This looks to be something thats flown under many news sites radars.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100430/1509599266.shtmlIn a somewhat surprising case, the Second Circuit appeals court has ruled that infringing on a full album only counts as a single infringement for the sake of statutory damages, rather than counting each song separately. In an era when juries are awarding the record labels $1.92 million for an album's worth of songs being infringed, it's nice to see a court recognize how ridiculous this is. As Eric Goldman notes in the link above, this is a situation where a company "snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." It won the lawsuit, and while the court suggested it settle, it kept demanding an award of over $1 million, by claiming each song was a separate infringement and that each infringement deserved the statutory max of $150,000 per infringement.
The court seemed to recognize the blatant greed in the copyright holder:
"Appellees also were reasonable in trying to resolve the case short of trial: Appellees made an Offer of Judgment in the amount of $3000, which Appellants rejected, in favor of continuing to demand over $1 million in damages, notwithstanding the evidence that Appellees had received less than $600 in revenues from infringing sales."
In the case above it seems the court accepted there was an accidental but not wilful copyright infringement and made what amounts to a very sensible judgement, however with the important new caveat that an album may now only count as a single infringement this case will doubtless be of some use as a precedent to any who face a copyright infringement claim.
