Joel Tenenbaum has lost his trial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $22,500 for each of the 30 songs he shared via Kazaa. Tenenbaum, who pleaded guilty to downloading and sharing files earlier this week, will be left paying off the $675,000 to the music labels for the rest of his life.
Tenenbaum, a graduate student from Boston admitted to downloading and sharing 30 songs in 2004, faced a fine up to $4.5 million – $150,000 per infringement. After a week long trial the jury eventually decided to award the RIAA $22,500 per song based on “willful infringement” mounting up to a total fine of $675,000 for Tenenbaum.
From the start it was clear that the only thing that the jury had to decide on would be the the size of the fine. The fair use defense was thrown out a few hours before the trial started, which shut down the only escape route left.
Tenenbaum’s defense team, headed by Harvard Professor Charles Nesson and his law students, were left powerless. “Undoubtedly, we were a creative and nontraditional legal team. But going into trial, we were stripped of all our attempts to mitigate Joel’s liability, so today’s outcome has been in the cards all week,” student Debbie Rosenbaum wrote.
This is the second win in little over a month for the RIAA. In June, Jammie Thomas-Rasset lost her retrial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $1.92 million for the 24 songs she shared via Kazaa.
In total, the RIAA has spent over a million dollars on this case alone, to set an example to the millions of people who share files every day. Time will tell whether or not the verdict will have any impact at all, aside from ruining a student’s life and alienating a few million music fans.
Source: http://digg.com/d3zGat
30 songs? That’s all he had shared via the P2P network? That’s a little insane to have to pay $675,000 for 30 songs. The RIAA needs to chill out, seriously. They ruined a students life just so a musician, who most likely was well off to begin with (honestly how many non-famous artists are there on P2P networks) can make some more money. Maybe if the music that I purchase legally didn’t have so much DRM on it, maybe I wouldn’t have to resort to using illegal means to get the song so I can use it the way in which I wanted to use it when I purchased the song. I am not a fan in throwing away my money, so when I purchase a song to be in the background of a drum cover video, it better not have strict DRM on it. If I can’t import it to Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas, there is something wrong with that picture. However the same mp3 file that I got for free, I can do whatever I want with. It will import just fine into any program. That’s why I just don’t understand why they think it’s absurd when people don’t buy music, because why I buy music I am treated like a thief. However when you actually steal the music, you get an mp3 file that you can do anything with, import it to make a movie, burn it to a CD to listen to in your car, it will work on any mp3 player on the market and so on.
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The RIAA doesn’t do these things for the musicians at all. Do you know how small of a cut muscians make on actual record sales? They get most of their money from touring, or after they’ve established their name they leave their record label once their contract is up and promote themselves. They end up doing just fine financially and make more money off of CD sales.
No. The RIAA does it solely for themselves. For the sake of making examples of incredibly minor infractions, they’ve ruined someone’s life FOREVER. What an incredibly maliciously cruel methodology they’ve developed. If I were a musician whose songs were shared over Kazaa by a college student and the RIAA did this to them I would be outraged that somehow my music has inadvertently led to a lifelong debt for someone who is just trying to get on their feet and live the American dream. You only get one life… just imagine having to spend all of it paying back a completely unjustifiable debt. Sharing music may technically be illegal, but I consider the RIAA, namely those who initiated this horrible “anti music-sharing” jihad on the common people, the true criminals.
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No matter how many times these cases get to a jury and they rule against a p2p’r, (3 and counting) you will likely never acknowledge what’s really the issue here. P.S. I’m not the RIAA or a defender.
He violated copyright law, it’s in the constitution, look it up. The damages are set by federal statute, not the RIAA. They never once mentioned a $ amount to the jury, the judge told them the guidelines and two juries in Minnesota and now one in Boston took it from there based on the facts of the case and the law. JT was a horrible defendant and his legal team was a joke.
He could have settled for a few bucks a song but he suffered from the same magical thinking as you; that somehow this is about a brave new digital world wherein people share whatever. They can share whatever belongs to them but it’s illegal to take what is not yours. Always has been, always will be. The courts will find and juries will rule the same way every time.
Get all your minions, start a state to state campaign to amend the constitution, removing copyright protections and then you can “share” whatever you like. Good luck with that.
I doubt I’ll change your mind, but copy and paste this somewhere so you can look back in 10, 20 years and see if I’m right.
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I never said I was expecting things to change, and it is quite presumptuous to say that either I or Cody believe that we live in “a brave new digital world wherein people share whatever.” I personally am saying that this is wrong, whether or not it’s in the constitution. I choose to look at things in a more holistic perspective rather than saying, “well this document says it so it must be right.” I refuse to act as some kind of patriotic drone.
Take your political bullshit lecture somewhere else, preferably where they would be better received… like a filibuster. That way you’d fit right in with the rest of the heartless political nutjobs who are too in love with sounds of their own voices to comprehend that their words and insulting and they ruin lives..
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