We have previously discussed how President Obama has repeatedly yielded to the “copyright hawks” who have steadily increased the penalties for copyright and trademark violations, including criminal penalties. Despite the abuse of average citizens by thuggish law firms and prosecutors, the Obama Administration continues to support draconian measures against citizens. Even after the abuse and death of Aaron Swartz by the Justice Department, the Obama Administration has decided to double down in a case of a young mother in Northern Minnesota who was hit with grotesque penalties for simply sharing 24 songs. She was told to pay $222,000 — over 100 times the actual damages for the songs. The Obama Administration has intervened before the Supreme Court to ask for it to allow the penalty to stand as lawful and correct.
The Administration has joined these companies in pummeling Jammie Thomas-Rasset for sharing music through the peer-to-peer network Kazaa. She has been fighting for years and put through two trials. Huge awards were thrown out by the court but the industry continued to make her an example by ruining her. Last year, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the $222,000 award. Rather than agree that such penalties are outrageous and seek the protection of average citizens in the courts or in Congress, the Obama Administration has done precisely what is demanded by industry lobbyists and lawyers.
What is striking is that these damages are not treated as punitive but statutory damages. The Supreme Court has previously struck down the awarding of punitive damages to citizens suing companies as unconstitutional. These cases like Gore v. BMW involved punitive damages greater than a 10 to 1 ratio to compensatory damages. They were found to run afoul of due process. In the Gore decision, the court wrote that “the most important indicium of the reasonableness of a punitive damages award is the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant’s conduct.” Gore, 517 U.S. at 575, 116 S.Ct. at 1599. “This principle reflects the accepted view that some wrongs are more blameworthy than others.” Id.
The Obama Administration clearly does not believe that standard applies to people like Thomas-Rasset or Swartz. It precisely sided with the companies in the case and said the award was not excessive. While judges have decried these penalties as absurd, the White House continues to argue for the penalties to be enforced. The question is whether this Supreme Court will feel as much sympathy toward individual citizens in statutory penalty cases as did has repeatedly for companies in punitive damage cases.
The Obama Administration argued that awards can be disproportionate but that this is not such an award. It felt that the case really speaks to the poor company lawyers and shareholders who are put at an unfair disadvantage by citizens like Thomas-Rasset: “The public interest cannot be realized if the inherent difficulty of proving actual damages leaves the copyright holder without an effective remedy for infringement.” Without an effective remedy? The portrayal of these companies as helpless victims is a bit much . . . but not too much for the White House.
Source: Rolling Stone
SOTU from Cspan coverage. 2013
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“the greatest ´nation of earth, can not do its business, by drifting from one manufactured crisis to another”…..(paraphrased), ref. Obama SOTU 2013
On a tangent it was fascinating in the full coverage to see him work the line of first row greeters, he cut one pol dead after a glance, and went to another two rows back.
Hope he was well oiled in. So many cheek kisses. He is white, in skin hue.
Now we will monitor if it is business as usual. the big thrust as usual, and watch the details of the edicts and the laws enacted. Someone here did an excellent exposé on “No child left behind” or some such program.
The devil is in the details. And it is not he that makes the details, although some of his people do. But he chooses his cabinet. Damn his bankster loving hide. Put a stop to the revolving door by executive directive, why don’t you Prez.
You all know: business men, leaders of men, military, bureaucrats, that the people under you can “kill” all that you want to achieve.
Weeding out that opposition is impossible**. as his program’s failure to de-classify more documents has ground to a stop and demonstrates my point..
Thank you, Mr President.
**Only citizens can be weeded out. But that we know.
“…too big to fail EQUALS too big to prosecute….”
I’m back again, using Obama as my purpose.
In this newly seen video (thanks to the original poster) Obama is examined as to two roles: Is he an unwitting accomplish to banksters, or is he just part of the Washington that see to big to fail AND too big to prosecute.
http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-on-big-banks-lack-of-accountability/
The revolving door between the FEC and Wall Street lawyers representing these banksters is given an airing, whereas in WASH;DC it is business as usual when folks rotate between employee to regulator and back again.
Under Bush, Tabbi says that individuals were prosecuted. Now they aren’t!.
Prosecutors (accdg to AG official) must take into the account the effects on the nation and its economy of such a prosecution.
He got the door for that boo-boo.
It is so easy to see when these guys lie. They blink, break the visual contact with the interviewer, dropped their voice volume, stutter, mumble, etc etc. I feel like a polygraph and want to scream STOP LIAR!
Mahtso, the Dead were protecting themselves from being ripped off by big businesses or others who sought to make a LOT of money off of them. They did NOT go after the kid on the block who printed up his own T-shirts to gvie out to his friends for cost or for free. BIG difference! Too bad you cannot see it.
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/02/lapd-vs-christopher-dorner-case-file-leaked-proves-lapd-have-been-lying-about-entire-thing-2561274.html?currentSplittedPage=0
OT AS ALL GET OUT.
Dorner thread is dead, as he may be. But it remains as a monument to the LAPD and other PDs in the area.
See the photo shown at above link of him in combat fatigues standing next to and being clapped on the back by a LAPD chief. Who was the prime meat they were recruiting? Dorner apparently. The photo is most often run with the chief clipped away (media obedience?)
As a last point, check his rank insignia (in black) on Dorner’s lapels of his fatigues. He was Captain, and not the piece of icing the LAPD stood beside for a photo op staged by them. Do you think he went around after his discharge in fatigues?
Wise up folks, Dorner was screwed and tattoed. And he broke bad.
As said before, for the inside story on the LAPD, read Choir Boys by Wambaugh a 14 year vet from the LAPD, He had planned to do 20, but his conscience got in the way of Wambaugh. Published 1975 but fresh as a donut today. Read it and laugh and weep.
As I understand it, the Grateful Dead zealously protects its trademarks and will not turn a blind eye to unlicensed goods being sold.
I agree that it’s stealing an artist’s work. Because it’s possible and convenient to steal an artist’s work doesn’t make it okay. Having been a musician, I have no sympathy for these thieves. This is how an artist is paid. It used to be that a songwriter, for instance, would get a couple pennies from each record sold, but folks don’t buy records. Sites like iTunes sell music for $1 which leaves nothing for the writer, performer, publisher, etc. If there’s no money to be made, talented people won’t participate and we get the likes of Justin Beiber to represent music. Mike Spinelli made the point that the Grateful Dead allowed free taping of their shows. That was true, but only AFTER they became famous and had made a good bit of money from their record sales and concerts.
now i’m curious as to what the twenty four songs are.
I did some work for recording industry attorneys going after Napster kids. They liked to focus on universities and they are sharks. The fact that Obama is in bed w/ these people says a lot.
Overzealousness in these premises is a form of oppression.
The fact is that the Internet has ensured the rightful curtailment of the reach of intellectual “property”. The longer governments insist on supporting the music industry’s outmoded bullying behaviour, the more foolish they look.
As for those who are so concerned about “stealing” an artists work without compensation I would reference them them to the “Grateful Dead’s” and other musical artists long term policies. The “Dead” have always allowed their fans to record their music without penalty. I wish that I had the money that this group has had and is making still after Jerry Garcia’s death. These enforcement of copyrights are the work of corporate greed, mixed with misunderstanding of the avenues of profit that have opened up via the internet and the computer age. There is money to be made, if only they would look past the old business model.
“In its 26-page brief to District Judge Michael Davis – who is presiding over the appeal case -, US Federal Justice Department has said that the verdict passed against Minnesota grandmother Jammie Thomas-Rasset was “not excessive.””
“Justifying the reason behind seconding the verdict passed against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the brief from the Justice Department said: “Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed.”
Now I don’t know what “The Justice Department”, or Eric Holder, believes regarding this specific case. While under the “Justice Department” rubric each individual regional Deputy Attorney General prosecutes the cases in their own area without a great degree of Washington oversight. So the use of “Justice Department” policy may or may not be an overstatement. The paragraphs above are quoted from the article linked above. Their use of “Justice Department” is a generic one that may or may not reflect the administrations views on this particular case. That point needed clarification, not in the sense that I’m defending the Administration, but in the sense of trying to understand what is going on here.
Now copyright enforcement should never be the province of government. It is a civil issue and should remain such. However, in our current situation where we have government by lobbyist, many laws get passed that have no relationship to the public good. Obviously the statute cited in the article that calls for Federal intervention is the result of lobbying and money. If there is indeed an effort by this administration to stringently enforce that ill-starred law then they should be held to account. We need more facts though to determine this. The Deputy Attorney Generals around the country have wide latitude to enforce the laws as they see fit. Many are still holdovers from the Bush Administration. I other cases the supervision that is necessary from the Justice Department on down is lax and the usual prosecutorial excesses continue. Holder has been a bad Attorney General, but it is hard to determine if his ineffectiveness arises from incorrect ideology, or from administrative inability. Perhaps a combination of both. Whether in fact though this reflects the conscious policy of the entire Obama Administration, or a reflection of poor supervision, is still a moot point.
Part of the difficulty of fighting these extreme examples of governmental overreach into what should be civil law issues, is that the corporate media is the source of major publicity and this government intrusion is advantageous to their own copyright claims.
When the world is free of the ISP model for internet access, these suits will become impossible.
I see at Wikipedia that Ms. Thomas-Rasset turned down settlement offers of $25,000 which is $7,000 more than the statutory minimum penalty.
The copyright laws may need reform, but this case is not about someone who copied (meaning stole) for her own use, but rather someone who distributed the stolen work to others. What should the penalty be for someone who takes a work of art (as defined in copyright law) and puts in on a computer site where others may then make unlimited copies of that work? Or a movie that cost $100 million to produce? What if I take a book that you wrote and make photocopies? Or I scan it and give it away free?
Raff,
Good question….
Obama…. Here to uphold your rights….. Yeah…. Baby…. Common to grips with it Austin powers…..
If these companies are truly people under the Constitution, then why aren’t they paying taxes at the individual rates?
@bettykath
The abuse of these large companies is agregious.
Microsoft was fined around $2 billion for operating in open violation of EU trade laws for a decade.
Because nobody goes to jail, there’s no incentive to obey the law.
The cost just gets treated like any other business expense — advertising, marketing, etc. — on the road to market domination.
An important facet about modern industrial capitalism that often gets overlooked is that the whole point of an economic competition is to put your competitor out of business. Industry doesn’t compete. Structurally, industry does not in the least bit resemble a “lemonade stand” type capitalist enterprise.
Talk about inappropriate. Huge companies do egregious harm and get fined a few weeks income or profit. How about using that same measure for private citizens, you know, the real heart and blood citizens.
I agree with Jamie Thomas’s lawyers, that this is a case of the music industry using the legal system to prop up a failing business model.
Also relevant in this particular case is the fact that the music industry hired unlicensed private investigators to illegally download music to prove that illegal file sharing had taken place.
Part of the problem with prosecuting these cases — specifically as relates to peer-to-peer networks — is that it is difficult to prove that illegal file sharing has taken place, quite apart from whether or not files are available for download. That is, making files available is not the same as illegally copying or re-distributing them.
This is why the industry is so keen on DRM — it seeks to prevent copying, and thus, illegal re-distribution, at the source, though this also prevents people from “owning” their “purchases” and hinders criticism, re-use of certain materials in an academic ccontext, and certain artistic practices as well.
“The cloud” is marketed as convenient, but by ensuring that nobody “owns” their own stuff — and by requiring that anybody who wants to access “their” data purchase internet access indefinitely — the result is to turn everybody into the digitial equivalents of teneant farmers.