you're free to go". There are often other consequences (community service/fines/light jailtime) attached.

        Most cases settled because most people the RIAA
        went after were guilty, and knew it, and realized
        the the minimum damages they would owe if they
        lost in court were quite a bit higher than the
        RIAA's settlement offer.

    That's exactly what they want you to believe.
    That's why they pursue these lawsuits. It's
    good old FUD. They can't sue everyone, but they
    are hoping to sue a handful and scare millions
    into obedience. It's pretty damn successful at
    that, too. I know many people who won't download
    anything for fear of a million Dollar lawsuit.

The people who have been sent the cease and desist letters and asked to settle have generally been sharing thousands of songs. The settlement offer is typically in the neighborhood of around $4k, which is not unreasonable--it's in the ballpark of what it would cost to pay for the download where the person acquired the song, and some for the downloads that others got from that person at the market rate for legal song downloads.

If the defendant choses to go to court, and loses, the minimum statutory damages are $750 per song, unless the court decides the defendant is an "innocent infringer" (basically someone who had no reason to believe that what they were doing was copyright infringement), in which case it can be lowered to $200 per song.

At $750/song, it only takes about 7 songs illegally downloaded and shared before taking the settlement is cheaper (just on the damages--I'm not even counting defendant's time and attorney fees) than going to court. At $200/song, the crossover is around 25 songs. This is far far under what most people who get caught were doing.

    In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me
    for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they
    catch me downloading.

The RIAA deals with music, not movies. As I showed above, the amount the RIAA offers to settle for is in fact reasonable under your definition--it is in the same ballpark as what the infringer would have had to pay to purchase the copies they download and share.

The damages one faces in court should be higher than that, for the simple reason that if the worst that happens in court is that you have to pay what you would have paid to not infringe in the first place then the risk of being sued is not a disincentive. You could just completely ignore copyright law, and when sued let the plaintiff win a default judgement and pay, putting you in the position you would have been in had you not infringed.

    But somehow, somewhere, things went awry and people are getting
    sued for absurd amounts of money. That alone should be a tell
    tale sign that this is nothing but a big scam. Dressing it in fine
    legal language doesn't change that.

The "absurd" amount of money comes from the law not anticipating that an individual would infringe thousands of copyrights for a purpose other than trying to make money from it, so statutory damages are designed to cover the range of damages that are appropriate for a commercial setting. Every RIAA defendant who lost big in court could have avoided that by accepting the first very reasonable settlement offer (or even more simply by not infringing in the first place). Hell, even after Jammie Thomas-Rasset lost in court and suffered a large judgement, the RIAA renewed their low settlement offer. After she rejected that, and got another trial, and suffered an even bigger judgement, they again offered a much lower settlement amount that she rejected.

You're overlooking the disincentive that there is to defend yourself even when you're innocent. The costs of defending yourself in court (and possibly needing to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court) well exceed the $4k settlement offer. This is why it's a 'shake-down'.

"We think that you have wronged us, so pay us $4k or else be forced to defend yourself in court where if you win, you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees, and if you lose you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees in addition to whatever the damages awarded are."

That you're completely ignoring this possibility says to me that you feel everyone accused by the RIAA is guilty until proven innocent (in your eyes at least).

By that argument, anyone who offers to settle a dispute for an amount less than what it would cost to litigate is doing a shake-down.

Do you think the right thing for the RIAA to do instead would have been to not offer to settle, but just open with a lawsuit and insist on a trial? Or are they supposed to just ignore people who they have very good evidence are massive infringers?

In general, when a large company with deep pockets goes after many people with such a tactic, it's seen by many to be a 'shake-down.' One-off instances not so much.

Not to mention that in most cases that evidence was obtained in an illegal manner (by people that were acting as if they were private investigators, but had no license to do so). Is that okay too? Should the RIAA not be responsible for it's own transgressions because they were just 'innocent mistakes' in the pursuit of a much higher goal (corporate profits)?

What about when the RIAA tries to sue people for sharing songs by artists that the RIAA has no legal standing to represent (I'd argue that moves like this are either made because: 1. the RIAA naively view itself as some entity that 'all of music' must pass through or 2. it's part of some targeted plan to make sure that the rest of the world thinks/believes that the RIAA controls all music)?

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