US govt says $1.92M P2P damage award totally fair

The US Department of Justice has weighed in on Jammie Thomas-Rasset's $1.92 million liability for damages, calling the amount perfectly constitutional. In fact, Congress intended for such massive damages to fall like a stone upon even noncommercial P2P users.

Thomas-Rasset was the first defendant in the RIAA's 18,000-person war on file-sharing to take her case all the way to trial. After two trials, she ended up owing $80,000 per song, for a total of $1.92 million, an amount promptly challenged as "unconstitutional" by the defense.

But the DOJ says that the range for statutory damages was clearly laid out by Congress to apply precisely to such cases. The amounts involved were last increased in 1999 as part of the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act, which "improved" statutory damages by raising the maximum to $150,000 per infringement.

According to Congressional thinking at the time, these amounts were not intended solely to apply to massive corporations; the DOJ quotes an explanation from the negotiations that says higher damages are necessary because "many computer users are either ignorant that copyright laws apply to Internet activity, or they simply believe that they will not be caught or prosecuted..."

The DOJ adds that Congress also wanted to "deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights" by setting the awards this high, and that there is nothing problematic about this unless the amounts are "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable." $1.92 million for downloading and uploading 24 songs does not reach this threshold, says the government.

"We are pleased the Administration has filed a brief supporting our position," an RIAA spokesperson told us. "Its views are consistent with the views of every previous Administration that has weighed in on this issue."

Statutory damages are certainly a useful tool; as the DOJ points out, the actual damages can be tough to quantify in many copyright cases, and so statutory damages provide a relatively straightforward system for taking claims to court. But the damage awards in this case and in the recent Joel Tenenbaum P2P case have been life-altering, bankrupting judgments when applied to young, noncommercial infringers. Given the publicly stated antipathy toward this litigation from both federal judges overseeing the cases, the post-trial damages ruling should be worth waiting for.

Not helping Joel Tenenbaum's case, however, is the front page of The Pirate Bay—which is now displaying a graphic of Tenenbaum labeled "DJ Joel: The $675,000 mixtape." Naturally, it provides a link to all of the songs Tenenbaum was sued over.

(For the record, Team Tenenbaum says it had absolutely nothing to do with this.)