Do You Download Music? Willing to Pay the $1.92 Million Penalty?
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Intellectual property law is usually not on our beat. But counseling clients who don’t want to settle their litigation is definitely up our alley.
The Wall Street Journal Law Blog featured the Minnesota woman who was ordered by a jury to pay $1.92 million for the music that she downloaded.
In pursuit of our mission to translate legal issues for a non-legal readership, here are the highlights:
• This is the only case of this kind to go to trial – all the others settled;
• This was the second trial; the verdict from the first was vacated on a technical issue;
• The verdict from the first trial had been $220,000;
• The judge from the first trial thought $220,000 was excessive;
• Despite losing to the tune (excuse the pun) of $220,000, the defendant didn’t settle and opted to re-try the case;
• The damages are “statutory damages,” meaning that they are not based on actual loss to the plaintiff, but on the provisions of a statute;
• The range of statutory damages and, therefore, the stakes in the case, were known to the defendant and her lawyers throughout.
We tend to have difficulty convincing clients that litigation is inherently uncertain and that settlement at some point is usually the best option. Here is a good horror story to illustrate our point.
The WSJ Blog post also discusses some of the avenues of appeal, mostly on constitutional grounds, and the possibility that the case may yet settle.
Incidentally, the defendant was accused not just of downloading but putting music in shared folders for others to access without charge. If you download from iTunes (or a similar service), always pay, and never, never put the music in a shared folder. You never know who’s watching!
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Images: Ipod Shuffle (above); Wildwood Flower LP, from the days before downloading. Both images courtesy of Wikimedia.
