$222,000…
That’s the amount a Jammie Thomas, a 30-year old single mother has to pay total to various music companies for sharing music and more music:
Record companies win music sharing trial
By JOSHUA FREED
Associated Press Writer
Fri Oct 5, 6:15 AM ETDULUTH, Minn. – The recording industry hopes $222,000 will be enough to dissuade music lovers from downloading songs from the Internet without paying for them. That’s the amount a federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay for sharing copyrighted music online.
“This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK,” Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies that sued the woman, said Thursday after the three-day civil trial in this city on the shore of Lake Superior.
In closing arguments he had told the jury, “I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence here is great.”
Jammie Thomas, 30, a single mother from Brainerd, was ordered to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs in all.
It was the first time one of the industry’s lawsuits against individual downloaders had gone to trial. Many other defendants have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars, but Thomas decided she would take them on and maintained she had done nothing wrong.
“She was in tears. She’s devastated,” Thomas’ attorney, Brian Toder, told The Associated Press. “This is a girl that lives from paycheck to paycheck, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheck garnished for the rest of her life.”
As an independent (indie) musician that has sold music through various online retailers such as CDBaby and iTunes, this win for the music industry brings conflicting emotions in me. On one hand, I want people to buy my music. Not just share it with masses. So I understand that issue. On the other hand, the music industry is notoriously and historically destructive towards artists. The music industry’s corruption is well-documented. The sad thing about this win by the music industry is that those music artists that Jammie Thomas shared will probably never see a dime (even if she could pay all at once) due to the record companies’ creative accounting.
Yes, sharing copyrighted music is wrong and illegal. But I would feel better if an indie artist won this lawsuit instead of the corporate music bloc. The human wreckage the music industry leaves in its wake is appalling. I’ve seen it happen. Being massively in debt to the record company when you have sold 500,000 copies is just a crime. The corporate music bloc deserves no good press in my book.
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8 Responses to “$222,000…”
I believe the old school music recording industry is tottering on its last legs. Resorting to this kind of a stunt to try and hold on to the last vestiges of their relevance is sad, and obscene. 24 Songs on Itunes is $24, not 6 digits.
Now that musicians have the ability to record, market and distribute their own music, the old guard fat cat industry is getting scared. Granted we may also be seeing the end of the musician as celebrity or deserving of super wealth.
The majority of musicians struggle along doing what they love, not for riches but because they love making music. There is ample opportunity for musicians to make their living playing live performances, making and selling their own CDs and benefitting from the exposure they recieve through the internet. They don’t need some greedy corporation skimming 98% from the top or pushing an artist to make something outside of their creative vision.
My current favorite bands don’t really make anything off of their record sales. They are a platform to attract listeners to their live shows. These bands work hard and deserve my concert dollars and support.
I think anti-trust legislation should be filed against the RIAA- they amount to a consortium of lawyers who’s only job is to bleed the general public dry-the artists see dime zero in these cases.
Places like Myspace has brought more talent to the surface and done things the good old fashioned grassroots way- now major musicians have a presence there.
Shortsighted and hypocritical. Need any more really be said?
Screw them, toss her in jail for 30 days like a shoplifter. Garnish her wages for life? What a pack of jerks.
The woman doesn’t have that kind of money. She will have to file bankruptcy, this judgement against a single mom won’t even cover the perks for a couple of record executives. Years ago many FM rock station played album sides at night, I DOUBT that anyone taped those songs illegally. Shut down file sharing sights and leave single moms and their kids alone.
I love that the lawyer says ‘our recordings’, because it isn’t about the music, or the intellectual property of the artist. It’s just about property. It has nothing to do with artistic integrity or stealing from the artist. It has to do with terrorizing consumers. What bothers these people is the idea that they’re all rich tycoon types, and yet, the market is phasing them out. Electronic development has decided they are no longer a profitable or worthwhile means.
The free market, of all places, has decided fifteen dollars is too much for a record, that the music industry in the state it is in now is not the most comfortable distributor of its product for consumers. Radiohead right now, is releasing a record called ‘In Rainbows’, digitally, and you decide how much you pay for it. Lily Allen, Kate Nash, both myspace musicians. They’ve sold tons of records despite a deal of their content being available for free stream online. The issue then, is about the internet. Artists have used the internet to reach their audience, to expand on it, to get to them in a way record labels will not allow. Lily Allen would still be waiting on a shelf in some corporate office somewhere to be polished up.
So, why are they attacking P2P sites? Not for stealing from the artists, but for the fact that the internet is stealing market share from them, that electronics are burying the big label music industry. The market favours the electronic world. The internet is phasing out the effects of major record labels, and this is how they react. It is using the idea of ecnomic death to threaten consumers.
If you look at the key facts of the case, at the trial, the judge first off, seems a bit off in what is reasonable for a case to be built and for a person to be stripped of their livelihood. If you look at the case itself however, she had twenty-four songs. Two dozens songs. She’s paying over 200,000 dollars. How many more albums would Aerosmith have sold if it weren’t for her in particular? You don’t know, because that punitive damage is impossible to figure out. But that doesn’t matter, because the idea is to scare you.
They want to rebuild a coprorate structure that is currently crumbling and this is the means they’re using to go about it. It has nothing to do with the artist. It has to do with control. It has to do with control over an industry, control over distribution. The market no longer favours the music industry being under that control.
If you want music, you don’t have to download. You can go to myspace. You can go to youtube. You can watch FUSE, MTV, VH1, MTV 2, etc. You can go to libraries, even. Here’s the thing, the music industry can only control so much, and the internet ain’t it. You can listen to an artist’s cd, and you don’t have to pay a cent, and it’s not illegal. Just go to their myspace page, and watch that puppy stream. That’s the artist reaching the consumer, the audience, without the middle-man. ‘In Rainbows’ enhances that even further.
With something that monumental, that big a shift looming, what would the middle-man have to say about it?
The labels provided the infrastructure of support. They contacted the radio stations to get airtime. They did the publicity, the media relations when a musician or group was starting out and didn’t have their own people to do it. Far too often they signed musicians to contracts that gave the label far too much of the money that came from the talent. Eventually this abuse of the artists came into the light and no one really has any sympathy for the labels any longer.
P2P file sharing is wrong, folks. But we are in the midst of a change derived from technology that is going to create a major restructuring of the business. I’m surprised we haven’t seen a music equivalent of United Artists, where the actors started their own studio in order to better control their work. A new cooperative effort from artists who could dive fully into using the new technologies in a way that the established studios are terrified of doing could be an interesting company to watch.
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