As from what I understand, IPs assigned by ISPs are recorded and IPs through the whole Internet cannot be modified if some proxies are not used (provided they don't keep any connection records).

If so, there should be no way someone has stolen her ID?

To many names were matching for her to get off. The terastar name was every where including her email address. I don't see her getting the decision reversed. If she does though, it will set a huge precedent.

Based on RIAA point of view I conclude as I cannot share my computer with my guests, kids etc because of liability. This is not right.

I think a global network without borders should have same rules and free of possibility of such fines-charges, because not all people seating up front of computer understand and agree with US based RIAA and because computer can be infected/hijacked.

I don't understand why the e-mail address was supposed to be a 'confirming' thing here. Frankly, anyone can open a e-mail address on the web today, and anyone can hijack someone's e-mail box if they get a virus into their machine.

She also has good reasons for not settling: She did not do this and she doesn't want to be bullied by the RIAA.
The jury should have taken that into account, that she categorically DENIED that she ever used Kazaa and the only evidence that was given was her IP address and that someone was using an e-mail address that she also used.

Big whoop! I can put my cousin's e-mail address as my name into Shareaza, that doesn't mean that she is sharing any songs illegally!

Same thing when someone can do the same thing with MY e-mail address, which is well known to people who I have shared it with and anyone who has hacked any of the sites that I post on, like this one!

It's good to know that this might be revoked. It's also awesome that they might finally put a stop to the RIAA's current method of dealing with pirating.

There was a time when athletes played for the love of the game and the fans. There was a time when musicians played for the love of the music and the fans. Now they play for the love of money and material possessions.

It used to be that they touched our souls and made us feel that the impossible was possible. It used to be that they were our heroes who made us dream. Now they repulse us with their arrogance, excesses, and vanity.

You musicians who are against music sharing are forgetting that we have been doing it for decades. Converting our vinyl records to tape and sharing them with our friends. We shared your music because you touched us, and we wanted to share that gift that you gave us.

Now you want to stop that. Stop us from sharing your gift. Stop us at the price of your soul. Stop us at expense of a mother and her child.

You have sold your soul, and we have all paid the price.

She was framed don't you know I am Bill Gates!

Was she using a switch? No one asked this question.. X_X

A civil case only requires a preponderance of the evidence. "This preponderance is based on the more convincing evidence and its probable truth or accuracy, and not on the amount of evidence." An email address and a matching IP address from the ISP is clearly a prepoderance against "Trust me I didn't do it" and "my identity was stolen".

Clearly bad legal advice. Don't get your hopes up for a big turn around RIAA practices.

There are thousands of ways to steal info, pretend to be somebody else, or actually use their machine or their net connection. And, given that you've hacked into their machine, why the heck NOT use their username on whatever illegal scam you're running? It's probably stored all over the machine, and if things get traced back, you've got a fall guy ready to take the blame. I run a mail server at home, and I continually get spammy bounces from other mailservers saying letters 'I' sent were going to bad addresses. I never sent any letters, people merely used my address for their spam. Likewise, I've noticed my wireless router is running at about 1/3 as fast lately as it used to, so it's time to dig out a traffic analyzer and find out whether I've got a freeloader on my router or a trojan snuck in. Her claims are easily possible, and would be tough to truly prove or deny even with the hard drive. Without it, there are all sorts of ways for somebody else to have zombie'd her machine to use as a filesharing server without her knowing. The judge and jury were pretty clueless about technology, apparently.

You would be surprised how many posibilities and way to fake or get your IP exists. Its easy to hack poorly secured wifi (posible to hack even secured wifi with some knowledge). Its easy to steal your IP from any PC on same network. Its even posible to do "Man in midle" technique and i am sure there is many more posibilities.

when the people don't respect property rights and steal rampantly there can be no society. it is a very slippery slope.

At the same time the courts have to prove a crime has been committed before punishing and I don't think U.S courts really do that in every case.

One cannot condone stealing and consider themselves moral and yet that doesn't mean justice is being done in this case.

She can make this and shop for judges to grant this appeal..but a more sound case would be an attempt by the RIAA to "shake her down" and rob her of quality of life for her and kids by an obviously unpayable fine. Her lawyer sounds like he has tunnel vision.

Kazaa you can use any id for an email you want. there can be multiple the last time i checked. also you can be called annomxxx. xxx meaning a number. plus i know that my kids have downloaded kazaa and other p2p programs and i didn't even realize it. they automaticly search for music on the harddrive. mainly in the mymusic folder of your my documents. which in turn mean YOUR cd's will be automaticly shared on its network. if thats not enough. the program auto run on startup so that it is logged in all the time. if you don't change these setting or know enough about it. you will be unwillingly sharing music by accident. just my thought on it

Wow, you really don't get it. Musicians have to make a living too. If all was fair the price of their tracks would be much lower than it currently is to get legally.

I also think the RIAA's method is bad and that virdict was ridiculous but it is all part of their battle to convert users to legally downloading songs/movies and to stop sharing such things. Glad they're fighting it but please stop preaching about artists selling their souls out, you sound like a Jesus freak.

Given the fact that this lady was convicted of copyright infringement by simply having files on her computer without proving that anything had actually been shared raises an alarming scenario.

Consider this, you leave your mp3 player sitting on your desk at work, in your dorm, etc somebody could come by grab it, copy the mp3s off of it and put it back. Or how about this, you share mp3s off your laptop at home with other computers in your house. Then you forget to turn off sharing and hit a public wifi hotspot with your laptop. Are now guilty of copyright infringement and liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines?

Rediculous scenarios yes, but given situation that has been upheld in a court of law its fair game.

In this case we may see as someone of 1000000000 net users remotely accessed her PC, created sharing service login same as her email and shared her music files with all net…. Sounds unreal, - think again.. All who has computer should fear that.
She might be even changed her HDD due to weird PC behavior or crashes, - sounds convincing to me to have possibility of hijack/virus. Letter from RIAA may took more her attention to the problem…
There is no way court decision is justified and fair.

I don't understand why people think it is okay to steal music online, but they would never take a candy bar from a convenience store.

Fact: RIAA owns the copyright to the music in question. Copyrights are protected under Federal Law.

If you don't like the law, change it. Don't blame the RIAA for protecting their business model. If you don't like RIAA's business model, don't buy support the RIAA by buying CDs that their members publish.

The RIAA has just sued one of their paying customers (the article clearly mentions cd's she has boughten). This is a faulty business model.

Let's not forget him. Did he bring any computer experts as their witness? Or in cross, he should have been able to poke a big hole in RIAA's expert.

As for claiming that you left the KaZaa settings at default... well we know ignorance is not an excuse.

Which then opens up another Pandora's box... if I leave my wifi unsecured, am I liable for any malicious activity? What if my wifi is secured but hacked?

Suing customers doesn't make sense to me, unless the goal here is simply to recoup as much money they think they lost as possible...

But this doesn't solve the problem, nor is it going to stop piracy. Things aren't going to get better for the industry until they do something about music quality/innovation and the record co's distribution models... I don't hear iTunes complaining about piracy...

The RIAA must've seen this coming in the 80's when we used dual cassette deck boomboxes to share tapes with our friends, and record from the radio. There should already be a good solution to the problem: one that doesn't involve suing customers.

The e-mail information corroborates the one piece of evidence that the defense can not discredit: The MAC address of her Ethernet adapter was logged with the file sharing network traffic.

You have to admit her hard drive failure (and its disposal) days before the system was impounded is somewhat fishy sounding too....

I work as tech i have cleaned 1000's of machines there are what is referred to as proxy trojans, they allow people to download using your ip.

I have seen this in the wild on over 500 machines so far for average user its almost impossible to detect, nortons does not detect most of them.

This woman could be the victim of proxy trojan/irc proxy bot unless you know what to look for they are VERY hard to find most virus scanners don't pick them up because the hackers re-write the code once they have been found out.

No Niva, you do not get it. Which is more important to you (assuming that you are a musician, but I doubt you are)? That people hear your music or that you make money? Is it more important that you make money, single mom be damned?

Most musicians that I know are kind and forgiving people. They may disagree with online sharing, but they would not want to ruin a mother and her child to prove the point.

You my friend are shallow, self serving, and worse yet cruel for wishing this upon that woman. You should be ashamed, but you are not. Maybe you should take a long hard look at yourself.

I think what everyone appears to be overlooking, is that she is being fined for sharing music, not for stealing it.

In the candy bar reference mentioned above, it would be like legitimately buying the a candy bar and then being brought to court for sharing that candy bar with a friend. In that case, I guess I won't be giving away any candy for Halloween this year. =(

I am one of the oldest punk rockers here in maine.my band is big meat hammer and i have played in bands since i was 16 in the summer of 1972.

No band of mine will ever be on or sign with a label having to do with RIAA.
My music collection contains hundreds maybe almost a thousand records and not one of them are a big label.
Complain all you want to about large lables who rip off consumers and/or their artists or complain about the RIAA.You want to do something useful against these organizations then do it......
stop buying their music.Surely you can find music to listen to that is not large label/RIAA stuff.I don't have any problems at all doing this.

Oh and to those who say artists get paid thru royalties with these large corporate labels you are only partially right.More likely your lawyers,manager,and business crew will make more money than you as an artist will ever see from your musical efforts.Think I lie then talk to some who might have known someone who actually got a big contract and ask them where it got them.....
Nowadays bands can exist better by promoting themselves and not paying a "middleman".Just use the internet like a website,myspace,etc. and your act will do a hell of a lot better than ever going near a large stupid corporate label.

It seems that RIAA has lost the sense of what is legal and what is not; they see everything you do not pay for as illegal. It's all about the money.

that's pretty scary Ron
I hope my ip is clean :S

Prove the harm. If this is such a terrible thing to do, prove the harm.

Oh wait... a huge percentage of people who download songs *wouldn't* have actually bought the song from the record company if it wasn't available for download - so the harm is actually pretty minimal.

Downloading a song that you wouldn't have bought in the first place is about as harmful as speeding. Anyone who claims otherwise is either cashing the recording industry's cheques, or has not gotten past the external morality stage of development and doesn't want the burden of thinking for themselves. Slavery was a law on the books too - would you suggest that it was moral?

Just because lobby groups and people with money have gotten the law written the way they want, doesn't mean it is just to enforce it. Especially not when the punishment is nowhere near proportionate to the so-called 'crime'.

If you think it 'is' theft, compare it to stealing a candy bar. Do you honestly want to live in a society where stealing a candy bar carries a NINE THOUSAND DOLLAR FINE per candy bar? Especially when you don't actually *take* the candy bar, you just make a copy of it and leave the original behind?

Yeah, that'll be a great system forever and ever.

Oh wait, no it won't.

if she owns the song and the only people she shared it with was herself from a remote computer they can't disprove that. The RIAA has no case here and the first Judge was a technical moron. This will be overturned...

I think it's funny that the company the RIAA used broke the law in dload'ing the files from "her", yet they can get away with it. The Digital protection act is very clear in that ALL distribution of illegal copies are illegal. The "permission of the studio" doesn't permit it either.

Since her OS drive was not available for study, the prosecution can not PROVE that she was the only one with acces to the PC and therefore the IP address at the time of the crime.

As mentioned previously, ANYONE can create an account with her "usual" alias.

The case was thin and the only reason the jury found her guilty is because they did not have supporting technical information and was overwhelmed with pointless testimony all about the evils of piracy, but not about how people can screw others with hacked connections.

Silk,
When you buy anything digital, you don't own it. You own the right to use it in accordance with the user agreement. Those agreements specifically state that you are not allowed to make a copy (full or partial) for anyone else but you. Technically and legally, not even your spouse, child, parent, etc.

this is a monumental case that can/will decide many cases to come in the near future. If the RIAA can be defeated now it will set precedence for and update of the DCMA.

Spoofing a MAC address is easier than spoofing an IP. I can change the MAC address of my router to be the same as any ethernet adapter I want. Know what you're talking about before you post.

There's a lot here about musicians being behind this, you have to remember, on a 17$ CD, the musician wro wrote and performed it may only recieve 10 - 17 cents for it. When you download a song for a dollar, try to understand, unless the musician in question is Zepplin or Metallica, the artist probably isn't getting more than a penny or two. The problems aren't with the musicians, the problems are with the record companies. I'm not saying all musicians are generous or nice, but the majority of nationally touring musicians/studio musicians don't care. The proper question here would be, if it's for the musicians, how much of the 222,000 is going back to the artists where it belongs?

Virgin Media have clearly stated that when you pay 17GBP for a CD (yes, they're twice as much here than there, for no APPARENT reason), that the artist gets at least half. Thats a big chunk.

I haven't bought music in years (haven't downloaded any either), mainly because there isnt anything I like. But I'm agreeing with most people here - I'm liable if my wifi is hacked? I'm liable if a trojan gets onto my network? A Credit Card company takes the fall if my card gets stolen, yet I'm liable for having MP3s on my Laptop/PC because they 'might' get shared??? Thats a load of f****** bologne and the RIAA know it. [Edited for vulgarity]

Stromm

I'm not arguing the fact of whether she's legally allowed to copy a song and give it to a million friends or not. However, I think the blame should be placed on the people that are taking the songs.

In this scenario, if someone steals my iPOD, I am liable to be sued by the RIAA for sharing songs with the thief. God forbid I get a fancy new car with a built-in hard drive and I load thousands of songs on it. Should someone steal my fancy car, I could end up paying a billion dollars to the RIAA.

Either way, I don't care. I don't buy music and I never will. The radio works just fine for me. It didn't use to be the case, as I own hundreds of CDs, but I don't support the RIAA's beliefs, nor will I support them with my money.

We're glad to see Jamie won't allow herself to be bullied by the RIAA!

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Check out more about this story at http://globalgrind.com

"Hegg, a married father of two who said he formerly raced snowmobiles, said he has never been on the internet."

"never been on the internet"
How can one such person decide?

While I 100% support Jammie's case, I think her defense is weak. Even after watching that interview with CNN, I felt she was lying.

Like seriously, do you really think a person is going to hack in your system, download Kazaa, create an account with your username, and then proceed to share mp3s on your computer? Considering that getting caught by the RIAA from uploading mp3s is less likely than getting kill in a car accident on the way to work, I highly doubt that a hacker would go to this kind of trouble for possibly zero gain.

Seriously, I think at this point it would be more worth for her to try and get the fine reduced. Everyone knows $220k is an absurd fine for file sharing.

Anyways, I hope she does win and sticks it to the RIAA!

Id theft is possible via your ip. If u run an unsecured wireless access point then anyone can access your network and use your broadband and isp. And u wont know unless u monitor your network traffic.

My router allows me to assign it any MAC I desire and it will use that as its MAC address until I tell it otherwise. My router is a wireless B w/ cable modem at least five years old. You connect with real MAC and then change MAC via software. It works.