The EFF surely wants Jammie Thomas not to settle at any price, while the RIAA, even though it won $1.92 from a jury, surely wants her to, likely for any price.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt reports that the RIAA is anxious to settle the case in which it won $1.92 million from Jammie Thomas-Rasset for illegally downloading 24 songs. As Masnick writes, the RIAA “seems to recognize that the insanity of the $1.92 million doesn’t do it any favors. Even the musicians whose music was part of the case are embarrassed by the amount. . . . the RIAA would love to settle the lawsuit for some lower amount so it can run around touting the ‘risks’of file sharing without having people laugh outloud when hearing that someone had to pay $1.92 million for potentially sharing 24 songs that could be bought for $1 each.”

Masnick writes too that he’s been expecting Jammie Thomas to settle “but the longer this goes on, the more I wonder if she’s actually planning to fight on. If so, this could certainly represent a case to examine the statutory rates associated with copyright violations.”

Mike is more right than he may know. Any lawyer interested in challenging the constitutionality of the statutory penalties imposed by the Copyright Act would want to represent Jammie Thomas on this appeal. When a lawyer looks to challenge a law, if he’s got any sense he doesn’t challenge it via any case that happens to come up. He chooses a case that presents especially good facts for the challenge. The EFF would love to have Jammie Thomas appeal – no case involving a defendant found liable for illegal downloading would be a better vehicle for bringing the challenge to the statutory penalties.

$1.92 million penalty for illegally downloading 24 songs.

From cnet news:

Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of willful copyright infringement on Thursday in a Minneapolis federal court and must pay the recording industry $1.92 million. In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset, who was originally accused to sharing more than 1,700 songs, at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was ultimately found guilty of illegally sharing.

Representing clients in a changing world

This item, from Techdirt, should give some pause to lawyers who represent copyright holders: the top selling MP3 download on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV album.  As Techdirt explains, this means, “[i]n other words, you could go on pretty much any file sharing system out there and legally download the music for personal use… and yet it was still the top selling downloadable album (this is on top of all the money earned by Reznor’s other business models associated with this album).”

A lawyer’s job is to represent the best interests of his client.  It may well be that the best interests of copyright holders in an environment where digital information can instantly be duplicated and instantly be disseminated world-wide is to find new business models, not to persist in the 20th Century habit of filing infringement lawsuits.  It seems silly, for example, (as IP Watchdog points out) for Gatehouse Media to be suing “the New York Times alleging copyright infringement by the New York Times because one of the papers owned by the Time, namely the Boston Globe, was linking to original articles owned by Gatehouse Media.”  Gatehouse’s allegations of infringement are based on the fact that the links, though they provide attribution to Gatehouse, are “deep links” — that is, they are links to the articles themselves that, therefore, bypass Gatehouse’s homepage (and, presumably, the advertising on the home page).

The court in Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.Com, Inc., No. 99-07654 (CD Calif. Mar. 27, 2000)(pdf), found that deep linking was permissible. Tickets.com had provided deep links to pages on Ticketmasterrs website to guide readers precisely to the spot the could purchase tickets for specific shows. Ticketmaster wanted readers and customers to come through Ticketmaster’s homepage. The Court stated:

The customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine webpage of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.

The court concluded the deep links provide by Tickets.com did not constitute copyright infringement. Nevertheless, other deep linking cases (discussed by Gayle Campbell and Patty Steib here) make clear that the legality of the practice (like so much in copyright law) has not been finally determined.

But Gatehouse Media’s lawsuit seems intended to stop a practice that can only benefit Gatehouse Media by bringing more traffic to its site.  And what good are links if, for example, I left you wandering through a webiste trying to find the right page rather than sending you straight to it?

For some lawyers, unfortunately, a right is only something to be vindicated, not just one factor among many that need to be taken into account in seeking the client’s best interests.

RIAA to stop suing over illegal downloads

From the ABA Journal:

Ending a controversial enforcement effort in which it appeared to be fighting something of a losing battle, the Recording Industry Association of America says it will stop suing consumers over illegal music downloads via the Internet.

“The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.”

Instead of using lawsuits as leverage to try to protect music copyrights, the RIAA now plans a more practical enforcement effort concerning illegal downloads. With the help of Internet service providers, those who repeatedly download music illegally and ignore ISP warnings are expected to have their Internet service first slowed down and then stopped entirely, the newspaper explains.