$ 222,000 is a buncha bullshit! I personally think that someone should start a collection drive to help this lady out. the RIAA is trying to make a big showing by this. what if the public stood up and said fuck you RIAA and we are paying her fine! I think that should send a pretty clear message right back to them!
her attorney Is Brian Toder of Minneapolis. Someone should contact him and talk to him about it.
Why don't you do it?
I am the thread killer.
YAY! FOR THE RIAA!!! In a way, they're helping out the independent artists. The attitude that music should be free HAS to stop. That mindset is that music isn't worth any money, and it IS. People need to read what intellectual property is. There SHOULD be a penalty to stop people from STEALING music. It's not as though there aren't alternatives to stealing. A song on iTunes costs you less than a 20oz. soda. Are you telling me that a soda is worth more than music is? That's sad.
I'd be okay with free music when:
The studio time is free
Engineers are publicly paid, and at no cost to bands
Studio SPACE is free
ALL things needed to create a functioning studio are free
CDs/Cases/inserts are free
Duplication/replication is free (plus the shipping if applicable)
Instruments are free (including cymbols, strings, picks, tubes, mics, cables, etc.)
Musicians are paid through public funds. Enough to make a living.
Rehearsal space are provided for musicians
Bands get paid better at clubs. This $50 bullshit doesn't cut it.
If you want to send a clear message to the RIAA, start buying only local, unsigned, and small label bands. Even when their music is stolen, it shows a demand for it. I don't really like/dislike the RIAA. They have no effect on my life. I don't buy their crap, and I don't steal it.
If you REALLY want to "give it to them" go independent. They get NONE of that money.
Topher: YAY! FOR THE RIAA!!! In a way, they're helping out the independent artists. The attitude that music should be free HAS to stop. That mindset is that music isn't worth any money, and it IS. People need to read what intellectual property is. There SHOULD be a penalty to stop people from STEALING music. It's not as though there aren't alternatives to stealing. A song on iTunes costs you less than a 20oz. soda. Are you telling me that a soda is worth more than music is? That's sad. I'd be okay with free music when: The studio time is free Engineers are publicly paid, and at no cost to bands Studio SPACE is free ALL things needed to create a functioning studio are free CDs/Cases/inserts are free Duplication/replication is free (plus the shipping if applicable) Instruments are free (including cymbols, strings, picks, tubes, mics, cables, etc.) Musicians are paid through public funds. Enough to make a living. Rehearsal space are provided for musicians Free amp repair by ZC Bands get paid better at clubs. This $50 bullshit doesn't cut it.
Free amp repair by ZC
Kenner. Bass Guy. Beer Drinker. Fondler of Boobies
Zero Cool:$ 222,000 is a buncha bullshit! I personally think that someone should start a collection drive to help this lady out. the RIAA is trying to make a big showing by this. what if the public stood up and said fuck you RIAA and we are paying her fine! I think that should send a pretty clear message right back to them! her attorney Is Brian Toder of Minneapolis. Someone should contact him and talk to him about it.
That's a cute gesture. Lemme know how that works out for ya.
"Seriously, Al Franken? Fu*kin' Al Franken?"
What Topher said.
Todd F.
www.winterlandstudios.com
www.myspace.com/winterlandstudios
Me Grimlock no bozo. Me king!
I had a nice long rebuttal to this typed out last night and its gone now due to the musicscene server taking a dump! Sometime when i have the energy again i will retype most of it.
In short, i dont feel ONE bit sorry for Big Music. they had there chance and refused it. they were ASKED to be involved from the beginning and turned it down. now they are dying a slow suffocating death and its just too damn bad. Die already and bring in the next generation of music for sale.
I do NOT think for one minute that stealing music is OK. but assraping one person for what 3 billionother people in the world do on a dailey basis is just stupid.
Should music be free? no i dont think so. But there does need to be a new way. Rick Rubin has some great ideas. and they scare the hell out of Big Music. Good. its time for a change. Its time for a new system, its time for a new way.
The RIAA is not going to stop file sharing. they can instill all the copy code crap they want to and where there is a will. there is a way. You cant stop it. just like guns or drugs on the streets, it is here to stay.and trying is ridiculous.
What to do something about it? how about changing the way people think. we are in world today where 13 year old girls think its cool to be a porn star, Mothers leave there 11 month old babies in the tub while they shop for shoes and people have ZERO accountability for there own actions. But hey, thats todays generation.
I still buy my music. i would rather have a shiney disc or a piece of black vinyl in my hands. something tangable. but thats me and i am from yesterdays generation. Try finding a 20 year old today that has never downloaded a song for free. Not going to happen. they dont even think twice about it. you want to do something. change that method of thinking. then maybe, just maybe you have something.
The music industry needs to change. it needed to change 10 years ago. there are plenty of bands out there doing it all on there own and doing quite well.
I am not defending her actions "If" she downloaded and shared music. should there be repercussions, yup. I think so. but $222,000 is just stupid. and what the RIAA is doing right now is wrong. Instead of assraping people, how about spending all that time, money and energy into something more productive? Something to bolster and promote the new way, whatever that may be maybe. I dont know. I dont have the answer.
you will not get any sympathy from me about Big Music's pains or the RIAA. too bad so sad.
If you cant lead, then follow, if you cant follow, THEN GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY!
Zc
I simply cannot understand how people can justify illegally downloading copyrighted music. I have heard damn near every argument by every kind of downloader, and it all comes down to this: They don't give a shit.
Frankly, people who download to avoid buying something will never have their minds changed so long as they are able to break the law with impunity. Clearly, the idea that they're taking money away from not only the artists, but the companies who promote those artists, is of no concern to them.
And those of you who want to bring up the "well I download because I want to sample the music before I buy" or "There's usually one good song in a whole CD, and I don't feel like buying that whole CD," or "Artists don't make any money this way anyway" or "this woman didn't make any money from this so she doesn't deserve this punishment" bullshit.
Music has value. You acquire the music files not because they're of no use to you. You want them. So, instead of buying the songs you want 1 song at a time, or one album at a time, you take them. And now people complain that this woman didn't deserve this penalty - a penalty that by statue is VERY lenient.
Fuck. I'm just so sick of hearing all of these really weak arguments... We're not ENTITLED to someone else's music unless they either give us permission to have it, or we buy it.
The End.
I am Burger King Diamond!
KPatrick: Yeah, I don't think she's going to get too much sympathy on a site full of a bunch of independent musicians. We're trying to figure out how to make a little money with our music and you're defending the people who steal it.
Yeah, I don't think she's going to get too much sympathy on a site full of a bunch of independent musicians. We're trying to figure out how to make a little money with our music and you're defending the people who steal it.
You realize if we were hunting Rons...you would get finded for laying out bait during hunting season.
This guy has an interesting perspective.
If I were a big-shot L.A. music mogul, Jammie Thomas would not be my ideal poster child as the face of illegal file sharing.
Thomas, you'll recall, was found liable last week in a Duluth, Minnesota, court for violating copyright law by making a couple of dozen songs available to the multitudes. For this she was ordered to pay the recording industry $222,000 in damages, and she could lose even more to court costs and appeals.
All because she was among the 26,000 people sued by those Brioni suits known collectively as the Recording Industry Association of America, and hers was the first case to actually reach trial. The RIAA, faced with plummeting CD sales and increasingly restive artists, wanted to "send a message" to all the lowlifes out there who download music for free and undercut their profit margins.
The message, apparently, is this: "We're idiots."
The RIAA, after all, is the guardian of an industry so antiquated and oppressive that having sympathy for these guys is a little like feeling sorry for a Georgia slaveholder after watching Sherman's troops fire his mansion and scatter his livestock.
So when their first victim, Thomas, turns out to be a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year -- latte money for the RIAA boys -- you have a hard time picturing these guys nailed to a cross. But that's the image the RIAA has tried hard to foster since some pimply-faced intern first explained to them what file sharing was. All of a sudden it was, oh, boo-hoo. Poor us.
Cry me a river.
Here's an industry so bloated with executives and middlemen, all of them greedily slurping up profit like bluepoint oysters, that the people who actually write the songs and play the music -- the "talent" -- are getting royally screwed in the royalty department. It's been like that for years. The Dylans and the Stones of the world might be able to rise above it and name their price, but for the rank and file it's "Dance to our tune, or go back and rot in that crummy little club."
The usurious nature of the business is the main reason that the average CD, which at most costs a couple of bucks to produce, routinely sells for upwards of $20. Sometimes the songwriter makes out all right (forget about the singer or the musicians), but licensing and contracts have been sufficiently rigged by the boys in legal to ensure that the lion's share of the carcass goes to people who have absolutely nothing to do with the actual music.
If there's an industry where the Marxist exhortation for the workers to control the means of production makes sense, this is it.
Some artists are beginning to wise up to this. Thanks to technology (and when have you ever heard the Luddite say that?) bands are discovering that they can, in effect, become their own publishers, cut out the middleman and go directly to their audiences.
Radiohead is the latest band to offer an album's worth of music online, for free. Fans are being asked to pay what they feel is fair, and my guess is that most people will kick in something. Given the chance to be reasonable, we usually will.
The record companies are greedy, not reasonable, which is why it's hard to get worked up at the thought of people sharing "their" music for free. Thieves stealing from thieves? So what?
It's this new artist-to-audience business model, though, that poses the real threat to the long-term survival of the traditional music companies. If you're among those who consider corporations and conglomerates to be evil incarnate, you'll be rooting hard for this new model to take hold. Not just for the sake of the little guy in the music world, but for the sake of little guys everywhere.
Meanwhile, I think Jammie Thomas is going to turn out to be a public-relations nightmare for the RIAA. Crucifying someone who falls into about five demographically challenged categories to "send a message" hardly represents sound battle tactics for an entity already perceived as arrogant and overweening.
Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.
Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News
Zero Cool: $ 222,000 is a buncha bullshit! I personally think that someone should start a collection drive to help this lady out. the RIAA is trying to make a big showing by this. what if the public stood up and said fuck you RIAA and we are paying her fine! I think that should send a pretty clear message right back to them! her attorney Is Brian Toder of Minneapolis. Someone should contact him and talk to him about it.
It's been done. Go ahead and make your donation. I'll use my money to buy music.
Defendant knocks Web illiterate juror in RIAA case
"On a separate issue, a Web site created to accept donations from supporters has crashed after receiving more than 500,000 visitors, Thomas said. Freejammie.com is being moved to a new host server and should reappear in a few days.
Thomas said the site has raised more than $9,000 and the money will go to pay her legal bills."
Damn! If only those who donated spent that $9000 on iTunes.
Born of black wind, fire, and steel
Sawbones
Kwang