International Douche Award Winners...

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A federal jury yesterday levied what may be the largest per-song file-sharing fine ever charged to a person.  Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota mom of four and not exactly your poster child for pirating intellectual property, has been fined $1.9 million for downloading 24 songs, or $80,000 per song.

This was – despite all the hot air blown over internet piracy by the RIAA – the first copyright infringement case of this kind to go to trial.  But there’s more fuckheadery to this case than even meets the eye…  

This was the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. The judge ordered a retrial in 2007 after there was an error in the wording of jury instructions.

The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.

So the judge screwed up the first trial and said, it’s cool we’ll just have a do-over and it’s totally not my fault if you get punished 9 times more severely.  A lackey for the RIAA commented that the organization is

"pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable.”

THIS MAKES YOU LOOK BAD.  The protocol for prosecuting these cases is beyond flawed.  The fact that a jury assessed the value of 24 songs at $220,000 one time and $1.9 million another should be ample proof that no one has any idea how much a this kind of property on the internet is worth (hint: 99 f*cking cents), but Christ if you steal 24 books from Waldenbooks, you are not going to be paying $1.9 million to Random House.   Because the American legal system does not understand how this “internet” thing works, people like this poor woman get f*cked.  You could steal 24 cars and get a lighter sentence.

You’d be charged with theft, in a criminal court, rather than with “copyright infringement” in a civil court (if Ford tried to sue someone for stealing a Taurus and letting all his friends drive it around, that claim would be thrown out.  The unfortunate sticking point here is that having songs on KaZaA counts as illegal distribution to millions of people.), where damages for this kind of intellectual trespass can be assessed between $750 and $150,000. The jury could have literally picked any number in that range as the per-song fine.  Why not $80,000, that seems like a happy medium, right?

And what’s more, this is essentially the same as hunting down dudes holding an eighth of weed and locking them up for 20 years while ignoring the drug cartels that make the stuff available in the first place.  I assure you there are bigger fish in the piracy game than this mom from Minnesota.  The problem, again, is that the state is not the instigator, the record companies are.

One final point:

     Thomas-Rasset downloaded work by artists such as No Doubt, Linkin Park, Gloria Estefan.

No one has actually purchased music from any of these bands in at least five years.