Downloading student must pay $675K for 30 songs to 4 record labels.
A jury has decided that 25-year-old Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum must pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and sharing 30 digital music files. He admitted to having downloaded hundreds of songs, but the labels and the court nailed him for 30 specific tracks he dowloaded via Kazaa.
This past June, a federal jury in Minneapolis ordered Jamie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year old Native American mother of four, to pay $1.92 million for copyright violations involving 24 downloaded songs.
Snip from New York Times item:
[He] testified Thursday in federal district court in Boston that he had downloaded and shared hundreds of songs by artists including Nirvana, Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins, and said he had lied in pretrial depositions when he said friends or siblings may have downloaded the songs to his computer. (...) Under federal law they were entitled to $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, but the jury was permitted to raise that to as much as $150,000 a track if it found the infringements were willful.There's a support website for Mr. Tennenbaum here: joelfightsback.com.
AmLaw Litigation Daily, a legal trade publication, had an interesting piece up about the arguments in this case around fair use -- and about some of the courtroom drama, including defense attorney Charles Nesson posting an internet video of his wife calling one of the members of the defense team a "schmuck." Snip:
On Monday, with jury selection about to begin, the judge knocked out one of Nesson's key legal theories, granting partial summary judgement to the five record companies suing Tenebaum on the question of Tenenbaum's fair use of the copyrighted songs. Though the judge said she will issue a full opinion later, her minute order is pretty stinging: "Tenebaum proposes a fair use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created," she wrote.Fair Use Defense Gets KO'd at Boston Illegal Music Downloading Trial (law.com, thanks Rob Rader)
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he admitted to lying in his depo? game over.
Wait, is he in trouble for downloading or for uploading?
they must go pretty far to find a jury full of luddites for these cases. and sadists.
Let's turn this thing on its head: what would your gut reaction be if a Sony Music exec uploaded 30 songs of a promising-but-as-yet-unsigned recording artist without her permission, then lied in court and said it might have been his brother who'd done it?
It's sad that Mr. Tennenbaum's little band of supporters think they've actually accomplished something here. Mabye when the kid gets rejected for a mortgage in 5 years or so he'll realize he was a just a prop in Attorney Nesson's screwball legal theater.
Lol, yeah Slizzered, because that's pretty much exactly what happened, right? Because there's pretty much no difference between some guy and Sony, right? I mean, they would both have exactly the same ability to make money off of the music, and the same distribution systems, right? They'd have exactly the same motive too. Yeah, if all that's true, then you sure do have a good point.
If you've got to declare bankruptcy it's better to do so at the beginning of your career than later down the road when you have more to lose.
Is this whole thing part of some strategy to make up for the shortfall in CD sales? It's an interesting business model if so, but I suspect that it's not sustainable in the long term.
I wonder how many five- and six-figure judgments the record industry has to win before they make up the claimed loss of revenue due to downloading.
Hmm. Why did the author of the summary point out that Jamie [sic] was Native American? Was she living on a reservation when she was alleged to have downloaded RIAA tracks, perhaps implicating some esoteric jurisdictional defense? Is "Native American" supposed to further indicate an assumed economic inequity in the amount of the judgment, the way "32-year-old mother of four" does? Not concern-trolling, but sincerely curious about this choice of descriptors.
I really don't see how this is good business practice? Sue your fans? Use fear tactics to force music sales? They should just admit there business model is dead and soon their industry.
In case anyone thinks this is about paying the artists (#4), I cannot recommend enough the breakdown by Steve Albini, producer of Nirvana's In Utero, of how much a band makes when their record takes over $3m:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Lol, Nosehat, let's get all cute and snarky without actually bothering to comprehend what we've read. Like, yeah, being a record exec is totally the same thing as being a record company, with all of the attendant perks.
They don't actually get payouts from this - nobody can pay the stupid fines. It's the "send us your kid's college fund now and avoid a legal battle" end that shows a profit.
Here's a problem many copyfighters seem unaware of: record companies and other copyright holders are more able to choose battles they're likely to win than are the bloggers who hope to influence public opinion by stirring up outrage. 675K is an utterly outrageous sum of money to expect a 25 year old student to pay off. But my sense of outrage is tempered by the fact that the kid is a lying dumbass. Still, there are only so many high profile cases out there for copyfighters to latch onto, thus we find ourselves asked to get involved on behalf of a perjurer. Sorry, but I like to imagine I'm better at picking my battles than all that.
Slizzered, oh well if it was just the record company exec who uploaded my stuff because he personally liked it, I'd be delighted. I suspect I wouldn't remain unsigned very much longer. :P
"Wait, is he in trouble for downloading or for uploading?"
I believe it was for uploading. Reporters (not just here, I mean generally) don't seem to know the difference between downloading or uploading.
I know these large judgements are intended as a deterrent to others who do the same, but don't they seem overboard?
$675,000 for 30 songs? Did he share each one over 20,000 times?
Stealing is stealing.
I'm not saying that the record companies' old model was any good, but the kid knew what he was doing and figured that he wouldn't get caught.
Is there a legal protection against cruel and unusual punishment in the U.S.?
In Canada, if a court sentenced a person to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for making mp3s available on Kazaa, the defense attorney would be having a field day getting the sentence struck down as unconstitutional. A lot of people who commit objectively more serious crimes get away with a lot less than that.
Stealing is stealing, and the record company executives should be nailed to crosses for what they are doing. $675,000 for inflicting nebulous and hypothetical damages by sharing maybe $15 worth of songs. What possible justice can exist in a system that allows this kind of legal travesty?
Regarding #4, that would be doing the musician an enormous favor.
Saw him interviewed on CNN - he has excellent poise for this kind of thing. Came across very solid.
Does anyone have the list of songs he was prosecuted for? I will happily boycott and badmouth those bands forever.
Maybe this is easy for me to say in my current position, but I would never pay up if I was caught in a similar case. I would sooner face whatever indignities I would experience in jail.
What's funny is the labels aren't getting any money out of this court action. $675,000 off of a 25 year old college student? He just declares bankruptcy, they get nothing, and the lawyers make off with their money. The only ones suffering are the record labels themselves.
Will this deter anyone from sharing music? Let's watch!
I think this whole thing is just a bunch of lawyers talking the record labels into "You just HAVE to defend yourself! You HAVE to take people to court". Of course the lawyers think that.
"Stealing is stealing" might look like a logical argument, but the meaning behind it is sorely lacking. Should we allow ourselves to believe that music files can be stolen? Copying information from an already public source and allowing others to copy it hardly sounds like stealing to me, especially since no one lost anything. The record companies still have exactly what they started with: a bunch of plastic discs and the right to sell them. It's not like the kid broke into the recording studio and took the master tapes. We should be careful with the semantics and the meanings here.
Nosehat, let me get this straight: You would sign a contract with a company that has an outdated business model and that bankrupts anyone who makes their product freely available to the public? What incentive would they have to sign you if nobody is obligated to pay for your music? Why should they spend money to promote an artist if there's no profit in it?
"Stealing is stealing.
I'm not saying that the record companies' old model was any good, but the kid knew what he was doing and figured that he wouldn't get caught."
Proportions, people ! Where is reason ? ...
In your argument, one could easily put someone on the electric chair for stealing an apple.
As they said in ancient Rome, dura lex, sed lex (the law is harsh, but it is the law).
I think that observing cases such as these from the safety of the sidelines pits us against each other.
It seems we're being forced to choose sides between whether we pay for the right to the music we listen to (i.e. buying CDs, having a Rhapsody account, or donating money directly to the artists) or whether we don't (downloading mp3s with no intent of compensating any artist or group for it).
How you see people and their individual circumstance really depends on which side of the fence you're on.
What I wonder is how do they even decide to go after somebody who downloaded/uploaded 30 songs. Surely that level of activity isn't that noticeable in the wide sea of the internet. Do they just throw a dart at pages of the phone book, assume that person probably downloading something, and then just go for it?
has anyone rich ever been successfully sued?
I want to know what the songs were, does anyone have the list of songs?
"Stealing is stealing"
Correct. -And he should make out the check or money order, for $30.00 + $3,000.00 as a Reasonable penalty, to the proper parties.
#30: Just because it is the law, doesn't mean we don't have the right to disagree with it, or promote the change that may eventually overturn it. many unfair and unreasonable laws have been changed by those who broken them.
Also, I thought that the way they catch people, it was nearly impossible to pin it on a single person, unless they admitted to it? Am I right in the idea that they put these songs out as bait on P2P networks, track the IP address of the people who unwittingly download the bait songs, and attach it to a computer/account holder with the help of the offender's ISP. And since when did IP address = conclusively a single person? If it was at his university then his university snitched on him after the uni received warning from the copyright holder, in all likelihood. Or am I off base in this idea?
here are the songs:
http://joelfightsback.com/2009/08/the-30-songs/
Digital music = code
Code can and will be cracked by those able and willing to to do so
Ergo
Musicians: Develop a new business model, work for and with your fan base, and avoid labels altogether.
Agreed with #36, it always confuses me how they 'prove' that these songs were downloaded. Surely an IP address simply isn't enough evidence to convict someone in a court of law? And where do they get the information about the IP addresses? Don't institutions need a warrant to spy on my digital activity? it all smells like tainted fruit to me.
Nonsense, IPs are a perfect tracking tool. I for instance, live in Palm Springs, California. My IP tracks to Brampton, Ontario, Canada. Really. What's a little 2,500 mile mistake?
#29 - ACB - If you had a four year old kid who walked out of a store chewing a piece of bubble gum that wasn't paid for, and the store owner had him decapitated, would you still make the same comment?
These cases, I strongly suspect, are intended to 'make an example' of someone pirating music. All they really do is prove that you can get away with basically anything in a courtroom in the United States as long as you have the corporate funding to back you up.