Single Mother Fined For Stupidity And Arrogance
8 10 2007Single Mother Jammie Thomas fined $220,000 for music file sharing
I’m wondering exactly why the fact that she’s a single mother who has two children makes a blind bit of difference. Would they have said, if she was childfree that “Childfree woman Blahblah fined $XX for music file sharing?”
Doubt it.
So what does the woman’s marital and reproductive status have to do with anything?
Other than to prove that she wasn’t very bright.
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of downloading music and file sharing. Well, not much anyway. The people commenting on the piece in The Times Online have done that to death, galvanized into sudden verbal diarrhoea by the topic of big bad music corporations winning a case against the “innocent” consumer. Most of them completely missed the point. It’s not about downloading music for free, neither was she being prosecuted for downloading music for free .
What Jammie Thomas did was to make an unlimited number of copies of thousands of songs and advertise on the web where everyone can see her ad, telling everyone they were available. Not hiding anything. If she was bright, she would have known that this isn’t “fair use”. She didn’t have a license to distribute music in this way, but she went ahead and did it anyway.
But here’s the thing that proves she’s really stupid. When she got caught, instead of admitting it and saying sorry (like so many others who have been caught have done) and settling, she fought it through the courts, and lost. Boohoo!
Maybe she thought that being a single-mother-with-two-kids would get her off.
She was fined $200k for her stupidity and arrogance.
As for the writers, shame on them. Neither the fact that she’s a single mother, has kids or is Native should make any difference to the facts. For shame.
Just tell the facts as they are.
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I have my own opinions on the RIAA and the story itself (other than the incidental “facts”) and will keep those for myself, but I will comment on the incidental “facts” of the situation i.e., reporting on marital, parental, and racial status of people.
I’m not sure about where you live, but on the nightly news Every. Single. Night. when a news report is done on a victim and she is a woman and is married or has children she’s noted by the those two facts first. “Today a wife of two children….” “Today, a single mother of a 4 yr old boy….” then some facts about the tragedy. If the woman being reported on has done a criminal act, her race and age are generally the describing facts of the woman. With men, generally the same thing occurs, although criminal reporting is mostly done on men, and victim reporting is mostly about women.
I completely agree with you, Britgirl, in that just because this woman you are talking about has bred and is unmarried has nothing to do with the facts of the story - although her marital and parental status may really be “facts,” they’re not FACTS of the CASE. IMO, her marital and parental status are put out there simply to garner sympathy and support. Lawyers defending their clients try all angles they can.
There is STILL this underlying belief that women “should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” It may not be out there actually *said* in direct form, but it’s in the language that people use, i.e. news reports in describing people in general. Who cares if this woman is a mother, single, and native american? It’s because they want to garner sympathy, “Oh.. look at this poor mother! It’s so haaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrd to raise children alone and just LOOK at what they are DOING to her!”
And then there’s the race issues. “I KNEW those kinds of people were like THAT.” Call me skeptical. Look at the Jena 6. ‘Nuff said about that.
What incidental facts like these do is help to get the reader or listener to do one of 2 things: relate to the sympathetic (or pathetic for that matter) hero/heroine, or separate them and distance them from the villain. I don’t agree with it, but then again … writers writing “news” stories ARE writers and so they are out to tell a STORY, not just the facts. Cold hard facts are usually left to the lawyers and the court room. Even criminal profilers use these sorts of incidental facts as information to determine possible stories and situations around the crime - what the victim must be like, how the criminal thinks to hopefully catch him before the criminal acts again.
I’m sure there are other reasons and others will pipe in. These are just some of my observations.
As a law student aspiring to be a copyright attorney, my sympathies are obviously not with downloaders. It’s not personal, it’s just business. As far as why they mentioned her being Native American, I think that had more to do with the fact that Native Americans tend to be very poor and contrasting that with the fine she’s been ordered to pay. Still playing the sympathy card though.
I’m of the same mind as CFSinceSix on this one. I have my own vested interest in the battle between the RIAA and us commoners, having dived into the internet broadcasting hobby a while back.
Very true that the fact that she’s a single mom has nothing to do with the actual story. However, I believe this is the same woman I read up on a year ago that stated that her son had installed Kazaa on her computer without her knowledge and downloaded quite a bit of music before her IP was tracked and investigated. Either way, she needs to have more control over her stuff than that. The media plays the i-have-kids-so-show-some-sympathy card wayyyy too much.
Also, I read other news sources on this. Apparently, the judge let a few potential facts slip by in the process of making decisions on the case. Some people are just that computer-illiterate (I’d call them unsavvy) that they never know what’s going on inside the system or what could be served off their computer (a dirty filesharing tactic, sometimes having a user’s computer act as a mail server) until it’s too late. Granted, it’s a stretch, but known to have happened. She may not have known what was going on until it’s too late. I’m sorry, but I can’t be quick to judge her until I know a lot more facts than what they’ve given out. Investigative computer science is not normally this cut and dried. Just a gut feeling on my part… something smells rancid about the verdict.
Just my $.02
Cheers!
“There is STILL this underlying belief that women “should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” It may not be out there actually *said* in direct form, but it’s in the language that people use,”
Yep. You’re right CFS6
@CFS6- I note that whenever a woman is in the news reference is always made to their gender and how many kids they’ve had. It’s the same in Canada and it’s the same in th UK. As well as being intensely irritating it shows, as you say, the continuing bias against women (very subtle, but there) and especially the underlying message that “whatever the news, as long as you are a woman, we need to know whether you’ve reproduced. Or you’re not worthy of mention.” In 2007, in this age where women have been to the moon and back - this is where we still are. When a man is similarly wrtiten about there is hardly mention of how many kids he has had. Even if he’s got several.
@Chris - interesting point… although I find it hard to believe she didn’t know what was going on. If she really didn’t she needed a smarter lawyer :). I’m not holding my breath for more facts though… unless that includes a reversal of the fine.
@strawberry - it’s a shame because it promotes a stereotype. That all Native American people are poor.