RunawayJim.org

Jammie Thomas, the first person to lose a trial by jury to the RIAA, wrote a story for P2PNet.  She blames her loss on a few things related to her case.  She starts off by trying to paint herself as a poor victim, not wanting any press and not wanting notoriety.  Well, writing that piece for a website is certainly not going to go unnoticed.  I don’t believe she didn’t want the notoriety for a minute.  She then blames the media for filling in stories with misinformation.  I wonder if she realizes that the transcript of her trial is public record and anyone can read it for themselves… unless, of course, she wasn’t telling the whole truth at the trial or was purposely leaving stuff out.  Now onto the rest of the blaming.

First, of course, she blames the RIAA.  While that’s cute and all, they’re just protecting their copyrights.  I don’t blame them for trying to make a buck (even though their music sucks, there is better ways of hurting them than illegally acquiring or distributing their music, like not bothering with their music to begin with).  Next, she blames the hard drive that was replaced.  Of course, the story gets good here.  While I don’t think she purposely had the hard drive replaced after the infringement occurred, I don’t think it makes her innocent either.  Apparently, the hard drive died two weeks after the infringement occurred because her son, upset that the computer froze up while in the middle of an intense battle in a video game, beat the side of the computer.  I’ve done it… many times.  In fact, my hard drive never died, though the computer has shut off on my for doing that.  But I can see how it can happen.  I’m not doubting that the hard drive died and had to be replaced.  Unfortunately, she got the dates screwed up when she first spoke with her lawyer.  And then she got them screwed up during a deposition.  Not only were the dates off, but they were off by a year.  That makes it sound a little suspicious to me… and of course, since the jury heard it, I’m sure they were thinking the same as me… something’s not right.  She also, while seemingly attempting to sound like she doesn’t know a whole lot about digital music, said that she ripped almost 3000 songs to her computer from her CD collection.  Could it be that the 24 songs in question came from that collection?

She blames her lack of money to pay for her expert witness.  If I was on trial and risked paying up a maximum of over $3,000,000, I’d certainly find a way to pay the expert witness who probably would have only cost me a several hundred dollars.  That’s a better bargain than the $3,000,000.  She talks about her defense and how it was not about spoofing like the media reported, but rather that you can’t turn an IP address into a person.  However, you can turn an IP address into an account holder with an ISP.  That’s exactly what happened.  Since she only has 1 computer and no wireless, I’d have to say based on my knowledge of TCP/IP networking that the IP address in question actually did belong to her computer, assuming her ISP’s logs were correct (which it is possible they were not, though unlikely).

In her long diatribe about this whole thing, she forgot to mention one of the more damaging pieces of evidence… that the KaZaA username in question was an exact match to her email username and the username she uses for various online dating and shopping sites.  There’s really nothing about what she wrote that will change my mind about her.  A jury of her peers, which her attorney had to agree upon, found in favor of the RIAA.  You can’t blame the jury, you can’t blame the RIAA for stacking the jury, and you can’t blame the system.  This was a case where she went through the American justice system and it did its job.  Sure, it didn’t turn out in Ms. Thomas’s favor, but it worked as its supposed to.  Unfortunately, there are still people out there who think she got the raw deal (just check the comments for the original story).  I wholeheartedly disagree.  She tried to fight it and she lost, fair and square.  If I were her, I’d stop writing this stuff and see where this post-trial motion that she filed leads.  My guess is that the judge will not overturn the verdict or rule it unconstitutional because it is written in copyright law and there is no reason to believe any foul play occurred on the part of the RIAA.  I’m sure she’ll appeal, though I’d like to see her explain how she can’t get any of her dates right.

As with many of the stories I write about, I found it on Slashdot.  There’s a nice discussion there as well on this whole thing.