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Student Joel Tenenbaum Fined $675,000 For Illegal KaZaA Downloads
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by Annina Bergman | July 31, 2009 at 03:35 pm
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PhD student Joel Tenenbaum was fined $675,000 after admitting to illegally downloading and distributing 30 songs using the file-sharing software KaZaA. Tenenbaum's attorney and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson stated that the figure was "bankrupting". Tenenbaum said he cannot afford to pay the fine, but will be filing for bankruptcy if the verdict stands.
Cara Duckworth of The Recording Industry Associaton of America (RIAA) announced that the association was "grateful for the jury's service and their recognition of the impact of illegal downloading on the music community".
She also said that the RIAA wanted Tenenbaum to realise that artists and music companies deserve to be paid for their work.
Tenenbaum is the second person who has been tried for illegal file-sharing. Both have lost their cases. In June, a Minnesota woman was fined $1.92 million for sharing music on the Internet. US record labels have announced that they no longer will initiate new cases against individual file-sharers, but they are going to see through the ones that are already started.
"I'm disappointed, but not surprised, but I'm thankful that it wasn't much bigger, that it wasn't millions," Tenenbaum told Ars after the verdict was announced.
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at 17:23 on July 31st, 2009
This is a disingenuous argument from the MPAA, whose sole income is from selling records, whereas artists themselves pay the rent on playing gigs. Record labels had a years and years of advanced warning that they could effectively be cut out of the artist-fan relationship, and yet chose to do nothing but waste time with DRM and sue students and moms for exhorbitant sums.