When law becomes a tool for corporate bullying
What does a single mother in US have to do to be fined USD$220,000? Defraud a bunch of grandmas? Abuse her child? Start a riot? No, just download and share 24 songs.
Jammie Thomas, one of almost 30,000 people sued or prosecuted by records companies, chose to fight the charges rather than be pushed around by corporate bullies. Having spent over USD$60,000 in legal fees fighting the case, she was nonetheless found guilty of the heinous crime of sharing music and fined almost USD$10,000 per song. Yes, what she did was illegal. However, one of the integral aspects of criminal law is proportionality - the sanction must be proportionate to the crime. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this is not the case here. When law is used by a multi-billion dollar industry, concerned only with its own profits, to persecute minor infringements for the sake of making making an example of a few law breakers in order to instill fear in millions of others, the legal actions are more harmful than illegal ones. Misuse of law for purposes that have nothing to do with achieving justice is quite offensive.
To top it all of, such measures are quite futile. For every file sharer the records industry prosecutes, there are thousands more who will never be caught and who may be quite content to play the odds. It is safety in numbers. There are so many copyright law breakers that the odds of an individual getting prosecuted are very small. No matter how much money the records industry wastes prosecuting single mothers for downloading two dozen songs, it will not empty an ocean of downloaders with a tea spoon. No matter how many P2Ps it closes down, new ones will emerge. Technology evolved massively in the last two decades, but the industry stubbornly refuses to evolve with it. Instead of devising constructive ways to reduce illegal music sharing, for example by providing access to cheap, easy legal downloads, that are not infected with digital rights management software which plays havoc with the users' computers, the industry is intent on fighting the inevitable. Instead of rising to the challenge of technology, they prefer to use the law as a tool for bullying the users of technology in the hope of turning back the tide. They think they can do it because they are big, powerful and ruthless.
And so were the dinosaurs…before they all died out.
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