No way!

I hope they were good songs

If I had the time I would totally sit in on this case.

There's something very disturbing about such a big, rich industry making an example of some poor individual. She must be scared out of her mind. Good luck to her.

A pox on Richard Branson. Isn't he rich enough?

You mean its only stealing if you take stuff from poor and middle class people? Cool! I'm going to head out to east end of town and get me some free stuff out of them big houses.

nah, but it is thuggish to push a case with so little evidence, promote and make law a technology that severely restricts and penalizes the use of a product after you purchase it, hypocritical to bring suits against certain people and not others (and there are a number of public stories about politicians and industry people who clearly have violated these self same, and similar, laws and others but no action has been brought against them). It is not necessarily that people have been getting away with P2P, but that the industry has fought tooth and nail against many honest alternatives, while at the same time having a pretty crappy record of actually representing the "artists". So no love here for an industry with its collective head up its ass.

I agree that the music industry has done next to nothing to give people a viable alternative to stealing. But there are legal means to buy music online these days. Granted not every single person in the world is happy with Itunes and all the other pay sites. But the only way to make everyone happy would be to have every major and minor record label on one site offering DRM free music for 10 cents/song. Basically my point is that the ineptitude of the music industry doesn't warrant a license to steal. As far as this specific case I have admit I know little about it. If she didn't steal a crapload of songs, than she shouldn't be sued. But I have no problem with them going after someone who has thousands of illegal songs on their computer. As soon as the first wave of $3000 bills were sent to college kids from the RIAA a couple of years ago, it should have been an effective warning to everyone. It's hard to feel sorry for someone to dense to take it as such.

With the Plantiffs having no evidence and their alleged Experts having already been proven clueless this may be the beginning of the end for the RIAA. As one Judge has already noted having your CEO write a letter crying about how much money you believe you are losing does not qualify as evidence!

With the Plantiffs having no evidence and their alleged Experts having already been proven clueless this may be the beginning of the end for the RIAA. As one Judge has already noted having your CEO write a letter crying about how much money you believe you are losing does not qualify as evidence!

As far as I know (by skimming the court documents), I think Jammie was caught having a folder on her computer that was accessible from a file-sharing program and that the files in that drive were copywrited. I'm not sure that they actually caught her stealing anything.

Just another reason to only download and not have any files available for sharing!

Let the people in Guatemala do all the uploading and you should be fine.

The new Radiohead album, "In Rainbows," will be available for download on Oct. 10, and the band is allowing downloaders to pay whatever they want.

Updated DNT article.

with all our cases we try to be fair and reasonable in resolving them quickly and out of court,” Cara Duckworth, director of communications for the Recording Industry Association of America. (Read: [cough] extortion.)

"My point is that the ineptitude of the music industry doesn't warrant a license to steal" Totally agree with Chris here.

Former CEO of the RIAA, Hilary Rosen, quoted in Rolling Stone: "Peer-to-peer took hold. That's when we went from music having real value in people's minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value."

Why do people think they deserve free music?

In a world full of real problems, I just cant stand listening to those RICH mother fuckers whining about money being "stolen" from them. Big music company executives are not really trying to protect artists, they just want more yahts n vacation homes.
The real value of music is that it's art which feeds the mind. Things that should be free are food, clothes, health care, ART, etc.
How many artists are actually loosing money from people exchanging their music. Bands should be happy to have their following increased by so much. Most bands we know aren't actually in it for the millions their making off cd sales any how. Their in it for the art and hot chicks staring at them on stage.
Half the bands I may or may not be downloading are long dead -and I know they don't care.

I hope that nice woman held up well against those high paid lawyers.
I am so happy listening to all the great music that I can't afford to buy. It feeds my mind n I don't know what I'd do without it.
Radiohead ROCKS!
Also every body should check out Nick Drake Family Tree.

so...radiohead rocks, but they should keep their day jobs?

I don't agree that art should be free, free to make perhaps not free to consume. Nothing cheapens the value of something more then by making it wholly free. However, there can be a big difference between not-free and fair. But, I also think that the RIAA and most of the "music industry" is wholly about making money for the music industry not about making money for the musicians. I don't have sympathy for the RIAA because it operates out of a stagnant position of distribution while having a long history of destructive self interest. Do I want to see musicians paid and treated fairly? Yes. Do I think the RIAA in its current form is the institution to do this? No.
Not terribly long ago (last year?) there was an amusing story about tones of royalties payments being held by the record companies because they could not "find" address for the artists to send them to, when all that was required was a simple Google search.
It has been with reluctance that DRM is being pushed back, and we still have fairly limited free competition in the "legal" music download field. AllMp3 was coheresed out of the broader market despite being ruled legal in Russian court because of the decisions of the monopoly of Visa. And btw how friggen much does it really cost to be able to download a song? .99 a song? ok, fine whatever, but this puts it in the range of buying the CD, which is physically handled, has to be individually made, wrapped shipped, materials printed for a store clerk to stock, ring up etc.
I would wager a good $50 that pricing individual downloaded DRM free songs at .50 a pop would still create good profit margins AND drive the majority of music P2P out of business.
The current music industry is so hidebound it makes you want to beat your head against the wall and cry.

Edgeways' most recent comment illustrates, I think, what Radiohead is trying to say with their "name your own price" downloads.

Who knows what the actual math is, but I'd wager that if Radiohead averaged $2 per download, for the ENTIRE album, they'd make a damn good profit, much better than what they'd get through a record company. There is very little overhead in downloading, no matter what the distributors want you to think.

In this day and age, 100% of the money you spend on music should go to the artists who created it (as well as those artists and technicians who recorded and produced it). And it is that very idea that scares the hell out of the RIAA and drives them to tactics like this.

Distribution is dead.

i completely agree that this litigious sideshow is just some big-wigs clinging to the last embers of a dead industry model. the thing that gets me is when people suggest the artists should be "happy" for the exposure gained from others stealing their music. these people have never priced a piece of musical gear or studio time in their lives.

"These people" have probably spent nearly a grand just repairing my own music gear that my roomies have broken so they can keep on playin it to death and the studio thing- also false.
But seriously I was going off on a little bent back there. I too wish the little musicians could get more of the profit. I was trying to make a point on how out of wack the music industry may or may not be.

Distribution is a far cry from being dead. Just ask Amazon.com. The music industry's blind, expensive, top-heavy distribution model? Yes.

AllMp3 was ruled legal in Russian court like the goddamned Storm Botnet is legal. Read: "What happens in Soviet Russia—you do not have correct papers."

Lawyers in the case will make their closing arguments tomorrow. Three days (including jury selection)? Seems a tad quick to me... .