If you get sued for file-sharing by the record industry, you can find yourself paying $750 per file in damages (the law allows a whopping $150,000 per file!). This Texas Law Review paper by J. Cam Barker examines this practice — the wholesale price of downloadable music being in the $0.70/song range — in light of the Constitution
In this paper, I argue that there is a constitutional right to not have a highly punitive statutory damage award stacked hundreds or thousands of times over for similar, low-reprehensibility misconduct. I point to the rationale behind criminal law's single-larceny doctrine, identify the concept of wholly proportionate reprehensibility, and use this to explain why the massive aggregation of statutory damage awards can violate substantive due process.
