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Originally Posted by Harmon
That was a civil case. So while the outcome might be "cruel & unusual," that Constitutional concept doesn't bear on this case. It only relates to crimes.
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The problem is that current copyright law has been written to apply criminal level punishments to trials with only civil standards of evidence. The reason the bar is set much higher for what the prosecution has to prove in criminal cases is because the penalties are usually much higher. What we have now is way unbalanced in favor of the copyright holders. The requirements for proof are very low and the penalties are very high.
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What we have here is a disproportionate award of damages, which almost certainly will be reduced on appeal. How much depends - I've read that she lied about what she did, which neither juries nor courts like.
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True, she certainly didn't do herself any favors. However, that is what perjury charges are for. The judge/jury are not supposed to increase the penalties because they were annoyed at the defendant.
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The inability of the copyright owners to prove any lost sales is irrelevant. That's not something they have to prove, except if they elect to go after actual damages, and then only if lost sales is at issue. There are probably other ways that a copyright owner could suffer actual damages.
But at any rate, under the copyright act, the owner can just elect statutory damages for the infringement itself. The whole point of statutory damages is to deal with situations where the owner finds it burdensome, or even impossible, to prove damages.
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That's true if the main problem was actual damages versus statutory damages. The issue I see here isn't so much that they didn't prove any lost sales, but that they never proved any infringement occurred. The only thing the plaintiff really showed was "making available", but the courts have already said that's not enough to be infringement.