"Normally in our American legal system, we say the punishment should fit the crime," said Ken Port, director of the Intellectual Property Institute at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. "Now she's being ordered to pay, in some ways, an incomprehensible amount of damages."
How much is she being ordered to pay? $1.92 million. Or £1.1 million. For the download of 24 songs. Normally the music industry settle outside of court for around $3000 to $5000 in the 35,000 or so cases against individuals it has pursued. This is the first case where a defendant has actively fought the companies. Legally they're entitled to between $750 and $30,000 per song, so with six companies suing one person, they settled on $80,000 per song. How kind.
Imagine paying £48,000 for a song. Spiteful, malicious attacks on one person won't help the industry recoup losses or get people paying for music. In fact, if anything, this will push them away. Even the judge in charge of the case agrees it's an outrageous verdict.
When Judge Michael Davis ordered the retrial, he also implored Congress to change copyright laws after Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $222,000 in the first trial, an amount he called "wholly disproportionate." The new fine is more than eight times the first amount.
(via Yahoo News)
Regardless, this is the wrong way of going about raising sales of music in shops. The people downloading are the audience that the record companies need and this just forces people away, the record industry are going to have to seriously change tactics if they want to revive the commercial viability of selling CD's.
1 comment:
what about the artists that made the songs she downloaded, surely they should have stepped in and attempted to defend her or done something, she is their audience.
they are just as bad...
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