Defendant knocks Web illiterate juror in RIAA case
Jammie Thomas is hard to rattle.
Jammie Thomas
She doesn't raise her voice or get angry when a reporter asks her to read a story where she is called a "liar" by a member of the jury that found her guilty of copyright violations and ordered her to pay the recording industry $220,000 in damages.
She calmly reads the quotes by juror Michael Hegg that appeared Tuesday in a story by Wired.com. She then draws a bead on where Hegg said he is a father, former snowmobile racer and has never been on the Internet.
"I don't need to say too much, obviously," Thomas told CNET News.com on Wednesday. "They admit that they are computer illiterate. This person (Hegg) has never been on the Internet, so how can he say whether my story is possible? I've been contacted by Internet security experts who said that spoofing my address would have been trivial. Internet illiterate people are not going to be able to understand that."
Thomas was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sharing 24 songs online and infringing on intellectual property. Instead of settling for a few thousands dollars like most of those sued by the group, Thomas is the first to take her case to a jury.
In the interview with Wired's David Kravets, Hegg, a steelworker from Duluth, Minn., said that during deliberations, the jury concluded after only five minutes that Thomas was guilty. They then spent five hours trying to decide what to award the recording industry. Hegg, 38, said the jurors did not believe her story that someone spoofed her IP address.
"She should have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars," Hegg told Wired. "Spoofing? We're thinking, 'Oh my God, you got to be kidding.' She's a liar."
Thomas, 30, has announced that she intends to appeal the case brought against her by the RIAA. She said she is seeking to argue her case before someone who is more tech-savvy.
But if Thomas can produce experts that can prove its possible her IP was spoofed, why didn't she present them in court?
"We didn't have the money to put those experts on the stand," Thomas said. "(Hegg) can say my story is not true, but at the same time you're talking about a person with no technology background whatsoever. He said his wife is an Internet guru, but his wife wasn't on the jury."
Thomas also was disappointed that the jury may have been punishing her for crimes committed by others.
"We wanted to send a message," Hegg said in the Wired interview, "that you don't do this, that you have been warned."
Thomas doesn't believe the law allows that.
The jury "saw those feeds that showed 2 million people shared using (file-sharing service) Kazaa and they want to hold me responsible for that," Thomas said. "The law states that you can't hold me responsible for the actions of another. This is one of the reasons why I'm appealing."
On a separate issue, a Web site created to accept donations from Thomas' supporters has crashed after receiving more than 500,000 visitors, she said. Freejammie.com is being moved to a new host server and should reappear in a few days.
Thomas said the site has raised more than $9,000 and the money will go to pay her legal bills.
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
-She is the one found guilty
-She is the one who has a $220k judgement against her.
Who should be the one mocked?
Does Hegg really qualify as an "impartial" jury of your peers? His decision probably wasn't based on the facts of the case but on his speculation of how the defendent viewed him. She thinks I'm stupid...well, I'll show her!!
Justice is not supposed to be about teaching lessons to the greater community. It is supposed to be about enforcing laws, and punishing individual offenders. No one person should be overly penalized to set an example for others.
For example, don't like your neighbor and he has an unsecured wireless router. Just get on his router set up accounts via internet using his address on various services (to prove this must be the person since they have all of these accounts in their name) then start doing illegal things like filesharing copyrighted material. Poof. Make sure it's in the thousands of violations. Poof RIAA arrives to do your dirty work. Pay us money or we'll destroy your life.
The crazy thing is that this does not take a lot of expertise. Probably about 1 in 50 people have the ability to carry out exactly this plan and who knows how many have already done this and had to pay the RIAA?
One day we will look at this period as one where justice really failed.
If something like this happened to one of the RIAA lawyers then I am sure they would understand how easy this is. It doesn't mean they would stop litigating these cases -- after all they are lawyers! In fact, I am sure these lawyers and the RIAA already know this but simply don't care. After all this isn't about the money they collect from these people, it's about scaring the public.
think they wanted to lose to the RIAA. Just look at the negative
publicity the loss has created to make the RIAA look the the bad
guys (which we already knew), surely the defense is positioning
themselves for the kill in round 2.
?When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song,? she said. She said making a copy of a purchased song is just ?a nice way of saying ?steals just one copy?,? she testified.
Now what's wrong with this statement? How can a jury of consumers not realize the impact of this statement? If we buy the song, do we not own it to do with it as we please? This case is much bigger than about an individual case, that's why the EFF took the case up.
or innocence should have taken much longer. This was a rush
to judgement. They wanted to get home to dinner is seems.
I said it on another thread I'll say it again. I disagree with one of
the points the judge gave as an instruction to the jury. Had I
been on that jury it would have been hung.
A 30-something that has not been on (or does not have?) the
net? That sounds like a false statement to me. Most persons in
that age bracket grew up online, or with modems. In Duluth
they have highspeed service in the city proper. If you get out to
rural regions up there you have to go through satalite if the
Cable service doesn't have it.
I started the early years with a 2400 Baud in 1985... Brings me
back... To hear that people have never been on the net sounds
questionable. If you went to school or college you went online!
how possible it is by spoofing their IP.
Whether a potential juror had ever been on the intertubes would
have been one of my first questions in jury selection. It seems like
it should be pretty easy to raise the $28.95 necessary to pay
Jammie's legal fees. That's all they were worth.
an internet illiterate on the jury? I would probably mention that at
the appeal. An really, since when is a person found guilty because
they had the "potential" to commit a crime? Doesn't everyone have
the "potential" to commit a crime. Maybe things changed since I
studied Law, but once upon a time you had to actually commit the
crime before you could be charged, tried and sentenced. Maybe
they are using the "Guantanamo Maneuver"?
people guilty of murder every day. Courts and juries decide cases
about obscure areas of intellectual property without attending
graduate school on the matter. As shocking as it may sound, there
is a cohort that has never been on the internet, but that should not
preclude them from sitting on juries deciding cases related to the
internet.
You can ONLY USE HEADPHONES to safely listen to your music.
If her lawyer let someone who had never been on the internet on the jury then she should be mad at her lawyer not mad at the juror who did their duty to serve on a jury.
Now that that's out of the way, I would have hung that jury if I were on it and she would have been acquitted. It's not that I think she's innocent, I think the law is wrong and if penalties can be used to send messages and attempt to deter, then a juror should also be able to send a message to lawmakers that the laws are wrong. So I would have acquitted her.
The penalty is absurd. The fine for a 3rd DUI is under $5000 and when someone has their 3rd DUI, obviously someone might DIE. Here, the victims won't be injured/killed and the victim collectively stood to lose under $10,000 in sales lost for these 24 tracks. (If even that much--would these leechers have bought the tracks if they had to?) I think the punishment should at least remotely fit the crime; this punishment doesn't even remotely fit the crime of sharing 24 tracks. This is a message, not a fair and legal ruling.
- "If that's the law, then the law's an ass" said Dickens
- by rafederico October 11, 2007 1:48 PM PDT
- Remember, this was NOT a criminal case, it was a civil case for money damages. Congress defined the trigger for liability as "making available" songs for download, and also defined the dollar penalty range. The RIAA obviously had a lot of lobbying clout with Congress to get this dickensian law passed. Regrettably, the jury bought into it, and imposed liability 1000's of times higher than actual damages. How many millions has the RIAA already collected through 1000's of these abusive lawsuits?--new revenue source?
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