Why do we care that she's of tribal descent? Are we now saying tribal American's are exempt from copyright laws? I flatly refuse to redefine native they way the PC crowd does, if you were born in the US you are native. I happen to be of Cherokee linage as well, but that doesn't matter, I'm native because I was born here.
In this case, I personally believe that she was discriminated against by the jury, because she was a Native American. She was tried many many miles from where she lived and worked, and did not have a jury of her peers.
Was she really convicted of "illegal downloading?"
1. She wasn't "convicted" of anything; this wasn't a criminal case. She was found liable for copyright infringement by making copies through downloading, thus violating the record companies' exclusive reproduction rights.
2. She was also sued for "distributing" and "making available for distributing", but the judge threw out the "making available for distributing" claim, and there was no evidence offered of the "distributing" claim.
So yes, the only thing she was found liable for was downloading.
This case is Capitol vs Thomas, not RIAA vs Thomas. Capitol is a music publisher, and this case was about their works.
1. Capitol is but one of the plaintiffs.
2. The RIAA was in fact running the case, with the aid of the record company plaintiffs.
3. Capitol is a record company, not a music publisher.
4. The case was about the recordings of several different companies.
Of course, the statutory damages are far too high to provide anything like justice; the amount should be based on actual damages.
Agreed
Thomas did not ruin the life of any of the involved corporation(s), nor did she ruin the life of any of their employees. It is simply not just to ruin her life in retaliation. That this goes on and is so widely considered legitimate is an example of our remaining barbarism.
I think most people, both in and out of the United States, see a result like this as absurd.
Nearly 10k per song is just dumb. If a CD is 12 tracks and costs ~15 bucks, its a bit over $1 per song. So this is a 1000000% penalty. one million percent. Just insane, no way that isnt unconstitutional. The fines should be like 200, maybe 300% penalty, maybe even 1000% (10x). That's reasonable. The punishment must fit the crime and all that.
That's the issue all right. And I think the Court's decision is absurd.
Check into it and ask about the impact of retinal remodeling on potential interventions.
Nossir. That is not correct. See my comment just above.
Yes. Precisely.
[sigh].... do not feed the troll.... do not feed the troll...
OK, I'll feed the troll. Yes, I am acutely aware of Paul Bach-y-Rita's work. You however apparently do not understand the concepts that you are invoking. There is plasticity in neural systems, yes. Plasticity is important in vision, sure. Nobody, *anywhere* has demonstrated that they can generate coherent "visual percepts" in a coordinated fashion with any kind of stimulus. Its far more complicated than hooking up electrodes and stimulating until someone "learns" what the stimulus means.
btw, the tongue thing is very, very cool. Its not vision and does not even map to vision, but those lingual electrodes can easily map topographic data, sonar data, relief data, contrast data onto the high resolution innervation of the tongue and allow people to interpret those stimulii as a map to be followed. The technology was originally developed for US Navy SEALS to navigate complex 3D environments at night, with no light and it works. It works incredibly well with very little training necessary. I would like to see more effort and funds put into techniques like that to help people live more independent lives.
I am familiar with Nirenberg's work. What Nirenberg seems to be missing is that the programming outflow of the retina is altered in retinal disease. ON and OFF channels are substantially altered in retinal disease and the whole programming substrate is altered because the circuitry and programming down to the molecular levels is altered.
Its not all pessimism though as we will need to understand how the normal retina signals and I find her work to be interesting and compelling. Though she is not addressing *which channels* of information outflow are being encoded. There are 14-16 separate outflow channels in the retina that project to different areas of cortex and sub cortex and she is not addressing how to separate those channels and what those separate channels mean in terms of the "visual world".
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse