{"id":68,"date":"2007-10-05T14:25:33","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T18:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=68"},"modified":"2007-10-05T14:25:33","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T18:25:33","slug":"a-win-against-intellectual-property-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/05\/a-win-against-intellectual-property-theft\/","title":{"rendered":"A win against intellectual property theft."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Big Lead is one of a small number of blogs to earn a place in my RSS reader, but boy, did they ever whiff today with their comments<\/a> on the Jammie Thomas decision<\/a>, where the Minnesota woman was found to have illegally shared<\/b> – not just downloaded – over 1700 songs via file-sharing networks:<\/p>\n

this is some bullshit – the woman who downloaded songs lost in court. Isn’t the greed of millionaires astonishing?<\/i><\/p>\n

Um, no. No, no, and how-did-you-tie-your-own-shoelaces-this-morning-NO. Sorry guys, I love the site, but you’re way off base here.<\/p>\n

We’ve seen an appalling decline in the respect that people have for intellectual property. Musicians make money by creating something and selling it, and the fact that it’s no longer sold as a physical good doesn’t make taking it without paying for it legal or ethical. It’s theft, and people who do it should be punished.<\/p>\n

But what Jammie Thomas did was worse: She didn’t just download songs – the RIAA hasn’t really gone after those folks – she shared the songs on her hard drive, making them available to anyone else on the same file-sharing network. This really isn’t any different from running a CD piracy operation, except that the number of people who could obtain copies of songs or albums from Thomas was not limited by production or distrubution constraints: Anyone who could find his way on to teh Interwebs could steal music with Thomas’ help. <\/p>\n

I had more sympathy for file-sharers seven or eight years ago, when there were no legal digital downloading services, meaning that to purchase a single song you wanted, you had to drop $15 or so on an album that included eleven songs you probably didn’t want. (Why this wasn’t considered an illegal tying arrangement is beyond me, but I’m not an antitrust lawyer, either.) Now, however, if you want to purchase a specific song, it’s probably available on iTunes and it costs a buck. So if you want the song, suck it up and pay the dollar.<\/p>\n

So what exactly is “bullshit” about this? She violated federal copyright law, and she stole profits from record companies and royalties from musicians. Given a chance to present her side of the story to a jury – and I can’t see why a jury might be predisposed to favor the record companies – she could not convince them of her innocence. The RIAA pointed out that the file-sharing took place via her IP address, with the MAC address of her cable modem, via a username she’d used before on other services, and from a password-protected computer she owned, and the songs were found on her computer’s hard drive. It is, as the defense argued, possible that someone spoofed her IP address and MAC address, and that same person could have sniffed her username\/password for other services and used it on the file-sharing network. But the defense also claimed the songs ended up on her hard drive because she ripped them from CDs, which doesn’t seem to me to tie to the evil-hacker theory. Someone knew the songs were there and set up this elaborate scheme to expose them on Kazaa, framing Thomas in the process? I don’t think so. She’s a thief, and she’s going to have to pay for what she did. At least she can take solace in the fact that she’s not facing criminal charges or jail time, since what the jury found her to have done is a federal crime.\n<\/p>\n

And I really don’t get the “greedy millionaires” bit. If someone produces something of value, and it’s stolen, does he then have less of a complaint? Is it less of a crime? If I pick Mark Cuban’s pocket and walk away with $500, is it okay because he’s a billionaire – and is he “greedy” if he wants it back? I don’t get it. Theft is theft. And as someone who makes his living by producing intellectual property – which, unfortunately, I often find reproduced illegally on various message boards – I find this kind of theft, and any defense of it, particularly appalling.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Big Lead is one of a small number of blogs to earn a place in my RSS reader, but boy, did they ever whiff today with their comments on the Jammie Thomas decision, where the Minnesota woman was found to have illegally shared – not just downloaded – over 1700 songs via file-sharing networks: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}