The People Who Were Sued for Downloading Music... What Ever Happened?

if you were born before 1995 you probably remember hearing these headlines a college student who admitted downloading and sharing music a minnesota woman who may face another trial staggering verdict of 675 000 they ordered her to pay nearly 2 million bucks to record companies you probably also remember that stretch of years where sites like napster kazaa and limewire were all the rage and everybody seemed to have a strong opinion about them music should be available to anybody that wants to hear it this is robbery this will kill the music industry you will all be sorry now that we're a couple decades past the era of music downloading i was curious to find out what actually happened did the record labels ever get their money and more broadly was gene simmons right has the internet killed music now a quick heads up this will be a little different from my usual videos you're not going to discover any new genres of music however if you're a history nerd like me i think you're going to enjoy this very bizarre and very consequential story of music at the dawn of the internet plus we'll play some hits along the way whenever the fair use doctrine allows it for example did you know fleetwood mac is the second most pirated artist in the world [Music] okay that's enough please don't sue me to understand the laws around music piracy we have to go back to the 1980s when home recording devices were becoming popular for the first time a major supreme court decision in 1984 allowed consumers to videotape live tv for personal use the concept became known as time shifting or taking a public broadcast and shifting the time that you'll watch or listen to it let's say that the program you want to record comes on at 10 at night you just set the auto timer and the system will automatically activate itself without you even being there for the music industry it was troublesome but not really the end of the world after all recording songs from the radio was hardly a substitute for a real copy and because tapes would degrade in quality each time you copied them it wasn't very feasible for people to share albums peer-to-peer without sounding pretty awful that all changed however in 1987 when digital audio tape hit the market two hours at 16-bit true 16-bit digital recording few people remember these besides audio engineers and field recorders but digital audio tapes or dats for short were unique in that they could create a perfect copy without any degradation the major labels were scared envisioning a future full of bootlegs and albums copied at home it is a very dangerous machine unless it's controlled in some way and the rights of the creators are protected so after a few years of lobbying in congress the audio home recording act of 1992 was passed this was basically a compromise between the record labels and the manufacturers who made the digital audio recorders new devices were required to have a serial copyright management feature which means that you couldn't make copies unless you had the original recording it basically stopped you from buying an album and then making a bunch of copies for your friends it also stopped musicians from making legitimate copies of their home recordings something that soured many users but for the riaa it was a big win the threat of digital music had been neutralized at least for the time being we should take a second here to explain exactly what the riaa is it's an advocacy group that's funded by all the major record labels in the united states as well as hundreds of smaller indie labels including apparently death groups the riaa was originally set up in the 50s to lobby on behalf of labels as well as to certify records that became gold or platinum they were part of the music censorship scandal in the 80s and actually came up with the parental advisory sticker to appease tipper gore and her army of angry moms parents in this country right now aren't tuned in they they're not aware of what their kids are seeing on television by the mid 90s the riaa's members were on cloud nine album sales were at an all-time high around 20 billion dollars in today's money even when adjusted for inflation they were making twice as much as they were in the early 80s new cds cost around 17 which is 30 today they only cost around 75 cents to make and only a tiny portion around 50 cents maybe was going to the actual artist so needless to say they were making massive profits but while all the partying was going on something was brewing under the radar that would soon change everything in 1995 the mp3 formally came into existence a fun fact the engineer who developed it listened to the song tom's diner by suzanne vega over and over again as hearing the subtle changes in her voice helped him fine-tune the algorithm and he fills it only halfway and before i even argue at first nobody really paid much attention to the mp3 besides computer nerds and audio geeks but in 1998 the first portable mp3 players hit the market including the rio pmp-300 even though it only had 32 megabytes of internal memory or roughly 30 minutes of music the threat of mp3 players was suddenly dawning on the record industry the riaa sued to block it from reaching the market they claim that under the 1992 law the mp3 player needed a form of serial copyright management or in other words when you put an mp3 file on one device you must not be able to copy it onto any others something that probably would have killed the new invention before it ever had a chance but as you're probably guessing this isn't what happened the riaa lost and the mp3 player was indeed allowed to be sold not to mention evolve into the iphone and basically change the fabric of society for better or worse the court decided that like time shifting mp3 players were space shifting allowing consumers to listen to music they had already purchased on a separate portable device of course the introduction of the mp3 player did lead to widespread illegal downloading piracy just one year later in 1999 napster was launched by this guy napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing service which means when you wanted to download a song you would get little pieces from whoever else was online at that time it was hugely popular at its peak napster had around 80 million registered users and was known to clog college networks due to its high usage among students but it was only a few months before the record labels would mobilize to shut them down even though metallica usually gets the blame it was actually the riaa's doing there was a time when i was too sexy for my shirt now i find myself forced to be too sexy for copyright infringement at trial napster argued that their service falled under fair use for two reasons first off utilizing the same space shifting argument as the rio mp3 player case they claimed that users were downloading music they already owned on cd or tape and secondly users who did not already own the music were simply making temporary copies to sample the songs much like a listening station at a cd store of course both these arguments were pretty lousy they may have applied to a handful of users but the vast majority were just scooping up free tunes the courts didn't buy them either and in 2001 napster was shut down but if the riaa celebrated it was not for long millions of dollars were spent shutting napster down and everybody's still doing the same thing in another place although napster was only around for two years it exposed millions of people to the world of peer-to-peer downloading and countless new services were already launched to replace them newer networks like kazaa grockster and morpheus would differ from napster in one key way they were decentralized whereas napster kept an index of every song available on their server these services did not and thus when the riaa tried to sue them this time teamed up with the film industry they were unsuccessful in mgm versus grokester the lower court ruled that decentralized peer-to-peer networks were more like home video recorders or copy machines technology that is sometimes used for copyright infringement but not the responsibility of the company to prevent this position would ultimately be reversed by the supreme court a few years later but the initial ruling in 2003 served a painful blow to the record industry cd sales had been dropping for four years straight mp3 players were getting better less expensive and more popular illegal downloading was ubiquitous and going after the peer-to-peer services was not yielding the quick results they wanted so you might say it was their nuclear option because this was the time that the riaa decided to finally go after individual downloaders and the music industry has now begun a serious crackdown on illegal music file swappers issuing nearly 900 federal subpoenas this month wow 900 music file sharers that dorm is toast but pretty soon thousands of lawsuits were getting filed and the very first settlement came in september 2003 against a 12 year old girl she had downloaded around a thousand songs including madonna's material girl and dittos here with me this wasn't exactly the villain the riaa was looking for and pretty soon there were more stories about single parents broke college students even dead people getting served with thousand dollar lawsuits though initially intending to fight it the girl's mom settled for two thousand dollars after being informed the riaa would seek a lot more money should the case go to trial and this was how they were able to settle the vast majority of cases so quickly typically for somewhere between two and four thousand dollars of course they had to expect that somebody eventually would refuse and take them to court and the first to do that was jamie thomas a single mother in her 30s from brainerd minnesota who worked for the department of natural resources of a native american nation jaime's ip address was found to be sharing over a thousand songs on kazaa she claimed not to know anything about them suggesting that her children or ex-boyfriend may have been responsible the riaa offered a settlement of 3 500 but jamie refused the gentleman that i spoke to he actually walked me through the process of trying to find kazaa on my computer and we couldn't find kaza on my computer i'm kind of like why would i pay you for one for something that isn't here at trial the record labels decided to focus on 24 songs which included irish by the google dolls basket case by green bay and run baby run by sheryl crow during the proceedings it was revealed that jamie was a pretty big music buff who owned many of those same songs on cd it also came out that she replaced her hard drive shortly after receiving her notification of copyright infringement frankly if i was on the jury i think it would have been pretty obvious that she had downloaded the music however the defense took on a more philosophical approach arguing that an ip address alone shouldn't be enough to find somebody liable they didn't after all catch her physically in the act but the jury didn't buy it they ended up siding with the record labels and were also tasked with awarding damages the jury decided that jaime would have to pay a staggering 222 thousand dollars to the riaa holy [ __ ] this is one of the hardest aspects of the case to understand sure i can see why the jury may have been a little peeved by her complete denial of wrongdoing but who in the right mind would think that 222 thousand dollars was a fitting punishment it turns out that they were instructed to choose between 750 and 150 thousand dollars per sawn the range that was required under federal copyright law the fact that they settled on about nine thousand dollars per song was actually somewhat on the lower end in any case the verdict as you can imagine prompted many strong reactions in the media jaime vowed to appeal and in the meantime another trial was underway at first glance joel looks like your regular student but that's not quite so he's faced with a lawsuit that could cost him more than a million us dollars joel tenenbaum was also caught downloading and sharing music on kazaa he was given the standard settlement offer of around three thousand dollars but joel countered with five hundred dollars instead i sent a money order to them which they returned saying essentially you know call us when you want to actually talk years passed and joel didn't hear a thing he just assumed that they had cut their losses but then suddenly out of nowhere a stack of papers arrived at his door joel was going to court thanks a lot [ __ ] now joel tenenbaum took a completely different approach to his defense unlike jamie thomas he never denied downloading or sharing the 30 songs the riaa singled out rather he argued that the penalty was unconstitutional the six-figure fines he argued were only meant to apply to commercial infringement people who made bootlegs and sold them for a profit it was not meant to be applied to individuals who were downloading music for personal use however when joel admitted on the stand that he did in fact knowingly download and distribute the songs the judge automatically issued a guilty verdict the only thing left was for the jury to award damages and once again the jury was only allowed to choose an amount between 750 and 150 000 per son in the end joel was ordered to pay 675 000 or 22 500 per song and of course once again it drew many headlines in the pressuring amount of money to be paid by someone who downloaded and shared music he has been slapped with quite the bill you're not going to believe it meanwhile jamie thomas was granted a retrial due to a technicality in the previous case this time she was represented pro bono by two hot shot lawyers but they put forth largely the same argument that the ip address alone was not enough to link her to the active infringement once again the jury sided with the riaa but this time raised the damages to 1.92 million dollars or eighty thousand percent i i still haven't been able to wrap my head around the fact that it was almost two million dollars now what many of you are probably thinking is how can she possibly pay this back most people never make close to two million dollars in their lifetime and certainly not after taxes house payments and living expenses but it turns out that collecting on this type of settlement is pretty tricky it's considered an unsecured non-priority claim unsecured just means there wasn't any collateral put down and non-priority means it doesn't fall under the category of a priority debt which includes things like child support criminal fines or income tax those are things you can't really wiggle out of but non-priority debt is fairly easy to wipe away by filing for bankruptcy now personal bankruptcy is still a pain in the ass it stays on your credit report for up to 10 years which makes it difficult to get a mortgage or a car loan but if the choice is between that or paying back an insurmountable debt for the rest of your life the decision is pretty obvious this i contend is where the riaa strategy began to fall apart undoubtedly at some point joel tenenbaum and jamie thomas realized that bankruptcy was an option they could live with and at that point they have nothing to lose they're being represented by pro bono attorneys they can keep filing appeal after appeal if they win great and if they lose oh well meanwhile with each passing day the riaa's legal fees are stacking up they're getting heat in the press yet if they back out now it will all be for nothing it will send a message to the public that downloading doesn't have consequences it's unsurprising then that in early 2010 the riaa offered to reduce the 1.92 million judgment against jaime to a mere 25 grand clearly they were desperate to put the issue to bed while also saving face but jamie simply turned it down again what did she have to lose and sure enough both her and joel tenenbaum would appeal numerous times extending the lawsuits for several years and taking them all the way to the supreme court where ultimately both would be denied a hearing so yes both of them lost in each case the initial damages were reinstated 222 thousand dollars for jamie and 675 000 for joel but that doesn't mean the record labels got any of it joel filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and the court records do not indicate that he paid a single penny to the record labels jamie thomas said that she would declare bankruptcy in 2013 but i couldn't find any public record of it apparently the riaa in a last-ditch effort had offered to accept a much lower settlement were she to appear in a public service announcement about piracy but once again jaime refused leaving them very likely with nothing at this point i'm asking myself the question was it worth it to what extent did suing file shares bring the music industry back if you look at the riaa's sales data there is actually a slight increase in 2004 the year after the lawsuit started but then it falls off a cliff as anyone could tell you piracy never went away the websites just kept changing meanwhile experts could never agree on how much file sharing was to blame in the first place intuitively it makes sense that somebody who downloaded 20 albums robbed the music industry of 20 record sales but you can't be certain that person would have purchased any albums had they not been available for free some experts have argued that music sales during the 2000s were declining anyway because the 90s were just an exceptionally good time for the industry cds were new and exciting baby boomers were replacing their vinyl collection with newly reissued cds and the home media market was not quite as competitive as it would be a decade later when dvd and video game sales skyrocketed the decline of cd sales they argue was coming whether or not napster ever came into existence did music piracy exacerbate it it seems very likely but there's hardly a consensus if and how much in 2008 after some 30 to 35 000 lawsuits the riaa officially reversed its policy of suing individual file shares instead they teamed up with internet service providers to send warning emails whenever a subscriber was caught multiple offenses would lead to their connection getting throttled or potentially shut down this continues to be their policy today so just in case you're wondering your odds of being sued for downloading music in 2020 are virtually zero not that you really would anyway music piracy has become a lot less common as ipods have given way to subscription streaming services like spotify or even youtube in fact in 2016 the riaa's revenue increased for the first time in decades almost entirely on the strength of streaming the resurgence of vinyl has also played a role in fact 2020 will be the first year vinyl sales outperformed cds since the 1980s it might be cliche but if i've learned anything from this bizarre episode of music history it's that when faced with an uncertain and changing market it's better to adapt than to beat your customers with a blunt object i don't think history will look too sympathetically on the riaa when they tried to block the invention of the mp3 player when they sued school children single moms and college kids for thousands and thousands of dollars in hindsight it's also clear that the music industry of the 90s had to change not just the extremely high prices for cds but the way artists were getting screwed around the handful of gatekeepers who controlled what got played on the radio the fact that music of all things was one of the first industries to change basically as soon as the internet came out is not a coincidence it was begging for a mako not that everything today is all sunshine and rainbows either but that will be something we can look back on 20 years from now if you're still with me thanks for watching and if you want to see videos where i play more actual music exploring some new genres or lesser known fans be sure to check out some of these links you

Channel: Bandsplaining

Views: 1,157,341

Rating: 4.9370799 out of 5

Keywords: joel tenenbaum, jammie thomas-rasset, napster, limewire, metallica, piracy, music piracy, rio pmp, rio mp3 player, mp3 player, cd sales, digital audio tape, DAT, audio home recording act, ipod, grokster, kazaa, peer to peer downloading, torrenting, morpheus, time shifting, space shifting

Id: QUm6no5MXYA

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LiciniusRex]

It's still crazy to me that the RIAA thought this was a good idea.

[u/FourthofMarch2015]

My wife’s dad was served back when she was a teenager living at home. They had to pay like $2.99 for each song they downloaded, and were threatened that if they tried to fight it it would be the cost of the whole album for each song. Between her and her sister they had to pay like $3k. FIL was not pleased...

[u/StarXSick]

Was it just propaganda?

[u/StopDropppingIt]

I still have a folder on my desktop that contains over 25K mp3 files in it. Thanks Napster!

[u/Phantom471]

Use a vpn folks.

Seriously tho, suing an individual for that much money is just hilarious.

[u/Brilliant_Manager_66]

"You wouldn't download a car, would you?" was always the most hilarious shit they would say about piracy being bad.

Who fucking WOULDNT download a car?

[u/[deleted]]

Dido not ditto lol

[u/ChocoMilkYum]

/r/ABoringDystopia/

[u/mynextdog]

Thanks for sharing