US Appeal court: $675000,- fine for sharing 30 illegal music files is reasonable

A remarkable ruling in a long string of convictions for file sharing in America was issued recently: A federal appeals court in the United States determined that a student of the University of Boston has to pay a fine of $675,000 (490,000 euros) for illegally downloading and sharing music on the Internet.

A jury in Boston decided in 2009 that Joel Tenenbaum should compensate the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represented four record labels. Tenenbaum had shared 30 illegal music files on the peer-to-peer network Kazaa. A judge later reduced the fine to $67.500, - with a rare application of the "remittitur" principle, meaning that a measure imposed by a jury can be moderated because the original penalty would have been "unconstitutionally excessive".

Both the RIAA and Tenenbaum appealed, either to annul or to reinstate the sentence. The appeals court decided to reject the penalty moderation and imposed the original penalty of $675,000, - on Mr. Tenenbaum. Unfortunately for the student, the use of remittitur added little more than procedural ambiguities and, at the end of the day, he ends up with the astronomical fine of $22.500, - per shared file.

The consequences of this ruling are difficult to estimate. The number of lawsuits against individual file-sharers has decreased the past year. On the other hand, Wired reported that a number of smaller independent film producers may see opportunity in this unexpected new precedent and start suing individual consumers for filesharing again.

Read more about filesharing lawsuits on FutureofCopyright.com:

• Swedish court: higher compensation for copyright violation due to filesharing
• Adult industry makes the shift from suing file sharers to listening to them
• Swedish judge sets new standard for file sharing penalties: €5 per stolen track
• File-sharing sites attract 53 billion visitors annually

Source: Wired