Out of more than 30,000 cases filed against downloaders by the record companies only two end-user download cases have gone to trial and judgment: the Tenenbaum case in Boston, and the case against Jammie Thomas-Rassett in Minnesota.
In the second case, the jury awarded the copyright owners $2 million for downloading (and allegedly distributing) 24 songs. The federal judge to whom the case is assigned has now lowered that amount to $2,250 per song (the legal term of the judge’s action is “remittitur”).
Some quotes from the Thomas-Rassett January 22, 2010 decision:
After long and careful deliberation, the Court . . . remits the damages award to $2,250 per song – three times the statutory minimum. The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music. . . . although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damages.
. . . This reduced award is significant and harsh. It is a higher
award than the Court might have chosen to impose in its sole discretion, but the decision was not entrusted to this Court.
. . . Thomas‐Rasset argues that the ratio of the statutory damages award to actual damages in this case, when measured in songs, is 1:62,015. She bases this calculations on a cost of $1.29 per song online.
. . . Thomas‐Rasset asserts that, at most, she was a single mother who merely downloaded and shared music when she had already lawfully bought CDs of much of that music and had no commercial motive to infringe.
. . . The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music.
. . . The Court will not substitute its judgment for the judgment of the jury. Rather, it will remit the award to the maximum amount sustainable by the record, so that the statutory damages award is no longer shocking or monstrous.
It will be interesting to see if this decision has any impact on Judge Nancy Gertner, the federal judge assigned to the Tenenbaum case in Boston. In that case, the jury awarded $22,500 for each work infringed, and a motion for remittitur is pending.
Here is a link to the full opinion in Thomas-Rasset:
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Final judgment in Sony v. Tenenbaum entered by Judge Nancy Gertner today. The 30 day appeal clock starts to run. Should be interesting to see what the First Circuit does with this one, although I suspect that the betting is heavy in favor of quick affirmance.
A few choice quotes from Judge Gertner’s opinion, which is provided in full below on scribd.com.
“the Court, deeply concerned by the rash of file-sharing lawsuits, the imbalance of resources between the parties, and the upheaval of norms of behavior brought on by the Internet, did everything in its power to permit Tenebaum to make his best case for fair use.…The Court did what it could to focus the issue, notwithstanding what can only be described as a truly chaotic defense.”
…
Tenenbaum “tailor[ed] his fair use defense to suggest a modest exception to copyright protections,” he “mounted a broadside attack that would excuse all file sharing for private enjoyment. It is a version of fair use so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress created, defying both statute and precedent.”
…
“As this Court has previously noted, it is very, very concerned that there is a deep potential for injustice in the Copyright Act as it is currently written. It urges – no implores – Congress to amend the statute to reflect the realities of file sharing. 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. The injury to the copyright holder may be real, and even substantial, but, under the statute, the record companies do not even have to prove actual damage. “Repeatedly, as new developments have occurred in this country, it has been Congress that has fashioned the new rules that new technology made necessary.” … It is a responsibility that Congress should not take lightly in the face of this litigation and the thousands of suits like it.”
The First Circuit’s decision upholding the RIAA’s challenge to Judge Gertner’s decision to permit webcasting of a motion hearing in the RIAA v. Tenenbaum case was issued on April 16, 2009, very shortly after oral argument.
The First Circuit, interpreting a D. Mass. Local Rule, held that U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner’s interpretation of the local rule concerning photographing recording and broadcasting of courtroom proceedings was “palpably incorrect”.
This result is quite disappointing for many people who had hoped that the First Circuit would hold that Massachusetts District Court Judges have have the discretion to webcast court proceedings in their courtrooms, and that this would be a first step toward allowing the public to view federal district court civil proceedings. The decision will, many hope, lead to a change in the pre-Internet Age Rule that was found to prohibit the webcast.
Here is the First Circuit’s recent decision upholding a preliminary injunction in a copyright case out of D. Puerto Rico. The sole issue on appeal was the holding on substantial similarity. The products were stuffed animals, specifically, frogs. Or, more specifically, the Puerto Rican tree frog, the Coqui. I’ve tried to find a picture of the defendant’s stuffed animal frog with no luck.
Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner issued an order permitting the webcast of a scheduled in-court motion hearing in the RIAA/Tenenbaum copyright downloading case. The RIAA challenged the order, arguing that a federal rule prohibits the webcast. Here is yesterday’s audio of the First Circuit oral argument, with Harvard Law Prof. Charles Nesson arguing for Tenenbaum.
Interesting fact from the article: On YouTube alone ten hours of video content are put online every minute of every day, more than 250,000 clips per day.
As everyone in the copyright law community knows by now, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Nesson, and a team of HLS students, are defending Joel Tenenbaum in an RIAA action. Nesson’s primary argument is that the copyright statute’s statutory (aka punitive) damages of as much as $150,000 per infringement is unconstitutional, least as applied to Tenenbaum who downloaded seven songs for personal use, not profit. Over $1 million in damages ($150,000 x 7) seems a bit much for such a violation, and Nesson argues that punitive damages of this magnitiude are unconstitutional.
Apart from the legal issue raised by Professor Nesson, this case has a great deal of humor in it, not the least of which is that Nesson and company are defending Joel Tenenbaum. This is kind of like picking on a little kid on the playground, who then shows up with The Hulk, who just happens to be his big brother and refuses to go away until he’s fought the bully to the death. Oh, and Nesson’s team is “immortal” for all practical purposes – I suspect there’s nothing that Nesson would like more than to take the constitutional challenge to the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. I doubt that the RIAA ever expected this, but they can’t exactly back down at this point. I hope to write about this case it in more detail in a future post, and highlight some of the bizarre turns the case has taken with Nesson guiding Tenenbaum’s defense.
A great blog that is following this case in more detail than I could ever have thought possible is Ben Sheffner’s Copyrights and Campaigns.
Are business training materials sufficiently original to be protected by copyright law? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” First and foremost it depends on the materials themselves, but it also depends on the judge. In Situation Management v. ASP, Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge William Young thought the training materials created by the plaintiff, Situation Management, were not entitled to copyright protection. (I posted on this case when Judge Young’s decisionwas issued – click here for earlier post).
Judge Young was not complimentary toward Situation Management’s training materials. In the process of holding that the materials were not entitled to copyright protection he described them as nothing more than “a summary of common-sense communication skills . . . “fodder for sardonic workplace humor” and as “aggressively vapid”. He observed that “the works at issue are so dominated by nonprotectable material that it is impossible to reduce the work to a copyrightable essence or structure.” He found that the materials were filled with generalizations, platitudes, and observations of the obvious” . . . [contained] “not-so-stunning revelation[s],” and taught “[a]t their creative zenith, . . . common-sense communication skills.” Not finished, he observed that “these works exemplify the sorts of training programs that serve as fodder for sardonic workplace humor that has given rise to the popular television show The Office and the movie Office Space. They are aggressively vapid — hundreds of pages filled with generalizations, platitudes, and observations of the obvious.”
The First Circuit disagreed and reversed. The heart of the decision is captured in the following quotation:
. . . the district court improperly denied copyright protection to large portions of SMS’s works because it, in an error of law, found “they focus on concepts and teach a noncopyrightable process.” . . . The fact that SMS’s works describe processes or systems does not make their expression noncopyrightable. SMS’s creative choices in describing those processes and systems, including the works’ overall arrangement and structure, are subject to copyright protection. . . . The district court’s analysis . . . lost sight of the expressiveness of the works as a whole by focusing too closely on their noncopyrightable elements.
In June 2007 I wrote a post discussing two cases in which clients of our firm had, before they became clients, failed to get written assignments of copyright ownership from independent contractors who wrote software for them. Without a written assignment the contractors were able to claim ownership of the works, and make life very unpleasant for their customers, who may have assumed that since they paid for this work the code belonged to them.
A case decided last Fall shows what happens when this problem is taken to an extreme. In this case the programmer-contractor claimed ownership, and the value he assigned was in the millions of dollars. The customer was forced to go through a federal court lawsuit that involved discovery (expensive), summary judgment (quite expensive), and finally appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (very expensive), only to finally have a court declare that it owned an “unlimited, non-exclusive, implied license to use, modify and retain” the source code written by the contractor.
While this case had a happy ending for the customer, the entire expense, as well as the risk of a loss, could have been avoided if the customer had a piece of paper with only one sentence, signed by the contractor: “I hereby assign to [customer] all right, title and interest to all intellectual property developed by [contractor] during the course of any engagement by [customer], including but not limited to all property protected by copyright, patent or trade secrets.”
[Update: the FTC did file a reply brief. Link here]
All the briefs are in on the FTC petition for cert in its antitrust case against Rambus, (unless the FTC decides to file a reply brief, which is unlikely to change things much). I’ve added the Rambus opposition to the Rambus Group page on scribd.com, here. Now its time for the antitrust community to hold its breath and see whether the Court takes the case. Some knowledgeable commentators have opined that FTC/Rambus case has the best chance of any antitrust case obtaining review this year, but that plus a dime will get you …. well, nothing I guess. If the petition is allowed, it will be very exciting times for antitrust and standards setting law and policy wonks.
In federal court in Boston the Gatehouse Media v. New York Times case (described in these two (1, 2) earlier posts) has settled, as I suspected it would. The settlement agreement (or a preliminary agreement which is binding in the event a “definitive agreement” is not reached), is on scribd.com, here. It appears that this agreement was not intended to be made public (at least not yet), but apparently someone leaked it, so it’s public now.
As I read this, Gatehouse prevailed, hands down over the NYT/Boston.com. Gatehouse will erect “technical solutions” to prevent Boston.com from copying the Gatehouse original content, and Boston.com will respect those “solutions.” If a “solution” proves ineffective, Gatehouse will notify Boston.com, and Boston.com will back off right away. Why the parties went about it in this manner (which implicates DMCA-like anti-circumvention) I’m not sure, but I appears to accomplish the same result as if the NYT/Boston.com simply said “we won’t copy your ledes.”
From what I can seek, Boston.com/yourtown has already dropped its ledes and links to the Gatehouse sites, at least based on a quick sampling.
[postscript: here is a link to the report of Gatehouse’s copyright expert, Douglas Lichtman, Professor of Law, UCLA. The report is an analysis of the case under copyright fair use principles, and a rebuttal of the NYT/Boston.com’s unclean hands argument]
Some interesting goings on on the copyright front in D. Mass. are worth a brief mention.
First, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner has ruled that proceedings in the RIAA’s case against Joel Tenenbaum, alleging illegal downloading, may be “webcast” by the Berkman Center. Whether the actual trial will be webcast is undecided as yet, but upcoming in-court motions will be. The audio-visual will be streamed live by the Berkman Center at no charge to viewers. Tune in on January 22nd to see the circus. [Update: the First Circuit held that the trial could not be webcast].
I find the following quote from the decision to be quite humorous:
In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet Generation — the generation that has grown up with computer technology in general, and the Internet in particular, as commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information largely, if not almost exclusively, over the Internet. . . Consistent with the nature of these file-sharing cases, and the identity of so many of the Defendants, this case is one that has already garnered substantial attention on the Internet.
While the Plaintiffs object to the narrowcasting of this proceeding, . . . their objections are curious. At previous hearings and status conferences, the Plaintiffs have represented that they initiated these lawsuits not because they believe they will identify every person illegally downloading copyrighted material. Rather, they believe that the lawsuits will deter the Defendants and the wider public from engaging in illegal file-sharing activities. Their strategy effectively relies on the publicity resulting from this litigation.
Meanwhile, in the Gatehouse Media copyright case against the New York Times, Gatehouse has filed an unopposed motion, asking Judge Young to rule on whether the court has jurisdiction before the copyright registrations for the material in dispute have been issued by the Copyright Office. This is a frequent controversy, and one of interest to copyright lawyers representing plaintiffs whose unregistered works are the subject of infringement – may they proceed with suit, and perhaps a preliminary injunction, or are they bound to wait for the registrations to issue? Apparently, this issue was of enough concern to Gatehouse Media that it filed this brief, collecting and arguing the legal precedents on this issue.
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ing the RIAA’s challenge to Judge Gertner’s decision to permit webcasting of a motion hearing in the RIAA v. Tenenbaum case was
settlement agreement (or a preliminary agreement which is binding in the event a “definitive agreement” is not reached), is 
!["Talkin ‘Bout My [Internet] Generation" and Gatehouse Media says, "Give Us A Break Judge, the Registration is in the Mail"](https://www.masslawblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/220px-My_Generation.jpg)
