Intellectual Property Law

Jury Dings File Sharer $675,000, RIAA Prevails ?Update

By David Kravets

A federal jury on Friday concluded that a 25-year-old college student must pay $675,000 — or $22,500 for each of the 30 songs he was found liable of infringing, Ben Sheffner reports from the courthouse.

After a week-long trial and nearly three hours of deliberations, the Massachusetts  jury concluded that Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, should pay those damages to the Recording Industry Association of America for infringing its copyrights on Kazaa.

He was the nation’s second RIAA file sharing defendant to go before a jury. In the only other case that reached a verdict, a Minnesota woman was ordered to pay $1.92 million for infringing 24 songs on the file sharing network Kazaa. The judge in that case is weighing whether the verdict was unconstitutionally excessive.

The RIAA has issued about 30,000 lawsuits during its nearly 6-year-old litigation campaign against file sharers. Most have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The record labels have said they are ending the campaign, and are now lobbying ISPs in a bid to disconnect repeat music file sharers

Under the Copyright Act, Tenenbaum faced as much as $150,000 in damages per track.

He testified Thursday and admitted he downloaded and shared music online. He said he was “not surprised” by the verdict. If it stands, he said, “I will be filing for bankruptcy.”

In a telephone interview, he said the RIAA originally requested to settle the case in 2005 for $3,000.

“I think a lot of people have this idea, and me in particular, that the RIAA should not intimidate people into huge settlements,” he said.

He added that he would challenge U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner’s decision, on the eve of trial, to prohibit a so-called fair-use defense. That would have allowed him to lobby the jury that the Copyright Act permitted the sharing and downloading of copyrighted songs online without the labels’ permission.

“We’re not going to let a $675,000 verdict sit without fighting,” Tenenbaum said.

The defendant’s lawyer was Charles Nesson, the Berkman Center For Internet & Society founder who was accused of pretrial shenanigans, including secretly recording court proceedings.

The RIAA apparently is a bigger adversary than the U.S. government. Nesson, in 1971, convinced a federal judge to dismiss espionage charges against Daniel Ellsberg, a former Rand Corporation official who leaked 7,000 pages of classified Vietnam War data to The New York Times.

See Also:

• RIAA Seeks Web Removal of ‘Illegal’ Court Recordings
• Court Bars RIAA Trial Webcast
• RIAA File Sharing Trial Begins ? Update
• Judge Mulls Sanctions Against Berkman Center Founder
• Berkman Center Founder Denies Pretrial Shenanigans
• RIAA Seeks Up to $150000 a Song in File Sharing Trial

Full post as published by Threat Level on July 31, 2009 (boomark / email).