$675,000 Verdict in RIAA's Favor

[Cobra]

A federal jury today ordered a Boston University graduate student to pay four record labels $675,000 in damages for illegally downloading 30 songs and sharing them online, in only the second such lawsuit to go to trial.

The jury could have ordered him to pay as much as $150,000 for each of the 30 songs at issue in the lawsuit, or $4.5 million.

The Recording Industry Association of America issued a statement praising the jury's "recognition of the impact of illegal downloading on the music community. We appreciate that Mr. Tenenbaum finally acknowledged that artists and music companies deserve to be paid for their work."

Full story: www.boston.com


"We appreciate that Mr. Tenenbaum finally acknowledged that artists and music companies deserve to be paid for their work."

Care to do the math with me?

It costs 99¢ to download a song * 30 songs = $29.70, the value of the songs.

But, he also shared the files, so for a verdict of ($675,000 - $29.70) / .99....  he must have allowed the files to be downloaded over 681,780 times. That is, if we were talking about a reasonable value for each of the songs.


If he had been caught stealing a rake from his neighbor, he would have to pay the neighbor $10 for the cost of the rake, not a possible $5,000,000. It's amazing how the same rules don't apply to music and movies.

[DaBees-Knees]

It would appear that there are no judges out there that are capable of doing that calculation. It's just possible that there are factors coming in to play that we are unaware of. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on that. 

[GhostShip]

This guy plead guilty at a later period during the litigation period and thus instead of making a deal out of court (which is what you do if your pleading guilty ) he decided to waste a lot of other peoples time and money and dragged matters all the way out to a trail which was completely the wrong thing to do if your pleading guilty and are going to state that in court.

People like this just make it harder to get a fair trail for those innocent folks who face extortion from the RIAA, its not acceptable for the RIAA to drop their litigation as they have done after costing someone money and they have had to pay ppl for dragging them to court already when it was clear they had no evidence against the accused person instead resorting to harassment and legal trickery to try to defraud folks into settling with them.

If your innocent the thing to do is fight on, if your going to admit guilt then settle early as there is nothing to be gained by dragging litigation out, and for the majority of folks who are unhappy with this ludicrous state of affairs that pit unrepresented members of the public against large media corporations with teams of lawyers contact your US political representative and find out why they think its ok for commercial dvd/cd piracy (a criminal offence) to be seen as less harmful than one guy in his bedroom and why their is no cap on fines for something that is a minor civil offence.