In Whitney’s Words

Guest post by Whitney Harper

Buried in a document full of rejections, last week the Supreme Court denied to hear my case.  I am a defendant in one of the tens of thousands of cases against peer-to-peer file-sharers.  The music industry has pursued a litigation campaign in an attempt to hold a selection of individuals responsible for a normalized technology that has allowed us to do what our parents always did — share music.

When this happened, I was a 14-year-old girl entering high school with nothing on my mind except the nervousness of being a freshman in a big high school. My friends would come over, and we would play on my parent’s computer, or I would work on papers and homework while listening to music — the same music I am now being punished for. I had no idea I was “distributing” the music we were listening to while playing SNOOD and talking on AIM. When I downloaded KAZAA on to the computer (all my friends had it too), it never asked me if I wanted to file share or distribute music; that was just a default setting. The site bore no copyright notice and claimed to be, printed in BOLD lettering, 100% FREE and 100% LEGAL.  Maybe I did not know any better.  Maybe I should have known better.  But when you’re 14 years old, these things don’t occur to you.

I guess the saying is true- nothing is free. I thought by listening to their music I was supporting the artists and their songs. I was enjoying listening and dancing to them as were my friends. After all isn’t that what music is for? How was I supposed to know that I was doing something illegal when I was never informed that I was doing it at all? What is often forgotten by people is this occurred when the downloading of music and file sharing was just beginning. Our parents were not tech literate enough to help guide us on the rapidly developing internet, and as a 14-year old, I just didn’t know enough to even ask.  I thought that maybe internet music was free on the internet the way mail, which we once paid for with postage, was also now free on the internet. Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA, said himself most people didn’t know what they were doing was wrong or illegal.

But what this judgment by the Supreme Court effectively says is that I, as a young teenager, was expected to just magically know that using some popular program that all my friends used was illegal, even though the majority of the world was also clueless.  Specifically, while two courts have already disagreed as to whether or not I can use the “innocent infringer” defense — a defense that significantly lowers my financial punishment for my wrongs — the Supreme Court continues to close its ears to one of the most controversial issues of our generation.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m okay with the music industry asserting their rights in their intellectual property.  But I’m not clear what they win by bankrupting a now 20-something year old who was 14 at the time.  Turns out, they are completely ruining my life in order to teach others a lesson.  What seems more practical would have been to take the approach they took with Napster on all of the file-sharing sites.

The most frustrating part about all of this is I have been completely honest about what happened. I had multiple people tell me I could get out of the situation by lying and denying, but I wasn’t raised to live my life that way. I admitted to downloading the music and listening to it, and I allowed them to look through my computer and iPod for evidence of the songs I had “file shared.”  Turns out that maybe honesty isn’t the best policy after all.

The bottom line is the copyright law needs to be rewritten. The original law dates back to 1978, and the most updated version is still over a decade old … Well hello, it is now almost 2011, and guess what? A little thing called technology has taken over, and the law has not kept up with what we now call the “Digital Age.” The only way to fix this problem is to rewrite the law. I pray that one day there will be justice reached on this issue because the RIAA has completely abused the copyright law and the American justice system. Needless to say, I am highly discouraged and disappointed in our legal system.  What upsets me most about this is there are millions of people illegally downloading music and file sharing every day, and they are punishing me for something I unknowingly participated in as a child.

Justice Alito was correct in his dissent and I praise him for that. Alito said he hopes to have another opportunity in a different case to give the matter further review.  That will be too late for me.  This case has been devastating for me and my family. I know what I did was wrong, and I have accepted that and even said I would pay for the songs that I downloaded. But it is simply unconstitutional to make ANYONE pay such an excessive amount of money for listening to a few songs. Today, I am now 23 and a fresh new graduate from college.  In addition to the loans that the majority of my generation takes in order to attend college, I have a $30,000 judgment against me that will give me severe financial troubles. This may force me to file for bankruptcy, a status that will ruin my young adult life.

While juvenile criminals get a fresh start when they grow up, I’m still being dragged through the legal mud and will have to carry the burden of something I did when I was a kid.