Joel Tenenbaum’s decision to share songs has cost him a judgment of $675,000.
Tenenbaum says:
So far as I can tell, he reaches this conclusion because the jury awarded only $22,500 per song, instead of the legally-possible maximum of $150,000 per song.
I think Tenebaum’s conclusion is misplaced, and that this isn’t the mark of a trend that’s happy for the people that insist that illegal music sharing is really nothing to worry about doing. Joel’s father testified at his trial that he had warned his son about being sued for sharing music online, and Joel had told his father that the danger was imaginary.
650 thousand dollars for 30 songs. I realize that the combination of Copyright and P2P Networks is a problem, but this is ridiculous. What will they do with somebody who downloaded some hundreds of movies? Send him on to death row?
Do I get a reward if I rat him out? I mean, if I knew someone like that, who, in my paternal judgement, might benefit from a highly structured environment will his old man kills himself with hookers and blow? Theoretically.
Apparently he changed strategies mid-course and admitted to knowing that he violated the law. Since such an admission raises the cap on damages from $35,000 to $150,000, that decision seems to me to be an effort to do one of two things: shoot for jury nullification, or shoot for getting really high damages since he’s going to declare bankruptcy anyway and they decided it would be bad PR for the RIAA.
In that light, the jury’s decision to award less than the maximum could be a clever way to punish the guy without issuing a multi-million dollar award that makes the statutory remedies seem ridiculous. Maybe that’s giving too much credit to the jury, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
It’s also possible that they were lenient, but they took into account the fact that he had downloaded many many more songs than those at issue and decided to price those into their judgment.
Does anyone really still think that picking out a few people and ‘making an example of them’ will do anything other than threaten the legitimacy of the law itself? P2P is too widespread and pervasive to prosecute most, or even a significant fraction of the ‘offenders’. For now, people will continue to share, counting on the low odds of being singled out. In the long run, society will be dissatisfied with living under a capricious system which may, at any time, pick out any person for punishment in a futile effort to make the masses act against their nature and conscience.
I can only hope that the inevitable backlash is focused on the moronic laws themselves. I can easily see how suppressing sharing behaviour for too long could lead many to see capitalism as the problem.
It always gives me great joy to see these IP theives get their just desserts. I think they should amend the bankruptcy code to make these judgments non-dischargable. Don’t want to pay judgments? Stop stealing music. Otherwise, stop whining about it.
At least part of justice if based on proportionality, that the punishment is not wildly out of synch with the crime. The recording companies likely paid their lawyers more than they were actually out of pocket. You may well wish to underline the importance of intellectual property rights, using a sledge hammer to crush a bug seems hardly proportional.
I wonder what might happen if they went haring after someone who could hire a team of lawyers? But they would hardly be so foolish, now would they?
I’m a little confused, was the fine for downloading or sharing the 30 songs? In the latter case the fine seems justifiable, after all, many thousands of people could’ve downloaded the songs if he was sharing them. In the former case, a fine in the thousands of dollars is seems bizarrely over the top.
Even granting that the current IP system is just and worth vigorously defending instead of reforming, it doesn’t follow that it makes sense to randomly hold individuals liable for exorbitant amounts. $150,000 per song just seems ridiculous on its face. I’m not even sure it is constitutional, as it is surely thousands of times higher than the actual loss experienced by the company. And perhaps more importantly, it seems to be ineffective and reducing the problem.
I’ll go even further and suggest that it actually damages the antipiracy movement. The negative publicity of such huge amounts can’t be helping their cause any.
Just so! The punishment is unjust, and using the law to acheive an unjust end is reprehensible. Property rights are important, but not that damned important, not so important that we make a mockery of justice to worship.
What negative publicity? The record companies are the injured party here. The people that got sued are thieves. There is no moral ambiguity. Defendant stole music.
You realize that to get 650,000 at a buck per, each of the 30 songs only need to be downloaded by another party ~20,000 times. That may seem like a big number but it is not when the artists are Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. From doing a quick search, KaZaA lite is reporting roughly 2 million online at any given time with 60 million users. With those kind of numbers it is easy to imagine 20,000 downloads per song.
The possible economic losses to artists from file sharing are hard to calculate but there is loss.
elucidator, where exactly is the line between just and unjust. For example, a game called World of Goo reportedly has a 90% piracy rate. Is that just for the creators of the software? Link.
So I did a little digging into the law of excessive statutory damages. A recent Sixth Circui case, Zomba Enters. v. Panorama Records, Inc., 491 F.3d 574 (6th Cir. 2007), lays out the law pretty well.
The Eighth Amendment does not apply because it is a civil case between private parties. But the due process clause does apply. There is some doubt about what the standard is. The minimum standard is the one offered way back in 1919 in a case called St. Louis, I.M. v. Williams. There, the Supreme Court said that awards cannot be “so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable.” In that case, the court upheld a ratio of 113:1 between statutory and actual damages.
More recently, the Supreme Court has ruled in two cases that some punitive damages awards are excessive as part of a multi-part test: (1) the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant’s conduct; (2) the disparity between the harm or potential harm suffered by the plaintiff and the punitive damages award; and (3) the difference between this remedy and the civil penalties authorized or imposed in comparable cases. The Court expressed a preference for single-digit ratios between actual and punitive damages, but set no bright line limit. Most courts and commentators seem to think that a 100:1 ratio would be per se excessive, though.
It isn’t yet clear whether this recent framework applies to statutory damages as well. Some lower courts have suggested it does, and others have disagreed. If it does, it might create a slightly stricter test than the one from 1919.
It seems to me that some of these guys would have a pretty good argument. But I don’t know what the actual ratio is. If we take sleestak’s numbers, we still get a 15:1 ratio. Suppose an individual song is shared to 20,000 people. Even implausibly assuming that every single downloader would have purchased the song, we’re still only talking about an economic loss of well less than $10,000. A $150,000 fine would then be a 15:1 ratio, outside of the Supreme Court’s preferred ratio if the recent due process cases apply. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this issue get back to the Supremes.
But Tanenbaum is almost certainly not responsible for every download of each of the 30 songs by everyone in the P2P network during the time he was sharing them. I’m sure plenty of users had those songs shared as well.
Does anyone who was following the case know if there was any effort to quantify the amount of copies that Tanenbaum was actually responsible for producing while he was sharing songs?