Judge Slashes Judgment in Illegal Music Downloading Case
July 14, 2010 | Media
Many of you out there download your favorite music through illegal file sharing. No big deal, right? Aside from music labels and artists complaining about the loss of revenue resulting from file sharing, we rarely think of illegal downloading as a punishable crime. Enter Joel Tenenbaum, the grad student who was found guilty in 2009 of downloading 30 (yes, that’s right, 30!) songs and who was fined over a half a million dollars for doing it. Sounds hard to believe, right? Luckily for Tenenbaum, last week, a federal judge found it hard to believe too, throwing out the judgment for being too severe.
Under the Digital Theft Deterrence Act of 1999, people are subject to huge statutory damages for violating copyright law through illegal file sharing. As reported by Boston.com, a US District Court Judge ruled that the letter of the law was stretched too thin when the jury imposed a fine of $675,000 under the Act. Holding this penalty as “unconstitutionally excessive,” the judge reduced the fine to $67,500. Now, the Recording Industry Association of America will likely contest this decision for “substituting [the] judgment of 10 jurors as well as Congress.”
Whether the reduction is contested or not, Tenenbaum says he is unable to afford even the reduced penalty. Regardless of the outcome in this particular case, Congress may want to reconsider the language of the statute that can put a young graduate student into deep debt simply for downloading an album worth of songs.
If you want to download music but avoid breaking the law, check out audimated.com.
Comments (4)
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The RIAA also said it was no longer going to go after individual consumers.
Very true. New focus is being placed on college institutions that fail to monitor P2P file sharing on campus. Colleges obviously are a much deeper pocket and easier to go after.
from a lay perspective all of this seems wacko, except that musicians are entitled to royalties from their work. when perusing, for example, ibook, there are countless online books for free, and of course, many for sale – wonder if there is a lesson to be learned from the book publishing industry about how to make this transition to cyber age. eg. if not is offered for free – people will eagerly find ways to steal it, and perhaps conversely. regardless, this young graduate student should be fined for the price of the stolen property — i recall keeping a school library book for 4 years and finally felt guilty enough to own up — aside from some painful glances sent me by the witchy librarian, i had to pay on for the cost of the book at the time it was published. —- and she took the book back from me!