Really? Really Music Industry? | Page 2 | WrestleZone Forums

Really? Really Music Industry?

I seriously doubt that a jury knows the cost of music if they are handing down $650,000 fines to people that pirate. I mean, my gran could be chosen for that case and what the Hell would she know about pirating music?

This case reeks to me of people who have bought into the prosecution's case and have taken a sum of money from their recommendations. When you consider that one judge has already reduced the fine, we can both argue that the sums of money we are talking about are reasonable.
 
A note about the amount of the fine and the jury being informed:

When I was on a jury, we were told to come up with the punishment ourselves. It was to be a combination of a fine and prison time, not exceeding a certain amount. That was all we were given. No guidelines, no previous penalties, no recommendations at all. The judge would have had to approve it, but we were never given anything but the range it could be in. I don't know if that's the situation here or not but it's a possibility.
 
Davidus Maximus said:
I seriously doubt that a jury knows the cost of music if they are handing down $650,000 fines to people that pirate. I mean, my gran could be chosen for that case and what the Hell would she know about pirating music?
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But then, wouldn't it be the prosecuting attorney's job to inform the jury of the costs? Then, once that happened, wouldn't it be the job of the defense's attorney to dispute the costs, to demonstrate how the prosecution's math is in error?

If by the end of a trial, the jury doesn't know how much the cost of the music in question's value is, then it's a failure on the part of the attorneys arguing the case, not the jury.
 
Gelgarin said:
Judges preside over the case, instruct the jury and are empowered to overturn jury decisions under certain circumstances - including in they reach an unreasonable verdict.
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Apparently the countless hours I've spent watching Law & Order were for nothing. I thought the juries just determined whether the defendant was guilty or not and then the judge sentenced.
 
Try The Practice.

Not a very good show (although possessing of a certain camp charm) but it's pretty good at getting the details of US criminal and civil law down.
 
In my opinion, the guy should be fined for what crimes he has committed plus legal costs. hundreds and thousands of songs still don't add up to that amount of money. Nowhere even close to that figure. And legal costs don't even cover it.

The fact that he has been fined an exorbitant amount of money shows just how uniformed the jury really was. There is simply no way the cost should have been that high. How a judge could sign off on that is beyond me. I would have thought that the jury would have come up with a cost per song and would have multiplied that by how many songs he was supposed to have stolen. That would be reasonable. This is just ridiculous.

If they all knew that he was going to file for bankruptcy in any case, then why not make his punishment more severe? Make his punishment the full extent of the law. I mean, he was never going to pay it anyway. Right?

How anyone else could argue a different sum of money is lost on me unfortunately.
 
In my opinion, the guy should be fined for what crimes he has committed plus legal costs. hundreds and thousands of songs still don't add up to that amount of money. Nowhere even close to that figure. And legal costs don't even cover it.
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1) So we should reconstruct the entire legal system so that every case is decided by you?
2) This guy didn't just steal thousands of songs, he also distributed them to thousands of other people.
3) Do you seriously not see why simply fining someone the exact value of the goods they steal is stupid? It provides no disincentive for people to steal, since doing so will never make them worse off.

The fact that he has been fined an exorbitant amount of money shows just how uniformed the jury really was.
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Says some guy with zero idea of what he's talking about. Did you listen to the case?

There is simply no way the cost should have been that high. How a judge could sign off on that is beyond me.
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Possibly because judges actually know the law. If the prosecution can show show potential damages up to a certain level and convince a jury to find in their favour to that amount then that is the verdict. Unlike random people on the internet; judges don't rewrite the law.

I would have thought that the jury would have come up with a cost per song and would have multiplied that by how many songs he was supposed to have stolen. That would be reasonable. This is just ridiculous.
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As I said; he also distributed these songs to thousands of other thieves. This will have been gone over at the trial. This is why the jury are informed and you are not. And this is why we leave the decision to them, and not to you.

Seriously; if you oppose trial by jury, what is your alternative?

If they all knew that he was going to file for bankruptcy in any case, then why not make his punishment more severe? Make his punishment the full extent of the law. I mean, he was never going to pay it anyway. Right?
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They didn't. That kind of information is intentionally withheld from juries. Revealing it would probably be grounds for a mistrial.

How anyone else could argue a different sum of money is lost on me unfortunately.
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So after five minutes reading you are legitimately unable to even comprehend how half a dozen people who spent days listening to the evidence could think differently to you. That's... disappointing actually.
 
For someone who stands on a basis of "someone else not knowing the case", you certainly do make a great effort to be so hypocritical that it amazes me.

You don't know how many times he shared the files. You don't know how many files he downloaded. Hell, you don't even know how many he was being tried for. Was it 30 or was it 30,000? You don't know for certain. It reads to me as if he was being tried for 30 and in the course of the trial, he was found to have downloaded thousands. That being said, that is not what he was being tried for. 30 is the number quoted.

He could have shared it with one person or 1,000. That much is not open to anyone. So don't act as if you know all of the sordid details of the case and we don't. You're just as clueless as the rest of us. So don't act as if you know it all because you watched an episode of The Practice. You're not Ally McBeal.

The point still stands that this was an entirely frivolous case. He was never going to pay the sum that was set out. It wasted time and money that would have been better served finding ways protecting the music and film against copyright infringement.
 
I don't think that is what Gelgarin was saying. I believe that it was more along the lines of giving the jury the benefit of the doubt because they did hear all of the facts, they do know how many songs were downloaded shared, etc, and that since we don't know, perhaps they know something more than we do to justify that amount.

It's not that Gelgarin knows the facts any more than the rest of us, but that the jury, which does know the facts more than the rest of us, might have had a good reason to deliver the amount they did.
 
Of course I'm just as ignorant as you are; that's my whole fucking argument. I don't know the details of the case. You don't know the details of the case. The jury did know the details of the case, so maybe just maybe we should go with what they decided until we're provided with a concrete reason not to. How many times do I have to post the exact same thing; that ignorant fuckwits on the internet shouldn't be judging this case; before it penetrates your skull.

Jesus Christ.
 
675,000$ is the fine for uploading 30 songs, or the maximum compensation for 270 killed Iraqi civilians.
 
Fine; I don't know all the details of the case. I know enough to say that.

The defended admitted in court that he downloaded hundreds of songs from a wide variety of artists using a file sharing program and distributed them to others - file sharing networks distribute your files to anyone who wants to download them, so unless you think that the net sum of illegal music downloads amounts to half a dozen people then I'm right.
 
Gelgarin said:
Fine; I don't know all the details of the case. I know enough to say that.

The defended admitted in court that he downloaded hundreds of songs from a wide variety of artists using a file sharing program and distributed them to others - file sharing networks distribute your files to anyone who wants to download them, so unless you think that the net sum of illegal music downloads amounts to half a dozen people then I'm right.
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You don't know what site or system he was using to distribute the music. It could be something as wide-ranging as The Pirate Bay or IsoHunt. Or it could be a private server that has 30 to 40 people on it. That much isn't clear. So all we know, for certain, is that we don't know.
 
You don't know what site or system he was using to distribute the music.
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Yes I do. He used Kazaa. User base at the time: several million I believe. Keep trying though.

Not that this is in any way relevant to my 'people in the internet shouldn't be responsible for judging this case'.
 
Internet piracy is a tricky business that the laws of our country aren't really equipped to deal with yet, so absolutely nobody in this thread can calculate the proper punishment for this sort of crime.

Gelgarin's right that fining him .99 cents a song is stupid, because then he's really not being punished, he's just being forced to repay for his crime. Not to mention he shared the songs, which also eliminated some profits the company that sued him could have had.

KB's right that over half a million dollars is excessive. This guy didn't cause any significant damages to the music industry, he just didn't give them money that they deserved. Generally in cases of unpaid debts, the losing party is forced to pay the amount of money they owe plus a little something for the trouble they put the other party through.

It's a tricky case with no clear answer.
 
...

The JURY decided the amount?

Holy Shit I've never felt happier to be British - over here Juries determine guilt, Judges decide upon sentences. The maximum fine is £50,000 or around $80,000. Also over here file sharing is NOT a criminal offence.

The guy does have precedent though and currently he is paying ten times more than what was set by Capitol v Thomas. Where a $1,500,000 fine was reduced to $54,000 "the court ruled that the $1.5 million award was "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable." The court again reduced the jury award to $54,000, or $2,250 per song." The quote is from wikipedia via the actual court documents.

He still needs to get his appeal heard to get it reduced though. Good luck to him, when judges are able to say that about fines and then reduce it by such a significant margin you know that something has gone seriously wrong somewhere

(As an aside, that particular value fluctuated between the two extremes at the request of a Jury, those figures are seemingly pulled from thin air and in all honesty the fact that a Jury gets to decide the amount totally baffles me...)
 
Shotaro said:
...

The JURY decided the amount?

Holy Shit I've never felt happier to be British - over here Juries determine guilt, Judges decide upon sentences. The maximum fine is £50,000 or around $80,000. Also over here file sharing is NOT a criminal offence.
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Confusing a box of propanalol and prednisolone, however is illegal.
 
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