Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum

It was only the second file-sharing case (after Capitol v. Thomas) to go to verdict in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) anti-downloading litigation campaign.

Joel Tenenbaum's issues started as a college student where he was accused of spreading songs to millions of people by uploading them onto P2P networks like Napster and Limewire.

Over 5 years the number of cases surpassed 35,000 and caused the court to apply the Copyright act to the digital realm.

Tenenbaum then offered the plaintiffs the original complaint amount of $5250, but the music companies declined, and subsequently demanded "double.

The plaintiffs responded that Tenenbaum had filed several motions with the court, and that "as our legal fees go up, so will the settlement amount that we offer.

"[13] On July 31, 2009, the jury awarded $675,000 to the music companies, taking a middle option between the statutory minimum ($22,500 total) and maximum ($4.5 million) for willful infringement.

[5][14] On July 9, 2010, Judge Gertner reduced Tenenbaum's fines to $67,500,[15] holding that arbitrarily high statutory damages violate due process and are thus unconstitutional, far greater than necessary to serve the government's legitimate interests in compensating copyright owners and deterring infringement.

[18] The appeal broached several topics, one of which was the District Court's authority to reduce a statutory damage award on constitutional grounds.

[19] It vacated the reduction in damages, reinstated the original $675,000 award, and remanded to the District Court for reconsideration of the remittitur question[19] by another judge, since Gertner retired.

To instruct the jury that it may ascribe an award in a range of up to $4,500,000 against a noncommercial copyright infringer is punitive, excessive, not authorized by statute, and a denial of due process.

[33] Although Judge Gertner and the Court of Appeals had both already rejected this argument when it was made on constitutional grounds,[16][19][23] Tenenbaum reasoned that if the District Court feels that the jury award was unjust, this time for any reason, then the statutory range given in the instructions to the original jury was unjust, and the instructions were therefore faulty and a new damages-amount trial is warranted.

[35] In the same order, Judge Zobel acted on the remand, holding that reduction of the award via remittitur wasn't warranted, since the jury had ample reason to find that Tenenbaum willfully infringed.

[38] In June 2013, the First Circuit upheld the statutory damages award:[39] The evidence of Tenenbaum's copyright infringement easily justifies the conclusion that his conduct was egregious.

Tenenbaum carried on his activities for years in spite of numerous warnings, he made thousands of songs available illegally, and he denied responsibility during discovery.

[40]Tenenbaum subsequently filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in November 2015 and the court granted a discharge of the $675,000 judgement against him in March 2016.

[41] Throughout the case, Judge Gertner issued numerous admonishments of both the plaintiffs and the defense, and implored Congress to take action to stop these kinds of lawsuits.

There is something wrong with a law that routinely threatens teenagers and students with astronomical penalties for an activity whose implications they may not have fully understood.

However, the court did not explain what those concerns are, and its opinion repeatedly expresses certainty that Congress intended for the Act, including the entire allowable range of statutory damages, to be applied to cases such as Tenenbaum's.