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Originally Posted by JSWolf
$20,000 could be enough to ruin someone. Who's to say what is appropriate?
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Originally Posted by HarryT
The judge, presumably? Is it the judge who sets the amount of damages? That's the way it works in our courts.
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Originally Posted by NatCh
This is a civil case, right? If so then the issue at hand ought to be did she cause harm and how much.
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Originally Posted by nekokami
But as NatCh pointed out, in a civil case they're going to have to prove damages, and that's going to be tough. I don't think they are going to have an easy time proving beyond probable doubt that someone out there who would have paid them for a copy of the music didn't do so because of her actions.
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The whole point of a civil case is to repair the harm caused. Sometimes the harm can be repaired directly, but usually it's by equivalent ($). So the amount of damages is whatever it takes to put the plaintiff in his original state before the harm was caused. Of course there's a lot of discretion on the part of the judge as to the actual amount, and proof of the harm is sometimes very iffy. Nevertheless, there's a principle according to which a judge must render a decision, even if the proof doesn't allow him to know exactly how much the damages should be. That doesn't mean he has to award damages when there is insufficient proof, it just means that when the proof is sufficient, but where he is unable to determine the exact appropriate amount needed to repair the harm by equivalent, he is forced to decide almost arbitrarily.
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Originally Posted by NatCh
What's the standard for a Civil case? I can't remember....
Criminal is "Beyond a reasonable doubt" but I'm thinking that civil is something about a "preponderance of evidence" ... maybe that varies from state to state ....
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The standard in civil proof is the balance of probabilities, or the preponderance of evidence (or plenty of other terms) which means that a fact's existence must be determined to be more probable than its nonexistence. It's like voting at a referendum: 50%+1 vote. It doesn't vary from state to state or from country to country.
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Originally Posted by HarryT
Do they have any say in the matter now that she's been found guilty? In this country, once a court has set a fine, it's the court system which enforces payment, not the original plaintiff.
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In a civil case, it's not the court's responsibility to enforce a judgement; it's the plantiff's. A plaintiff must hire an officer who executes the judgement on the defendant's property.