Because Who Really Needs Evidence Anyway?
Joshua Foust on Jun 21 2008 at 3:39 pm | Filed under: Law, regulation
The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.
“Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances,” MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.
“It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement,” van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.
A Duluth, Minnesota, jury in October dinged Thomas $222,000 for “making available” 24 songs on the Kazaa network in the nation’s first and only RIAA case to go to trial. United States District Court Judge Michael Davis instructed the 12 panelists that they need only find Thomas had an open share folder, not that anyone from the public actually copied her files.
So collecting evidence is hard, so why should they even bother if they’re suing single mothers for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Crap like this makes me believe the nutroots who claim our country has been sold out to unaccountable corporations—in this case, it very much appears to be the case.
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Even as someone who is sympathetic to copyright infringement claims, and a fan of novel legal theories, this would be a grave step too far. What the MPAA is asking is that attempted files sharing be treated the same as actual file sharing. They ask way too much.