Joel Tenenbaum RIAA Damages Increased Back To $675,000

[admin]

The world's second most famous music pirate, Joel Tenenbaum, has faced a minor setback this week after the appellate court rejected Judge Nancy Gertner's earlier ruling which reduced the amount of damages Tenenbaum owes to $67,500. But it's not all bad news for the Boston University student.

The RIAA has appealed Judge Gertner's assertions that the original jury awarded damages amount of $675,000 was "unconstitutional". And while it appears the RIAA were successful, the ruling of the First Circuit Court of Appeals suggests that the appeal success was more of a technical victory, than a legal one.

The appeals court felt that Judge Gertner should not have brought up the Constitutional question before using the more appropriate remittitur order. Remittitur would still allow the judge to lower the damages amount, give the RIAA the option to accept the amount, or reject it and seek a new trial, at which time, it would have then been more appropriate to bring up the constitutional issues.

What this means now though is that both parties will have to go back to court and let everything play out, just like Thomas-Rasset case, in which remittitur was also used, rejected, and the constitutional issue was brought up (which has since been appealed again by the RIAA).

But once this case gets to the stage where the constitutional issues are in play, it does look good that any RIAA appeal would at time be rejected based on statements the appeals court have made in relation to this current appeal. The appeals court stated they also felt that the penalties being handed out was harsh. "We comment that this case raises concerns about application of the Copyright Act which Congress may wish to examine," wrote the judges in their summary.

[drfsupercenter]

What I don't get is - how can they say what's Constitutional and what's not when the Constitution was written in the 1700s and copyrights hadn't even been established? Even the very first forms of copyright (which I actually agree with, unlike today's meaning of the word) was to prevent plagiarism, it wouldn't have mentioned anything about downloading music or copying CDs/DVDs and the like.

So how can they talk about what a fair punishment would be, at least by using the Constitution as a reference, if such a clause doesn't exist?

That being said, I'd like to think that anything over about $10 a song in damages would be considered "cruel and unusual punishment"
(Honestly, what I think is fair, is that if someone's caught pirating music, they should have to just pay what that music would have cost legally, i.e. $1 or so a song... $10 or so a movie, etc, not THOUSANDS of dollars per song/movie)

[admin]

The judge actually was the one referring to constitutional issues, in that she felt the damages amount originally rewarded was too large and interferes with due process.

Basically, large damages could scare people into settling, as opposed to getting their day in court, and that's not good from a due process point of view, which then becomes a constitutional issue.

The whole US Copyright Group mass copyright lawsuit scheme would not work without the insanely high copyright statutory and punitive damages, both of which were originally designed for commercial copyright infringement, not individual copyright infringement (pirating a 99 cent song => $150,000? But if I sold the same song online illegally and committed commercial infringement, then $150,000 may very well be a valid amount in terms of statutory damages), and possibly the two precedents the RIAA is trying to set with its two high profile defendants (Tenenbaum and Thomas-Rasset).