http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100710/ap_on_hi_te/us_music_downloading

BOSTON – A federal judge on Friday drastically trimmed a $675,000 verdict against a Boston University graduate student who was found liable for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs online, saying the jury damage award against a person who gained no financial benefit from his copyright infringement is "unconstitutionally excessive."

Joel Tenenbaum, from Providence, R.I., was sued by some of the largest music companies who said he violated copyright rules. He admitted in court to downloading songs between 1999 and 2007. The jury found him liable and assessed the damage award last July.

His lawyers appealed, calling the award "severe" and "oppressive" and asking the court for a new trial or reduced damages.

Judge Nancy Gertner on Friday cut the damage award to $67,500 — three times the statutory minimum — and said the new the amount "not only adequately compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards."

Gertner also denied Tenenbaum's request for a new trial.

"There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh," Gertner said, noting that the law used by the jury to penalize Tenenbaum did not offer any meaningful guidance on the question of what amount of damages was appropriate.

"Significantly, this amount is more than I might have awarded in my independent judgment," Gertner said. "But the task of determining the appropriate damages award in this case fell to the jury, not the Court."

Gertner warned that the fact that she reduced the award does not mean that Tenenbaum's actions are condoned or that wholesale file-sharing in comparable circumstances is lawful.

Still, Tenenbaum said he was happy the court recognized that the jury award was unconstitutional and trimmed it to about $2,250 per song, but he said he also cannot afford paying the reduced damages.

"I still don't have $70,000 — and $2,000 per song still seems ridiculous in light of the fact that you can buy them for 99 cents on iTunes," Tenenbaum said. "I mean $675,000 was also absurd."

But the Recording Industry Association of America was not sympathetic, saying that the group will appeal the court ruling.

"With this decision, the court has substituted its judgment for that of 10 jurors as well as Congress," RIAA said in a statement.

"For nearly a week, a federal jury carefully considered the issues involved in this case, including the profound harm suffered by the music community precisely because of the activity that the defendant admitted engaging in," according to the RIAA statement.

Gertner also said that her decision to trim the punitive damage award is in line with previous court decisions to curb excessive jury awards that targeted businesses.

"For many years, businesses complained that punitive damages imposed by juries were out of control, were unpredictable, and imposed crippling financial costs on companies," Gertner said. "In a number of cases, the federal courts have sided with these businesses, ruling that excessive punitive damages awards violated the companies' right to due process of law."

"These decisions have underscored the fact that the constitution protects not only criminal defendants from the imposition of 'cruel and unusual punishments,' but also civil defendants facing arbitrarily high punitive awards," Gertner said.

Gertner's decision comes more than five months after a federal judge in Minneapolis also drastically reduced a nearly $2 million verdict against a woman found liable last year of sharing 24 songs over the Internet, calling the jury's penalty "monstrous and shocking."

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis also reduced the $1.92 million penalty a jury imposed against Jammie Thomas-Rasset to $2,250 per song, or about $54,000.

Seriously it makes me

technology makes it complicated

before you could buy a cd, but it was kind of a limited number of times someone else could copy it ,, now one purchase can be shared by a world of people for free,, which does cost the industry,,,,,

Its time to let the major players in the recording industry simply die. We don't need them anymore - the internet has given us low cost channels for distributing music, low cost means of promoting bands, and sites that leverage social networking, opinion polling, and listening habits as selection mechanisms to screen the huge numbers of independent bands for talented artists creating excellent music.

The RIAA has outlived their usefulness, now they are kicking and screaming and doing whatever they can to continue their outdated business model. In the process, they are using their massive wealth not to adapt and innovate to changing technology and changing social dynamics - instead they've done what ever huge corporate entity (or collection of corporate entities) does: they've lobbied for favorable and anti-social laws, like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act


I am not a fan of violating copyright, as I usually prefer to follow the law while advocating changing the law...but under the circumstances, I really can't muster much criticism to those who do violate copyright. I just hope you also vote for saner copyright laws.

its not just the industry, its the talent that suffers a hit as well,,, I do think they deserve to get paid for what they have produced,,,

That is why we need to let the RIAA simply die - they are raping the artists. We can shift both the power balance and the cash flow to benefit both the consumer and the artist.

As far as copyright violation and copyright extension goes - I personally think that 20 or 30 years is long enough for an artists to benefit from their work. I think most people would go for 'the lifetime of the artist, or 70 years for corporations' - but this business of having lobbyists continuously extend copyright is going way overboard.

I think artists should benefit as long as others do. That is to say, I think they should be permitted to work the same LIFETIME that others do and they should be compensated as long as they are working.

i doubt this is real. It's only illegal to share the songs, not download them. The Person that provided the song would have only been charged unless the law just changed in the last month.

Is everything not true or a lie with you? This is in fact true, this has happened to several people over the past few years.

maybe you better look at the laws again...ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS

I disagree partly.

I believe if the artist extends the copyrights to the day they die or beyond if possible they should have the right to do so. They created it. They should be able to give their family those rights also.

if it's just a job to them, and they are mad because they cant make 30 instead of 10 million, let them go work at denny's or something... i personally would rather listen to something that comes from the heart, not just thrown out there to make a buck. if people really liked what they did, they will make the money... this the same reason i quit listening to metallica... greedy Ba@#!$%^.

Thats fine, but where do you draw the line? Should we have to pay royalties to the descendants of Shakespeare? Should we change copyright laws such that the Penguin Classics publisher is run out of business? Should destroy Project Gutenberg and Librivox?

And most important of all: whose opinion is really the basis for these decisions in practice? If I lived in a world where the majority of everyday people actually believed we should just change the law to hand over more power and wealth to Disney corporation, that would be different. I don't believe this to be the case. These laws may be a consequence of public apathy, but beyond that they don't reflect public opinion. This is a matter of corporate lobbying changing the law to the detriment of the public.

This is an excellent point. If 30 or 40 years of royalties is not enough to motivate you to make music, you are doing it for the wrong reasons and I'd rather you get shunted to the side so I can listen to real musicians, who do it primarily for the love of making music. This is not to say that real musicians should be opposed to making money - only that most real musicians would simply be overjoyed to simply make a livable income doing something they love.

Imagine how great it would be if the many billions that have gone to RIAA investors and upper management had instead gone directly to artists.

yes Shakespeare's descendent should be benefiting from his work.
Absolutely.
If it is detrimental to the public, I don't see it.
I would want my childrens children etc... to benefit from anything I wrote and made money off of. I have the rights to my work that I was paid for. The magazine had the rights to my work for one year. Then it came back to me. I can republish it when I get ready. I have total rights to it. I wouldn't want it any other way.

I feel as long as the artist is living, they should have a right to compensation for there work. Once an artist has passed they should be able to 'pass on' those lifetime earnings in an inheritance like anyone else and IF their work continues to be produced (which costs money), marketed (Which costs money) and sold,, their families should get some part of the profit from their work and not JUST those who are selling it.

Oh my! At least you are consistent. 400 years is enough time for 20 generations, and its not impossible that he (or his sister) had well over a million descendants. Imagine the amount of money and time we would have collectively wasted on lawsuits over those 400 years.

How about the apostles? People made a bible out of their writings, which I hear (?) is the most published book in the history of humanity. Their descendants probably number in the billions. Its time for a class action lawsuit!

Indefinite copyright leads to absurdity.



Your children can benefit from the money you make, if you spend it wisely and invest it wisely. (Investing in their education, for example).

But thats not enough - you want your children to be directly paid for something you did, after you die? Without doing anything themselves? This is suggestive to me of an attitude of entitlement.




You have these rights by law. There are people out there who will think they have these rights by something other than law - like moral entitlement.

I think this is a very reasonable compromise amongst opposing beliefs and their consequences.

everyone should get paid for what they do, thats not even an issue... but their children, and their grand children? i don't think they should, because they need to make their own mark in the world, just like the rest of us that wasn't blessed with a beautiful voice has to.

So give them independent channels (internet) to do so. Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) dropped his record contract years ago, Radiohead did the same. Record companies are just raping the artist, and giving them pennies for their work.

I say we do away with the entire business model and put it into the hands of the musician, then we can do away with two birds by throwing only one stone. Terrible pop artists that cannot be independent for the life of them would perish, and solid musicians with above-par skills and management would flourish.

Death to pop.