Tennebaum damages worth only $21: Nesson
p2pnet view P2P | RIAA:- Joel tennenbaum, ordered to pay the Big 4 labels $675,000 in damages for allegedly sharing 30 songs online, caused no more than $21 in damages, says his lawyer, Harvard University professor Charles Nesson (left).
Nesson told US district court judge Nancy Gertner the 1999 federal law a jury applied when calculating damages caused by his client, Joel Tenenbaum, had “produced absurd results” and a grossly excessive award that “violated Tenenbaum’s constitutional rights”, says the Boston Globe.
“If Tenenbaum had bought the songs legally on iTunes, Nesson said, the student would have paid 99 cents for each, and Apple would have passed on 70 cents for each to the labels, bringing the total damage to $21″ he argued, according to the story, which has him stating:
” ‘The idea that somehow Congress has done this,’ Nesson said of the federal law passed in 1999, ‘it’s almost like an insult to the Congress’.”
But, “This defendant has no one to blame but himself,” says Big 4 lawyer Timothy M. Reynolds in the Globe postk, which adds Gertner “took the matter under advisement but was openly sympathetic to Tenenbaum, a 26-year-old doctoral student in physics, who sat with his legal team in the courtroom.
“I’m not saying it was wrong to bring the case … or to hold people’s feet to the fire” for copyright infringement, Gertner told Reynolds. But she asked, “Is there another case in the galaxy that’s held up damages to that degree?”
Well actually, judge Gertner, there is.
Tennebaum’s $675,000 is almost paltry against the almost two million dollars Jammie-Thomas-Rasset was originally ordered to pay the labels for supposedly sharing 24 songs on the net, and who’s shortly to endure a third civil trial.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Boston Globe – Lawyer argues illegal downloader only caused $21 in damage, February 23, 2010
two million dollars – Third RIAA trial for Jammie Thomas-Rasset, February 11, 2010
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February 25th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
I have read the motion and fully agree with Tenenbaum lawyer’s arguments.
Certainly the court is being abusive.
Then on the other hand the Public Library system has caused the loss of sales and income (the amount of money does not fit here) to many authors by sharing book with people who read books they never purchased. All without authorization from the copyright holders. The case against Tenenbaum is the same case against the public libraries but no one will file a lawsuit against the libraries because THE JUDGE may have to explain why he or her or his children violated the law by reading books loaned from or at the library.
Google has caused me to loose over a billion dollars from the loss of sales if my book “How to become a millionaire”. In the book I explain that to become a millionaire you sell a book titled “How to become a millionaire” but filled with blank pages. Since people are so gullible they will buy the book by truckloads.
The problem with Google is that through Google the wrd about the blank pages spread throughout the world and no one purchased the book afterwords.
February 25th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Is it not odd that two (one would think) intelligent people, Nesson and the judge, trained as lawyers to think the same way about logic and the laws can up up with such disparate thinking about an extremely simple to determine damages award?
The reply is that thinking is not involved. It is a case of prostitution on one side (RIAA’s lawyer) and a decent person on the other and the judges is in favor of the prostitute.
February 25th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If this isn’t “Cruel and Unusual Punishment”
Punish us for what we have done, not for your worst-case estimate for what you think that we might have done.
The purpose of the “sue-em-all” campaign is to create fear. What it is doing is to create disdain and disgust, and raise a generation who hates the RIAA and MPAA and the Cartel which they represent. Keep it up!
February 25th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
“raise a generation who hates the RIAA and MPAA”
Add the now hated artists that work for these without realizing what their work is used for, for extorting artist’s fans.
A case of biting the hands that feeds.