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Recently, a Minnesota woman was ordered to pay the recording industry $1.92 million after a federal jury found her liable for downloading and distributing 24 songs on an online file-sharing network. Why are jury verdicts or penalties in such cases so high?
Ned Snow, associate professor of law in the School of Law, replies:
That’s a great question for the jury. What compelled those jurors to impose a penalty of $1.92 million for P2P file-sharing of 24 songs? Without interviewing the jurors, we may never know the answer. We do know, however, the law that allows such awards. Under the federal Copyright Act, if a person is found to have infringed a copyright willfully, a court may award damages up to $150,000 per act of infringement. In the Minnesota case, the jury found the infringement to be willful, and so it chose to fine the downloader, Jammie Thomas, $80,000 per file downloaded. The reason for such elevated monetary awards is to deter infringing practices. Case in point, I know that I’ll be extra careful from which Web sites I download anything—music or otherwise. But this deterrent effect may not be all good. For one thing, the elevated damages make people like me nervous to download even legal material from the Internet -- out of fear that the material may actually be illegal. This effect inhibits the dissemination of speech, which suggests a tension with the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution. Furthermore, the Due Process Clause restrains the size of awards that are punitive in nature, and the Supreme Court has opined that due process is threatened where such awards exceed ten times the actual damages incurred. So, assuming that the songs that Jammie Thomas downloaded were valued at $1 each, she was made to pay damages that were 80,000 times the value of the actual damages incurred by the record companies. To be sure, the excessive $1.92 million award raises serious constitutional questions. A free law article that addresses this issue may be downloaded from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1019577.