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Legal
US Justice Department back Tenenbaum damages
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 21 January 2010
The US Justice Department has supported the mega-bucks damages awarded to the music industry in last year’s Joel Tenenbaum file-sharing case, one of the Recording Industry Association Of America’s last sue-the-fan lawsuits. As previously reported, Tenenbaum lost the case and was ordered to pay the record industry $675,000, or $22,500 for each of the 30 songs he was accused of illegally sharing.
As well as appealing the whole ruling, Tenenbaum’s people argued the damages awarded were way too high, being out of line with the actual loss to the record industry caused by the Boston student’s file-sharing. US copyright laws allow damages to be awarded anywhere between $750 and $150,000 – Team Tenenbaum are pushing for damages to be reduced to $750 per track.
But the Justice Department said the court was perfectly in its rights to pick any figure within those disparate boundaries, adding that Congress had allowed significant damages to be awarded partly to act as a deterrent to others regards file-sharing.
Their filing on the issue reads as follows: “The current damages range provides compensation for copyright owners because, inter alia, there exist situations in which actual damages are hard to quantify. Furthermore, in establishing the range, Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe they will go unnoticed”.
As previously reported, both Team Tenenbaum and lawyers for that other high profile file-sharer, Jammie Thomas, who was ordered to pay a whopping $1.92 million, are appealing their respective damages rulings. They are likely to cite the famous US Supreme Court case of BMW v Gore, where a high damages payment was cut by the higher court because the payment was considered to be disproportionate to the harm caused by the defendant.
However, as also previously reported, BMW v Gore was a case involving punitive damages rather than statutory damages, as was the case in both Tenenbaum and Thomas. As recently as last October a US court ruled that BMW v Gore does not apply in statutory damages cases.
