A sort of interesting ruling in the US courts now which may have an impact on how content owners calculate their losses in online piracy cases.
The ruling comes from a criminal copyright action against Daniel Dove, who ran the Elite Torrents message board in 2004 and 2005, providing access to illegal sources of both music and movies. He's already been jailed for 18 months for his involvement in the infringing torrent group, and was ordered to pay a $20,000 fine.
However, two parties, the Recording Industry Association Of America and movie makers Lionsgate Entertainment, have also made claims for 'restitution'; basically they want to be compensated for the losses they claim they suffered as a result of Dove's torrent service (legally speaking, restitution is subtly different to compensation, but that's in essence what they want).
They calculated what they were due by doing sums involving how many bits of their content were featured on Elite Torrents, how many times that content was downloaded, and what the wholesale value of that content would have been. The RIAA managed to work out it was owed over $124,500, while the somewhat optimistic Lionsgate reckoned it was due $880,000.
But, according to Ars Technica, Judge James P Jones says content owners can't equate every download to a lost sale when working out what they lost in online infringement cases.
He wrote: "Those who download movies and music for free would not necessarily purchase those movies and music at the full purchase price. Although it is true that someone who copies a digital version of a sound recording has little incentive to purchase the recording through legitimate means, it does not necessarily follow that the downloader would have made a legitimate purchase if the recording had not been available for free".
Content owners often calculate the compensation they reckon they are due in online infringement cases by equating the the number of tracks or movies downloaded with lost sales.
In reality few defendants pay anyway near the amounts of compensation those equations often result in (often because of some out of court settlement), but Jones' comments could render such calculations even more obsolete in future copyright litigation.
That said, it should be noted Jones' ruling technically only applies to claims of restitution in criminal cases, and may not apply in civil cases like those pursued by the RIAA against individual file sharers. Though defendants' lawyers may refer to Jones' ruling when trying to force down any damages their clients are liable to pay.