Last year, in the US, a law known as PRO-IP was signed into law. It mandated the creation of a Justice Department position responsible for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The second part of that law, requesting comments about IP enforcement issues from the public, is now underway.
Specifically, they are looking for “written submissions from the public identifying the costs to the U.S. economy resulting from infringement of intellectual property rights, both direct and indirect, including any impact on the creation or maintenance of jobs.”
Comments should be emailed to the Office of Management & Budget (intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov) and must be received by March 24.
Comments received by the deadline will be published on a government webpage, so make sure you don’t include anything you wouldn’t want available to the general public.
PRO-IP (the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008) is a thinly veiled excuse to divert government resources to the entertainment industry’s war against P2P file sharing.
The rationale for such a law is based on the flawed premise that file sharing is responsible for billions of dollars suddenly vanishing from the US economy and the loss of nearly a million jobs.
Result for: file sharing
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is preparing for a third trial to once again determine damages, which have so far ranged from $54,000 to $1.92 million, to be paid by Jammie Thomas-Rasset who has been accused (and found guilty) of sharing 24 songs illegally on file sharing networks. Last year, the mother of four from Minnesota was ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for sharing the music.
Last week, Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis reduced the damages to $54,000, declaring that the $1.92 million figure was “monstrous and shocking.” The RIAA was given until Wednesday to accept the decision or to reject it, which would result in a new trial. The trade group announced it will reject the decision and go to another trial, as Thomas-Rasset turned down an opportunity to settle the case.
Attorneys for Thomas-Rasset said she would not accept a settlement offer from the RIAA, which would have her paying $25,000 to a charity for struggling artists. “Jammie is not going to agree to pay any amount of money to them,” Attorney Joe Sibley said, adding that it doesn’t matter to Thomas-Rasset whether the damages are $25,000 or $1.92 million.
“For her, it’s all the same. She just doesn’t have the money to pay any of those, and it would be financially ruinous,” Sibley said. She will continue to fight the case on principal, believing that the statutes that allow for such hefty damages in these types of cases are wrong.
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Result for: file sharing
The Justice Department has vocally supported the awarding of $675,000 in damages to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from a Massachusetts student for sharing 30 songs illegally on the Internet. The department said that copyright infringement, “creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.”
The comments aren’t very surprising, since several former RIAA lawyers do serve in high positions. The student in question is Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, who is only the second person to go to trial against the RIAA following a P2P lawsuit. Over 30,000 such claims were made, almost all of which have resulted in settlements for a few thousand dollars.
The Copyright Act allows for fines ranging from $750 to $150,000 per infringement. After the Jury verdict in Tenenbaum’s case, his defense team mounted a legal challenge against the damages, claiming they were unconstitutional on the grounds that they were disproportionate to the harm done to the industry by the crime.
“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.”
Tenenbaum’s legal team is attempting to bring the damages down to $750 per infringement.
