The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.
The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement “creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.”
The administration’s court filing Tuesday is the latest in the case of Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student who was the nation’s second defendant to go to trial against the RIAA on file sharing charges. Most of the 30,000 civil cases the music industry has brought have settled out of court.
After the July verdict in a Boston federal court, Tenenbaum’s defense team mounted a legal challenge, saying the damages were unconstitutional because they were disproportionate to the harm the industry suffered. The Copyright Act allows fines ranging from $750 to $150,000 per infringement, all at a judge or jury’s discretion.
“The current damages range provides compensation for copyright owners because, inter alia, there exist situations in which actual damages are hard to quantify,” the Justice Department wrote. “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.”
Among other things, Tenenbaum’s legal team wants the damages reduced to $750 per song.
The Obama administration and the Bush administration have supported file sharing damages of up to $150,000 per track. The Justice Department often weighs into cases when the constitutionality of laws are at issue, as copyright attorney Ben Sheffner notes.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner did not indicate when she would rule in Tenenbaum’s case.
The only other file sharer to go to trial against the RIAA was Jammie Thomas-Rasset. The RIAA won a whopping $1.92 million verdict against the Minnesota woman this summer for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa.
A similar motion to set aside that verdict is pending.
<While I sincerely doubt whether this has anything to do with a particular administration, that is not the real issue. What matters here is that word "deterrence". What deterrence does is in effect punish a person for the future of the crime. In other words, beyond what is morally appropriate for what they actually did in order to dissuade future hypothetical acts of others. Instead of letting people be afraid of being punished severely, why not make them assured that they will be given a JUST sentence for what they do?! How about that, how about putting justice at the top of our "criminal justice" system as a radical move.>
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