A jury has decided that 25-year-old Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum must pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and sharing 30 digital music files. He admitted to having downloaded hundreds of songs, but the labels and the court nailed him for 30 specific tracks he dowloaded via Kazaa.
This past June, a federal jury in Minneapolis ordered Jamie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year old Native American mother of four, to pay $1.92 million for copyright violations involving 24 downloaded songs.
Snip from New York Times item:
[He] testified Thursday in federal district court in Boston that he had downloaded and shared hundreds of songs by artists including Nirvana, Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins, and said he had lied in pretrial depositions when he said friends or siblings may have downloaded the songs to his computer. (…) Under federal law they were entitled to $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, but the jury was permitted to raise that to as much as $150,000 a track if it found the infringements were willful.
There's a support website for Mr. Tennenbaum here: joelfightsback.com.
AmLaw Litigation Daily, a legal trade publication, had an interesting piece up about the arguments in this case around fair use — and about some of the courtroom drama, including defense attorney Charles Nesson posting an internet video of his wife calling one of the members of the defense team a "schmuck." Snip:
On Monday, with jury selection about to begin, the judge knocked out one of Nesson's key legal theories, granting partial summary judgement to the five record companies suing Tenebaum on the question of Tenenbaum's fair use of the copyrighted songs. Though the judge said she will issue a full opinion later, her minute order is pretty stinging: "Tenebaum proposes a fair use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created," she wrote.
Fair Use Defense Gets KO'd at Boston Illegal Music Downloading Trial (law.com, thanks Rob Rader)
