As you might have guessed, I don't have much sympathy for this woman:
The U.S. Supreme Court appears interested in deciding whether a San Antonio woman intentionally infringed on music copyrights when she downloaded songs from the Internet when she was 16.
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(Whitney) Harper, who was on the cheerleading squad at Alamo Heights High School, said in an interview and in court documents that she believed that the music she accessed on the file-sharing sites, which made it available to other users, was like listening to free music on the radio because it carried no copyright warnings.Copyright warnings or no, I find this quite difficult to believe, with the issue in the news and the public's consciousness the way it was back then. I suppose there might be people out there who didn't know, but pretty much everyone I talked with about this knew the mechanics of file-sharing software like Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, et al. They knew exactly how it worked. And Ms. Harper was younger, yes, but with the ubiquity of technology even in 2004 I don't believe for a second that she didn't have a clue as to exactly how file-sharing worked. Hell, it's pretty much explained right there in the name. At least she has to pay even if she manages to hoodwink the court into believing that she didn't know what she was doing. So at least there's that.
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