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Posted on 05/21/2012 9:03:35 AM PDT by Mad Dawgg
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has refused to take up a Boston University student's constitutional challenge to a $675,000 penalty for illegally downloading 30 songs and sharing them on the Internet.
The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., who was successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally sharing music on peer-to-peer networks. In 2009, a jury ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000, or $22,500 for each song he illegally downloaded and shared.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Grand larceny is typically defined as larceny of a more significant amount of property. In the US, it is often defined as an amount valued at $400 or more. In New York, grand larceny refers to amounts of $1,000 or more. (From Wikipedia)
So your claim is that two CDs worth of songs (30) is $400? I don't know where you go shopping, but I suggest hitting Amazon or Best Buy, as CDs I've gotten aren't in excess of $20 a pop.
Indeed.
There've been cases where I heard an anime's opening or ending song and liked it so much I ended up getting the series DVD box-set, or the CD with that song... usually from overseas in the latter case.
It seems to me that the charge involved this guy sharing “hundreds of songs” (this is from the article) with a network of “friends.” I suppose the number of friends (not quantified in the article) was substantial, hence the loss claimed by the Recording Industry Association of America.
I can see where the value of loss might be quite substantial and certainly exceeded $1,000.
Nevertheless, it seems plain to me that his case was used as an “example” to warn others not to do what he did.
What you cite is immaterial to the actual punishment; the court "ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet."
As you can see the actual punishment is for downloading 30 songs, not "sharing hundreds of songs."
And, here's a question for you; supposing this guy was using BitTorrents as his distribution and had a song that was split up into 100 'chunks' and his Bittorrent served out ONLY one of those pieces to one of a hundred different people. Each downloader only got one percent of the song, and yet only one song in total was served out. Was that one violation or a hundred?
Likewise, let us imagine a downloader who gets a song divided as above, but each of the pieces that he got were from different people. At the end he has ONE song, there were a hundred chunks downloaded from a hundred different people though; is his violation one, or a hundred.
Now, combining the two, assuming each of the sharers owns a legal copy, how much should the injured party get? A thousand from the downloader plus a thousand from each sharer? That would be $101,000 in total, and yet the total "injury" in this case is a single item.
Damn, but you are determined to prove me wrong. OK, OK, you were right and I was wrong.
I have no idea of what you’re talking about with references to stuff like Bittorrents.
As I pointed out, I thought the damages were set at such a high value to make an example of this guy by making the judgment at the amount it was. I was simply noting that it did seem like grand larceny. What do I know?
Anyway, I concede. And if you have real problems with this matter take it up with the court. Goodness, some people just want to be argumentative.
Let me address this backwards:
Yes, I've been accused of being argumentative; in this case slightly, moreso to get at what would be a just punishment though.
I have problems with "the system" but this stuff is lower on my list of priorities than others. This case is arguably a violation of the Constitution's prohibition of excessive fines; I'm more interested in fixing the more blatant/inarguable violations first.
BitTorrents are a common form of file-sharing where people on the network who have a particular piece of the requested file can share it. I picked it because it's file-type/purpose agnostic; one could argue that a program sharing only MP3s is designed for 'pirating' but BitTorrent is different in that many people use it for legitimate purposes too; such as distributing Linux ISOs or their software installer (BitTorrent giving the advantage of not overloading their servers with download-requests when popular new-releases come out).
FReepmail me to subscribe to or unsubscribe from the SCOTUS ping list.
He was offered a $4,000 settlement and he turned it down, so they wanted to make an example of him to deter anyone else from making them go to trial. The damage award was set by the jury, not the judge, and the defendant came across very badly at trial-- he was forced to admit at trial that he had personally downloaded the songs when he had previously testified under oath, numerous times, that he hadn't. (At one point, he tried to blame his sister for downloading the songs using his computer; at trial, that was proven to be impossible.)
Thanks for that information, of which I was unaware. Very interesting!
It’s still. Absurd on all levels
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