Obama Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict

These methods aren't going to make people share music less -- it will simply make them find more secure ways of sharing. Lets all remember, that at the end of the day, if I burn a few gigs of MP3s to a dvd and pass it to a friend hand to hand, the music industry will never know.<p>Ultimately, sharing is something people want to do as a natural inclination. I like this band, so I want you to like this band, so here's their music. I personally have found the vast majority of the music I love in this fashion.<p>I love passing on my love of music to other people. I've run private MP3 servers before. It brings me much joy to share music and then talk about it.<p>I don't really know what these large verdicts do. They are still effectively like being hit by lightning, it's so unlikely it will happen to you.

This makes me extremely angry. $675,000 verdict to the average person is basically going to ruin their life. Per-capita income is still only about $21,500 in the US, so you're asking for 30 years of their working life.

I find the headline very disturbing.<p>It says "Obama" supports the verdict, when really it is Obama's administration. I am not a Washington insider but something tells me more likely than not, Mr Obama was not personally involved in this decision at all. He has more important things on his mind right now, and other fires to put out.<p>I worry a lot about how so many people think "I voted for Obama, ok he's in office, my job is done!" and then they sit there and do nothing and wait for Obama to pull off some magic and make the world good again. In the meantime the other side has a whole army of crazies pushing their agenda.

Bait-y title. I read the article, perhaps a bit casually, and I'm left with doubts that Obama even knows about this verdict.

"The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement 'creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.'"<p>I wonder how much campaign contribution money the RIAA had to spend to get those five lawyers (or lawyers with that resume) into those five positions?

This judgement is a travesty.<p>- Justice is only just if it is handed out evenly and in proportion to the crime. If ten million people share an mp3 and only one person is convicted for it, should that person have to pay for the alleged damages caused by the ten million? That's contrary to my sense of justice and to hundreds of years anglo-saxon jurisprudence.<p>- Stealing one CD from a store is clearly a more tortuous act than making one copy of the songs on a CD. If you steal a CD then the owner doesn't have it any more. If you make a copy of a CD then the copyright owner's potential sales may be diminished by some theoretical fraction of the original value of the CD.

Does anyone else have the same problem as me in this area? I am more than happy to pay for things, I just find it very hard to justify paying for some things that don't give any benefit over a one that I can get for free. So if they were to find a way to totally stamp out piracy or make it as likely to get punished for as taking goods from a store I'd be happy to pay for everything.<p>A good example is things like the WSJ, sure I probably don't read them enough to pay anyway, but the fact that you can just Google search things to not pay means that I would never see the value in paying.<p>I think when you feel that you are paying to support the content producer rather than to acquire the content something is wrong.

This is a list of some of the songs Joel is accused of sharing:<p><a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.p...</a><p>Funny thing is if I type the names (e.g. Nirvana "Come as you are") into Google in a couple of seconds I can listen to all the songs on YouTube. I would have thought Google would be a better target than Joel. If the music industry are justified in their cause they could do at the very least do a better job of communicating why.

What kind of public image is the RIAA seeking for itself? Can't they see they're committing imago suicide? Maybe these lawsuits were meant to show unequivocally to the public that file sharing is not permissible and will be prosecuted, but these figures are getting ridiculous. They lost their sense of proportionality.

Please change title to Obama [administration] Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict<p>It’s what the article actually says and is far less link bait. <i>The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs. </i>