Unjust verdict serves no-one, especially the music companies

Friday, October 5th, 2007

A court in the US has ordered a woman to pay $222,000 (£109,000) in damages for illegally file-sharing music. The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay for offering to share 24 specific songs online–a cost of $9,250 per song.

Her lawyer, Brian Toder, said Ms Thomas was reduced to tears by the verdict. “This is a girl that lives from paycheque to paycheque, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheque garnished for the rest of her life,” he said.

The US music industry said people would understand the verdict.

Er. No. At least I certainly don’t see how huge corporations financially crucifying people for their entire lives can ever be understood by all but the hardest and coldest of hearts.

Arguments over the rights or wrongs of music-sharing aside, it is a fact that such activity is currently illegal in most countries and likely to remain so. There are many good reasons for this. There are also arguments as to why it should not be illegal. But a modestly punitive fine would have been understood by most of us—say, a thousand dollars. For a lot of people such a sum would be a major disincentive to share music files, but yes, it is true that some die-hards would continue to take the risk of incurring such a fine.

But the majority of file-sharers will continue to file-share even after this gross miscarriage of justice in favour of big business over ordinary people. So what’s the answer? Even bigger fines? Pursuing the warped logic evidenced to date by Sony, EMI and all the other major labels, one could easily imagine their executives sat round a board table wishing they could openly push for the death penalty. Now that would be a disincentive, wouldn’t it?

The judgement against Ms Thomas means that the music industry and the courts have made life miserable for her for the rest of her life, unless she wins the lottery or lands herself a very rich partner.

This cannot be seen by right-minded people as being just punishment for the crime. Murderers go to prison—okay, in some US states they themselves are murdered by order of the courts, but that’s a whole other hot potato—but for many of those men and women who are found guilty of violent assault, rape and murder, they eventually have a chance to get parole and even to start new lives with new identities outside prison.

Of course, murdering someone doesn’t affect the profit margins of big business, so if you’re a suit with an off-shore bank account, you don’t give a damn about anything other than the money sloshing around in your vaults—okay, maybe your nearest and dearest, but that’s about the limits of your compassion and care. This is why government initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic to involve big business in communities, in education, are doomed to short-change the common people. Sure, Pepsi could fund a school budget—but the kids would have Pepsi pushed on them all the time. A major engineering firm could fund a college—but if you’re creatively inclined and not into architecture, you won’t get the same education standards as those who have been tagged by talent scouts as having specific potential.

We all know that justice, whether in the EU or across the Atlantic, more often than not favours the rich and powerful because it is they who can afford the best lawyers and therefore the best orators who can put across arguments that, in less expensive hands and mouths, would come across far less convincingly. We have better justice systems in the US, Canada and EU than we could hope for in, say, Zimbabwe right now, but at the end of the day it’s all just one big entertainment vehicle for juries. It’s a circus. It often feels like real justice taking place in court rooms is more of a fluke than anything intentional.

Sadly, Ms Thomas found herself in the ring forced to wear clown make-up. The only real cheering came from the peanut-lobbing music execs on the front row. They have a chance to say they won’t be pursuing the money. Chances are, though, they will. And they will do it with an enthusiasm that is utterly obscene.

If they want a war of attrition, sadly it is more likely than not that the public will give them that. In the end, who wins?