Article 11: June 21

We have all heard about people getting in trouble for illegal downloading, however most of us do it but we don’t think that anything would ever happen to us. Did you know that ninety-five percent of downloads are illegal (Tech-Ex 1) ? Well that was not the case for a Minnesota woman who was accused of sharing 24 songs over the internet, which ending up being a $1.92 million dollar verdict. Ken Port the director of the Intellectual Property Institute at William Mitchell College of Law said “Normally in our American legal system, we say the punishment should fit the crime.” He also went on to say, "Now she's being ordered to pay, in some ways, an incomprehensible amount of damages." He closely watched Jammie Thomas’s case and is the one who persuaded the judge in 2007 to give her a retrial, which ended June 18th (Williams 1).

So why haven’t we heard about someone else having to pay this big of a fine for illegal downloading. Well now there is a Federal Law the recording companies are entitled to $750 to $30,000 per infringement but the law allows the jury to raise that to as much as $150,000 per track if it finds the infringements were willful. And the jury for this trial decided on $80,000 per song (Williams 1).

Our society does need to learn that illegal downloading is bad and should not be done; however, $1.92 million seems very excessive, especially when the first trial ordered her to pay 222,000 and the judge gave her another trial because he thought it was too much.

I believe that our society should be punished but it should not be unreasonable because there is no way an average American woman will be able to pay $1.92 million dollars, when the songs can be bought for ninety-nice cents on iTunes.

References:
article used : Williams, Chris. Big fine could be big trouble in downloading case. 19 June 2009. 21 June 2009 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading.

Tech-EX. 19 Jan. 2009. 21 June 2009 http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2009/01/95-of-music-downloads-are-illegal-ifpi.html.