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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Something is broken in this country.

I think the broken thing in this trial was a misdirection of efforts. The defendant was quite clearly guilty, (her cable modem, her mac, mysteriously replaced hdd). The defendant spent her time grandstanding obviously false innocence, thumbing her nose at the court and the intelligence of the jury. The RIAA representatives spent their time grandstanding obviously false damages, thumbing their collective noses at the whole justice system.

In the end, the whole thing was just a circus that missed the most obvious point: What is a reasonable course of action for dealing with this type of infringement? The sad part is, this trial was a wasted opportunity where we could have begun to address this issue. Instead the judge let it slip once again into a good ol' fashioned case of American side-show freakery.

A trial court's job is to determine facts: did infringement occur? An appellate court has some power to get into some of the interesting policy issues you bring up. Maybe that will happen in this case, or maybe not.

They would have had better luck with jury nullification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Help fix it: join EFF: http://www.eff.org/

Agreed, but what do we do? I've seen few reasonable copyright reform ideas, and none of them actually discussed how we can push forward to implement them. Everyone simply says that too many people with too much money want things to stay the same, but I don't buy it. This attitude bothers me most when I see it here; this site exists because we know the power of the little guys in the market, and I know there's a workable approach to the copyright issue, it just needs to be found.

You mean the fact that we fund public schools with local property taxes, right?

You mean the fact that we fund public schools with local property taxes, right?

In Minnesota, schools are funded with general state taxation on a per-enrollment basis. But that doesn't keep the government-run schools from being remarkably ineffective.

I have to agree with you, Thomas. While IP law in the United States is clearly full of problems, we cannot ignore the simple numbers: millions of childrens' lives are worsened every year, through no fault of their own, just because of where, or to whom, they were born.

Healthcare? Quality education? Who gives a fuck- I want my free mp3s!

There's a reason the American dream isn't called the American reality: widespread socioeconomic injustice is alive and well in the United States of America.

That isn't the case in a lot of states that aggregate the taxes and disperse them. Texas does this, I think.

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