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. 
"I don't need to say too much, obviously," Thomas told CNET...
-She is the one found guilty
-She is the one who has a $220k judgement against her.
Who should be the one mocked?
And maybe she did explain IP spoofing well; maybe she didn't. However, some people can be surprisingly stubborn about excepting technology and its implications. Maybe what was going through the mind of a man who has never been on the internet was something like "She's trying to trick us with her computer mumbo-jumbo to get out of trouble." I know I've met more than one person like that.
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!!
You may look down on Mr. Hegg because he isn't connected to the newest porn, but he's not the one who got slapped with a $200K+ judgement is he? Perhaps they should lower the amount during the appeals process, but those CDs she didn't buy are gonna really cost her.
Making an IP Spoofing claim without actually proving it? What an idiot. Also, notice how many people flocked to her defense fund site and yet she only raised $9K.
So unless you saw every moment of the trial in an unbiased way, you can't say that.
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.
Defense and prosecution each get a certain limited number of jurors they can disallow. So if the defense chose to allow the 'teach a lesson' group in, that was their own failure, not the system.
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.
I've easily logged onto a half dozen of my neighbor's (unsecured)
wireless networks to connect to the Internet. File sharing programs
worked flawlessly and not a single neighbor suspected a thing..
I always wonder if the people in the slammer and especially the ones who commit suicide for such infractions are really guilty.
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.
You can ONLY USE HEADPHONES to safely listen to your music.
publisher (Form PA copyright) and the owner of the sound
recording (Form SR copyright). You couldn't just make copies
willy-nilly, and you can't use it for public performance without
securing the rights (The DJ at your local bar playing songs off of
store-bought, non-record-pool discs is, technically, in violation,
although they'll never go after him, because the bar does pay
fees to ASCAP and BMI. Not the same, but as long as the
industry gets something...). However, under the Fair Use clause
of Title 17 (The Copyright Act) you are allowed to make 1
backup copy for your own use (This allows making a copy of a
CD to tape for those who still have tape decks in their cars. Mix
tapes/discs could be a gray area.).
I suppose if I put on rose colored glasses I can call the sky red. Damned unlikely I'd ever get a judge to agree.
I understand the argument of those who claim that our current society is based upon the concept of ownership of ideas, and that changing this would be tumultuous. This is true. But sometimes change is painful.
How can I own something that can be "taken" (copied, in this analogy) from me *without altering the original in any way*?
Is a copy the original? Clearly no, and yet apparently I can steal something from you -- a song -- without taking the original.
I know that the law disagrees with me, but that's not the point. Sometimes the law is unjust, and needs to change. Quite often new technology necessitates changes in the law -- and that's exactly what's happening here, with the convergence of compression technologies and the Internet providing a perfect storm to finally challenge the old, creaky concepts of "intellectual property."
2600 was right; information wants to be free. Let's figure out how to set it free...
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!
The overwhelming circumstantial evidence is that it was her account, and that's why this only took five minutes to find her guilty.
She could have been impersonated, but why bother? Unless this was a frame-up, why would anyone go to that much trouble? Way easier ways to hide yourself 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"?
>>because they had the "potential" to commit a crime?
If they believe spoofing is impossible, maybe they think "Minority Report" (movie) is a documentary. :-)
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.
there is a cohort that doesn't use the internet. I pointed him to a
classmate of ours from college, age 38, who does not use the
interent or even have an e-mail address. There is also my carpenter
and furniture maker, age 35, a brilliant carpenter and crafter of
beautiful solid wood furniture (no nails, no screws) who has his
wife send me pictures of what he's working on because he does not
use computers. I envy those two guys sometimes.
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.
- Boycott - RIAA, don't buy records!!!!
- by Coors4bob October 11, 2007 12:53 PM PDT
- What the record industry is doing needs to be fought head on. Consumers should boycott record purchases until the RIAA stops trying to put kids in jail for sharing a song. Songs have been shared and copied for more than 40 years. Time for the RIAA to change their pricing and service model.
- Reply to this comment
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- Everyone has
- by skynet10011 October 12, 2007 11:44 AM PDT
- Everyone is already in boycott mode. CD sales are down 20%
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- That's what I'm doing
- by bgrigg October 12, 2007 2:32 PM PDT
- Fact: In Canada (and I bet in the States) there is a tariff on recording media (includes CD & DVD) that is collected and paid to musician organizations to combat intellectual property theft. You pay it whether you copy music, or your own data. You can be a musician, and you pay the tariff to copy your own music. As such, if I am to be treated as a thief (guilt presumed = tariff) then don't be surprised when I become one.
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- I agree -- BOYCOTT THE RIAA
- by subcan October 12, 2007 11:32 PM PDT
- I have said this on another forum. I have plenty of music to last me for quite some time. I think that most people can say this same thing. If everyone who cared about this crazy situation stopped purchasing music online or in the stores, for even one month, the RIAA would be forced to wake up and realize that they make plenty of money. Yes pirating is wrong, but a fine like this is crazy and that needs to stop. Go after the real criminals out there... but wait they aren't the average internet user and know how to "get away" with stuff... hmmmm...
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Showing 1 of 3 pages (122 Comments)continuing the trend for the 3rd year in a row.
If you really want to boycot, focus on the WUSI gang who own
and operate RIAA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_labels
* Warner Music Group
* Universal Music Group
* Sony BMG Music Entertainment
* EMI
It would be far more productive to stop buying the Sony PC
where you store copies of your music, or skip the trip to
Universal theme parks, or cancel your AOL or Roadrunner
account with TImeWarner so you can't download anymore.
I have stopped buying music and movies from any publisher associated with the RIAA/MPAA, and have chosen to buy directly from small independent musicians. I have found music that equals and even surpasses the "big" names, and they come without the egos and the coke snorting producers.