Proof for the peasants

By Fester:

In Common Law, you have to prove that you have suffered harm caused by illegal or illegitimate actions before you can collect damages.  That has been the situation for the past fifteen hundred years since the Saxons were in charge.  This week, the Motion Picture Association of America is arguing that since they are incompetent or lazy, they should not need to prove they were harmed.  Wired is reporting that the MPAA wants to collect damages on the potential to be harmed and not on any harm which is provable. 

The Motion Picture Association of America said  Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

"It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement," van Uitert wrote....

United States District Court Judge Michael Davis instructed the 12 panelists that they need only find Thomas had an open share folder, not that anyone from the public actually copied her files.

People are being presumed guilty for having a common technological configuration that the MPAA is too lazy to investigate further before they bring suit despite the stated fact in the article that it is not difficult for similar plaintiffs to capture screen shots and IP addresses of their defendants' activities. 

Wonderful, as, much like with the AP, we see another stale business model thrash about it in its death throes in actions which forget their value proposition and remember only their cash proposition which pisses off their consumers.  I know I won't download legit films and music files because I don't want to get entangled intheir restrictions and I don't download these files from other sources of unknown legitimacy because I can not even think about affording a fine that is greater than either my student loans or my mortgage.  Their tactics will lose customers like me as the MPAA sees it pie shrink while they argue that a fifteen hundred year legal standard is too burdensome for them to meet.