In the continuing saga of discontinuing its strategy of suing individuals for file-sharing, the music industry has just scored one of its biggest awards ever. On June 18, 2009, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was convicted of sharing 24 copyrighted songs. Federal law allows the recording industry to recover $750 to $30,000 per infringement, but in this case the jury decided to raise that figure $80,000 per song because they found the infringement “willful.” That comes to a whopping $1.92 million for the music industry. As Ken Port, a lawyer who has been following the case, told the Washington Post, “They now have a verdict they can use in other cases around America. The prices that they will charge for settling is going to go up.” Thomas-Rasset was originally convicted of copyright violation in a 2007 trial and was ordered to pay $222,000. She was granted a retrial, in part because the presiding judge was convinced that the fine was excessive. The new judgment is more than eight times the original sum. Kiwi Camara, one of Thomas-Rasset’s attorneys, said: “There really is a problem with the statute, because she’s been fined $1.9 million for stealing 24 songs that went for about $1.99 on iTunes,” slightly overstating the cost of songs on the site. “There’s no way that can be the correct result.” But for now, it is. Stay tuned.

Tags: copyright, downloading, filesharing, P2P, peer-to-peer, piracy
Categories: Issues

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 9:35 am and is filed under Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.