As an interesting aside, in one of the classes I'm taking this semester our midterm is to create a plan to change the status quo of copyright. The assignment was intentionally left very vague, so this could mean anything from educating the public to lobbying congress. Our prof. even gave the ok on distributing CDs with P2P clients and fake music files, the idea being to get students to set up honeypots for the RIAA (to reduce their credibility in court). Anyway we have three weeks to plan this using the class wiki. I suspect our final exam will involve executing the plan or some portion thereof, depending on what we come up with.

I think it's a pretty cool assignment anyway, especially as a cooperative midterm.

Dang it. I was hoping for juror nullification on this one. That ruling would have made some serious waves in the music as well as legal system.

That's a travesty of justice to be honest. Even assuming she's in the wrong, nobody in their right mind would value a 24 recordings at 220K. They sell them for 99c on iTunes, how they were magnified into those numbers is beyond me.

I think the whole point is to set an example and to deter others from sharing music. I wonder exactly how they expect her to pay $220k out of pocket.

The woman did nothing wrong.

Im not saying that the legal system is wrong either. But the woman did nothing wrong. I salute her for her courage to go to court.

And Im not going to spend any money on music anymore. Music and money dont go together for me. Im not going to finance people who sue people for sharing.

She did not sell the music. It was a "fan helps fan" thing. She did good, not bad.

Regardless of your moral stance on the issue, it is copyright infringement. How would you feel if someone went around giving away your programs for free, or even worse, the source code if it's not open?

Uploads, not downloads, for what it's worth. RIAA has been focusing on uploaders for some legal reason.

Thank you. This detail is ignored in most accounts I read. The RIAA has been going after people for redistributing copyrighted material, not for downloading. However, the hype about it is always about downloading.

The RIAA would like both to stop, but I think they encourage the idea that lawsuits have been about downloading rather than uploading because that (they hope) will drive more people to buy instead of snarf.

From what I've read, the defense was largely a matter of repeated insistence that there can be no real proof that a particular person or machine was involved because there are enough was to spoof the trace information.

The defendant was not using wi-fi. Is it that plausible that an outside person could engage in file sharing using a spoofed IP address and user name? Could someone go on a P2P network, look at who is online, and then clone someone's identity?

Stealing == giving artists 10% of sales.