This week in the federal jury in Minneapolis ruled that a Minnesota woman Jammie Thomas violated several music copyrights, and gave this poor mother of two children a “fine” of 1,92 million dollars – for sharing 24 songs in the net. That makes 80.000 dollars per song.
Idiots.
Many can probably agree, that the restitution sums in the States have been quite big, but this is just madness. Seems the sense of justice of that court has gone out to run a better business licking RIAA’s boots. The fine equals around 80.000 downloads per song from iTunes. Naturally if you share a song in the net, any number of people can download it from you, but fining someone 80.000 times of the worth of the item is just not in the galaxy of right proportions. Even big music makers and artists like Moby see this as a total lack of reason from the court and RIAA.
Moderation would be the key word here. I would argue, that it is the single most important virtue of a court. Without it, real justice isn’t being achieved. But the case shows, that the court in case has descended from the level of moderate justice to the level of lustful revenge. Being a small scale artist, that hopes to publish something in the future I’m all for the artist. But as Moby sees as well, this kinda greedy drysucking the record industry does by no means benefit the artist, but rather the company behind it.
Times have changed, and the industry needs to change with them. Hanging into these kind of judgements is grasping into straws when you’re drowning.