But I thought:

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3.14 = 3.14141414141414141414141414141414141414141414

Why couldn't we all just be happy with 22/7?

Is it me? Or is the internet getting lamer every day?

Interesting. We've had this in place in my area for over a year, maybe two. When i saw the page for the first time, the opt out form was on the ad page. It took exactly one view for me to opt out, so I haven't seen it since.

I guess they realized that the opt-out numbers went down significantly if you had to go to another page to actually opt-out.

1. It's not an attack on the statute, but on the award.
2. It's not an appeal.
3. There is nothing in the record to establish a penny in actual damages.
4. There is no such thing as "peripheral" damages.

1. I never stated that it was an attack on the statute - merely that the statute did not require actual damages be calculated, which as far as I know is true.
2. I did have the impression that this was an appeal. I blame that on it being 1:30 in the morning and not paying attention to detail. That doesn't affect my base opinion that this will fail miserably.
3. If there is nothing to establish actual damages, then how can you argue that the damages awarded are unconstitutionally disproportionate?
4. If I'm forcing the RIAA to come up with actual damages, they aren't going to respond with the retail cost. They are going to look at all of the ways that Thomas' action directly caused damage and cite many ways that she indirectly caused damage. The judge may not buy all of their arguments, but he certainly will give more than just the retail value of a single recording when calculating the appropriateness of an award. If he even starts to consider a new trial, he has to look at whether the award is appropriate and it doesn't take a giant leap of logic to make this award look constitutionally appropriate.

Now, if the case were handled differently from it's inception, I think you have something to work with. But it wasn't and the status is what it is.

Call my opinion baseless, fine. But the judge will agree with me.

It is an option to choose statutory or actual damages. There is nothing that requires actual damages be calculated.

The appeal would be that statutory damages are unconstitutional as they exhibit an extraordinary leap over actual damages. It sounds good on it's surface if you accept the argument that actual damages are 1/650th of the damages awarded, and in fact there is existing case law that extraordinary damages are not acceptable. Unfortunately, in this case, there is nothing established to make the leap that these damages are out of line. Further, there is the issue of peripheral damage that is incalculable. In my simple non-lawyer opinion, the appeal will fail miserably.

An 18K settlement is a part time job over two years including interest. I don't know that they are offering it after the re-trial, but if they did, or even if they offered double, she should take it. She's spinning her wheels and those of the people helping her, she has the ideal case from the RIAA's standpoint, and fighting the case is costing everybody involved money they can never hope to recover. She had her day in court. She blew it. Time to lick her wounds and move on.

$0.99 may seem like a going rate, but that pricing scale was established after Kazaa did it's thing. AFAIK, there was no establishment of cost during the trial - in other cases, but not in this one - at least not from the reports I read.

You might be able to establish the max on a 256K line, but how long was that line active for? How long were the songs available for download? How many partials could have been downloaded in that time?

If she was uploading at 256k full time, and the songs were 2 megabytes, you're looking at about 480 days if treble damages would be considered constitutional. If 10X damages are constitutional (and why would they not be at $.99?), you're now looking at 144 days of uptime. Take it a step further - $2.00 tracks, 10X damages, 51% uploads, and you can do that damage in just a little more than 1 month.

Certainly, if a set of facts establishing distribution costs for unsigned distributors, reasonable upload constraints and assumptions, song popularity, and changes in song income levels were established you could make an argument for what is reasonable, but none of that was brought up during the course of this case. As it stands, you have to give every tilt to the plaintiff when attempting to demonstrate their actual damages.

If she comes forward and says "I only uploaded at night, and the songs in question made up for less than 20% of my traffic" - which she would have to fight tooth and nail to get any appeals judge to believe at this point after having denied the charges for years - it's still quite easy to justify $1.92M in damages.

I can't see this even being heard. The only way this flies is if there can be an accounting of actual damages, and that is not likely to happen. There is entirely too much information missing in this case to prove actual damages. The only thing you could potentially do is compare income on the songs prior to and after the incident, and do trending on similar songs. Since that evidence does not exist, how can it be introduced during an appeal?

The only effective appeal I see is based on the allowance of evidence from an unlicensed investigator, and frankly I think that was argued poorly enough that it would have a rough time on appeal anyways.

This is a terrible test case.

That was the thing that caught me when reading the ruling.

Great that you know of another related case!

I was thinking of it this way - the same principles would seemingly apply to an investigator operating out of state who made phone calls as part of his investigation. Since he only recorded information that was sent to his out-of-state phone, the investigation would be legal.

Since it wasn't broadcast, but instead it was a two-way conversation, it should be treated as an in-state investigation.

It seems that having MediaSentry pick up 50 licenses for investigations would have been a good idea way back when. It's a very simple process in most states, and very inexpensive.

It exists. Actually I've seen two versions. Not sure if either provide ratios, I didn't pay that close attention.

I've seen a large one that a pharmacy student friend had. My pharmacist has a copy behind her counter that I recognize. I saw a pocket version carried by my wife's OB - which he referenced frequently whenever prescribing medication or asked about medication. The OB's book categorized drugs with a letter based safety code for pregnant women. He usually knew the answer, but always checked the book to verify he was correct.

No other doctor I've been to has referenced one of these books in front of me. Maybe they are more confident in their knowledge, maybe they check outside the room. More likely, they prescribe the same things over and over and have a comfort level with them.

What was it that you tried? Someone close to me has been experiencing chronic back pain (both lower and upper at alternating times). Doctors have come up dry so far.

Anytime I see something referencing child pornography, I immediately think it's a smear campaign.

I don't know anything about 3FN.net, but generally...

ISPs don't host porn, they host websites. Some people put up websites that have porn or other content that someone might object to. Some websites have illegal content.

Sometimes people get frustrated because it's difficult to stop whatever activity it is they are trying to stop. Because an ISP provides its customers with anonymity, or because it doesn't log certain things, or because they are not cooperative with whatever branch of the government wants their cooperation does not make them bad. There are plenty of legitimate, good, positive-for-society reasons that anonymity or partial anonymity is necessary. There are ways of enforcing the law and bettering society that don't strip rights away from free people doing ordinary things.

AP Content is all over the place. Most people weren't aware of how much of their daily news was filled by AP until the internet made it apparent. The WSJ has been successful as a pay model because 1) they create a significant amount of their own content, and 2) People want to read it. When you look online, the local newspapers aren't just competing with each other - they are competing with the TV news as well. With 4 sources coming up with the same stories, the reader will turn to the source they are most familiar with. When that source turns out to be too noisy (either with bad content, too many ads, poor layout), people will leave. There are other places to go. The papers aren't losing money because they can't make money online - they are losing money because they don't understand the marketplace they are attacking. They want "more revenue, more visitors" so they put up more ads, shock articles, and spam (pardon me, astroturf) other sites. Instead they should be thinking about things like visitor retention and how to attract long term customers.

The internet in the beginning was about how to make information more accessible. Too big a focus on commerce is bad.

If, say, the LA Times - with their vast library of news from the last 100 years made their archives publicly accessible from day 1, they would be one of the most popular sites on the web. They would be consistently cited, consistently searched, consistently visited. Instead they decided to charge a few bucks an article for their archives - and while they made a few dollars - the focus on monetizing rather than informing resulted in a lost opportunity to increase their company value by 20,000%.

I've used it plenty. I've scaled MySQL better, and more importantly - without any question as to how much I need to pay for licensing.

Enterprise Manager has changed remarkably little since it was taken over by Microsoft.

DTS portability and authoring is poor within EM to say the least. SQL Agent scheduling of DTS scripts is lacking as well. Querying, user management, etc. are all more intuitive than Oracle, but still the interface is quite poor.

MS SQL has it's place. But it certainly doesn't separate itself as significantly better than OSS solutions for 90% of database usage scenarios (at least 90% of the ones that I've been involved with).

how long will it be before we can stop relying on something as easy to get as a social security number as a unique identifier?