International Law

Michael Carrier: Innovation for the 21st Century: Copyright Damages

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

Michael A. Carrier sent me a copy of his book “Innovation for the 21st Century” for a book review. See also this “Blog Symposium” on the book at the “Truth on the Market” blog.

Second in line (see here for discussion of the first recommendation) is the proposal to limit statutory damages to cases of direct infringement on pages 160 and 161.That is also a good idea. American copyright law is seriously out of balance. As I remarked in an earlier post in 2003, American law on copyright damages is so fundamentally flawed that any action based on them is contrary to basic values of the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), leading to a highly exceptional total refusal of any cooperation under the Convention on the service abroad of judicial and extrajudicial documents in civil or commercial matters.

That blog post was in reaction to Lawrence Lessig’s criticism of high copyright damages. It was also in reaction to this decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court of July 25th, 2003.

That decision granted a motion of Bertelsmann and prohibited the service of an American  lawsuit where greedy American plaintiffs wanted $17 billion from Bertelsmann for their involvement in Napster. That’s multiple the annual turnover of the whole industry.

The German Federal Constitutional Court prohibited even the service of this action, since it was obviously an abuse of the court system.

I think that American copyright damages law is in urgent need of reform. Any recommendation to contain the madness is welcome.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on September 20, 2009 (boomark / email).