Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Unfortunately, the courts hands are tied by the statutory damages set in the legislation. They are not allowed to decide on an appropriate penalty.
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I think the statutory range for willful infringement is $750-$75,000 per work (in some cases of willful infringement it may go higher). The jury could have imposed a fine of ~$22,000, based on T's infringment of 30 songs. Of course they didn't; they imposed a fine of $675,000, reduced by the court to $67,500. While there is obviously some room for disagreement as to whether $750 per song (for willful infringement) is too high, this is not a case where the jury imposed the minimum fines. They could have, of course, but decided that T. deserved to be fined much more.
The real issue is that normal people - people who have never heard of Cory Doctorow or the EFF - are really not very sympathetic to file sharing. That's the real reason you keep getting such large damages in file sharing cases. Again, the idea that someone makes unlawful copies of songs and distributes it on the internet where it is downloaded by thousands or millions of other people, none of whom have paid for anything, is not an idea that has much resonance in the population at large. Most people think that this is wrong, and are not averse to punishing people who share files.
And, again, the case also has nothing to do with jury nullification - the jury didn't try to impose the minimum penalty instead of finding the defendant not liable because they believed that he had done something wrong and should have to pay for it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
Making it a criminal case will fix that. Can you imagine the outcry the first time someone gets a bigger fine for downloading an mp3 than someone gets for mugging an old lady or something else that people actually care about? At worst the downloader would get a small fine they could pay off monthly, and most likely just a warning for a first offence.
In the UK there has been a few attempts to prosecute people for this sort of thing, but they tried to call it "fraud" instead of copyright infringement and obviously they failed to get a conviction for that reason.
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Again, as I wrote above, there's not really a lot of sympathy for willful infringement among the people who sit on juries, so I'm not sure that there would be much public outcry if a willful infringer were given a 1 year prison sentence and $100,000 fine.
And even if you don't serve much or any time, having a criminal record will be much worse for your future than having had a fine imposed on you in a civil case.
And of course T. could have settled for $3,500.