SillyDog701

[stoperror]

ArsTechnica writes:

A new lawyer, a new jury, and a new trial were not enough to save Jammie Thomas-Rasset. In a repeat of the verdict from her first federal trial, Thomas-Rasset was found liable for willfully infringing all 24 copyrights controlled by the four major record labels at issue in the case. The jury awarded the labels damages totaling a whopping $1.92 million. As the dollar amount was read in court, Thomas-Rassert gasped and her eyes widened.

I think it's a bit overboard, even though she did do it. Perhaps a $150,000 fine AT MOST?

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[Don_HH2K]

I'll never really understand how a $0.99 song can translate to $80,000 in damages, which is what the recording industry asked for - and won - for each of the 24 claims brought against Thomas. Let's consider:

• $1.92m pays for 1,939,393 songs from iTunes or Amazon (99¢ per song).
• Similarly, $1.92m pays for 96,000 CDs ($20 per CD - this is even a pretty high estimate by most accounts), not including taxes. Assuming those are all standard CD size, that's 47 cubic meters of CDs (mathematically: pi*0.12m^2*0.0011m*96,000), not even including the cases - good luck finding a home for them!
• 1,939,393 songs would take up roughly 9.25 terabytes of disk space (5MB per song). That's almost 60 times more than what you can stuff onto the 160GB iPod.

Of course, we have to consider that this is file swapping, and that the figure also includes the damages accrued by other people downloading the files. For simplicity I'm going to assume they weren't suing on the grounds of the geometrically-expanding share path.

• Taking the 1,939,393 songs figure, subtracting Thomas's 24 (1,939,369), and dividing by the 24 songs infringed upon means 80807 downloads per file. XP Service Pack 2 was out in 2005, and assuming Thomas was running it, she was most likely subject to SP2's 10-TCP/IP-connections limit, making it time-consuming for all those connections to be made.
• The highest upload offering on Thomas's ISP in 2005, Charter, was 512kbps. Given the 9.25 terabytes figure, assuming she had the high-tier 512kbps package, it would've taken almost seven months to transfer all that data - and that's assuming a constant 512kbps without overhead (which on a line-share system like cable is unlikely) and that the computer was never powered off or disconnected from the Internet.

What I do find interesting is that the recording industry never really went public with what exactly constituted all of what they called "lost opportunities".

I'm not doubting that she did in fact do it - the evidence seems pretty clear against her - but the figures they're asking for just seem too outrageous to cover such "lost opportunities".

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[stoperror]

All I've got to say about your in-depth analysis is: wow. But, also remember that they wanted to "punish" her, so naturally they would have added more. But, yes this is ridiculous. I used to say to boycott them, but they'd take it out on people like her and say that she's the reason they lost money. Now, I don't know what to do. Have a lot of people stand in front of their HQ burning their RIAA affiliated CD's?

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