A federal judge has significantly reduced the penalty against Joel Tenenbaum, the graduate student that was convicted of sharing 30 unauthorized tracks online.
Last July, Tenenbaum was found guilty and told to pay $675,000 to the RIAA and record labels.
The judge has now reduced the verdict to $67,500, saying the damages award was “unconstitutionally excessive” given the fact that Tenenbaum made no money off the sharing of the music.
Judge Nancy Gertner added the following of the new verdict: The new damages “not only adequately compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards.”
$67,500 is three times the statutory minimum.
Despite being grateful, Tenenbaum still called the new verdict ‘ridiculous:’ “I still don’t have $70,000 — and $2,000 per song still seems ridiculous in light of the fact that you can buy them for 99 cents on iTunes,” Tenenbaum said. “I mean $675,000 was also absurd.”
The RIAA, unsurprisingly, was not happy: “With this decision, the court has substituted its judgment for that of 10 jurors as well as Congress. For nearly a week, a federal jury carefully considered the issues involved in this case, including the profound harm suffered by the music community precisely because of the activity that the defendant admitted engaging in.”
Result for: music community
The IFPI has emphatically noted today that revenue from legal music sales in Sweden has jumped 18 percent since February, thanks to the strong effort in the nation to crackdown on piracy and the shut down of the admins of the infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay.
Physical media sales jumped 9 percent in the reported period and digital sales increased 80 percent.
IFPI chairman and chief executive John Kennedy added (via The Guardian): “The increase in sales in Sweden, set against the backdrop of innovative new digital services and tighter copyright laws, is encouraging.It is too early to say if Sweden has permanently turned a corner, but we hope that users there will permanently switch from unlicensed filesharing networks that give nothing back to the music community to great value legal services whose operators recognize continuous investment is needed to discover and promote the talent of tomorrow.“
Result for: music community
The popular music community site Last.fm has launched its own online channel for video interviews, starting a trend of original content production it hopes to continue into the future.
Dubbed Last.fm/presents, the channel will show off videos of interviews with established and upcoming artists including Moby, Santogold, Joshua Radin and Neon Neon.
The site’s co-founder, Martin Stiksel, added that the interviews will “complement Last.fm’s “music discovery experience”. He also makes the somewhat bold claim that the site is the only place where “favourite artists talk so candidly about what makes them the musicians they are today”.
The videos will be distributed by CBS and its syndicate partners Joost, Bebo, AOL and NetVibes.
Since its acquisition by CBS last year, Last.fm has been aggressively expanding its services and has signed deals with all four major labels - Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI allowing the service to stream tracks for free on the site. Because of the deals, the site claims its amount of users have risen 59 percent as a result.
