GrindEFX

On Friday, a jury handed Joel Tenenbaum a verdict of $675,000 for illegally downloading 30 songs. This marks the second time in as many months that a jury has ruled in favor of the RIAA.

The verdict – $22,500 per song – is neither surprising nor as large as the one in last month’s trial against Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Ben Sheffner of Copyrights and Campaigns has a detailed post-verdict writeup. Among the highlights:

· Tenenbaum is planning an appeal of the verdict, and possibly declaring bankruptcy if he loses that appeal.

· While the RIAA has stopped filing lawsuits against new filesharers, it is continuing to move forward on currently filed lawsuits. In all, there are over 100 pending lawsuits, with about a dozen actively in litigation.

It remains to be seen how many of those pending lawsuits actually make it to trial. Of the 18 – 35 thousand downloaders the RIAA has sued, this is only the second case to reach a verdict. It also remains to be seen whether the RIAA’s strategy as a whole has resulted in a reducing the growth of P2P filesharing, or deterring internet users from engaging in the same behavior as Tenenbaum.

Rumor has it that Tenenbaum’s attorney, Charles Nesson, is planning on joining forces with Thomas-Rasset’s attorney Kiwi Camara in a class-action suit against the RIAA for its filesharing litigation strategy. The federal judge in Tenenbaum’s trial has announced that she is planning on a post-trial proceeding to determine whether the amount of damages awarded is constitutional.

Volokh Conspiracy’s David Post points out some interesting math in the amount of damages the jury chose to award the RIAA. The minimum statutory damages available for willful copyright infringement is $750. If you multiply that amount by the number of songs at issue in this trial (30), you come up with $22,500 – the amount the jury awarded for each song. He wonders if the jury meant to award the minimum amount but inadvertently awarded what would have been the total in that situation for each song. $22,500 is a rather arbitrary amount, considering the range of damages available is from $750 to $150,000 per work. The amount awarded per song in the Thomas-Rasset case – $80,000 – at least makes some sense, since it is roughly half the maximum award.

Putting a positive spin on things, Pete Cashmore at Mashable notes that, compared to $22,500 for an illegal download, iTune’s 99 cents for a legal mp3 is a damn good bargain.

In other news, a major record label embraced an infringement of one of its copyrights rather than go down the punitive route and made a ton of money.

I leave the question of which approach the music industry should take in the future to you. The latter approach – admit that digital media and internet architecture make it impossible to exert control over ones copyrights and find other ways to monetize content? Or the former approach, illustrated by the Tenenbaum lawsuit?

Image courtesy of Ilken