I'm not sure anyone benefited from this really, except perhaps the record industry's lawyers, who got one final pay day from the Recording Industry Association Of America's self-harming P2P litigation campaign which technically speaking came to an end last year. The record companies were successful legally speaking, of course, but even if Joel Tenenbaum somehow found $675,000, that wouldn't bring much joy to the owners of the 30 songs the Boston student illegally shared on the internet, not once all the RIAA's legal and administrative costs have been deducted.
And while Tenenbaum's legal rep, Charlie Nesson, said he thought his client had won in the "court of public opinion", I'm not sure the defence can really be certain of even that. With Tenenbaum's long held resolve against the evil record companies, and Nesson's bullish pre-trial interviews, you expected the defence to wheel out some killer evidence that, if not getting the file-sharer off the hook, would at least give the record companies a PROPER bloody nose. And yet most of Nesson's defence case was a bit, well, haven't we heard all this before?
Anyway, yes, the big Joel Tenenbaum P2P lawsuit reached its climax on Friday when, as expected, Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the student was guilty of copyright infringement for sharing 30 unlicensed tracks via Kazaa, and asked the jury to consider what damages he should pay to the content owners. As previously reported, the size of the damages depended on whether the jury considered Tenenbaum's file-sharing to be "wilful". The range of damages available to the jury was wide, starting at $750 per track, going up to $30,000 per track, and up to $150,000 track if they believed the defendant did indeed wilfully infringe. The latter rate would have seen Tenenbaum ordered to pay a massive $4.5 million.
Summing up, unsurprisingly, the defence again painted Tenenbaum as an otherwise good kid caught up in a dying industry's last bid to protect its intellectual property rights, while the plaintiffs wanted the jury to see the defendant as a persistent and uncaring infringer. According to Billboard, Nesson said: "this is a federal case, and what is it about? It's about a kid in his bedroom clicking on a computer screen, it seems out of proportion", while the RIAA's man remarked: "The defendant is a hardcore, habitual, long-term infringer who knew what he was doing was wrong, but did it anyway".
In the end the jury opted for the more modest $675,000 - so $22,500 per track. It was an interesting figure in some ways. Under Gertner's definition as delivered to the court last week, Tenenbaum did wilfully infringe, yet the jury resisted the temptation to go for record breaking damages - the final figure is quite modest compared to the $4.5 million maximum, and even to the $1.92 million that other famous American file-sharer, Jammie Thomas, was ordered to pay in June. So not the major league damages the RIAA's legal reps were pushing for.
Yes it's a huge sum of money for someone like Tenenbaum, who would have been originally offered a few grand out-of-court settlement. And it's much more than Nesson was angling for - at one point he suggested the labels get 99 cents per track, ie what they would have got had the tracks been sold on iTunes. Nesson wanted low damages not just to save his client money (and save him from the hassle of bankruptcy), but because he wanted the jury to say that, while Tenenbaum's file-sharing was technically speaking illegal, the law is an ass on this subject, the record companies are abusing that dodgy law, and a minimal payment would communicate that to the content owners, and the world at large.
Which is why it's hard for anyone to claim success. The damages figure isn't headline grabbing for the labels, because it's a third of what Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay, but it's big enough for the industry to still be portrayed by the pro-P2P lobby as a bunch of money grabbing bastards. Tenenbaum, though, has not really embarrassed the record companies in anyway that they haven't been embarrassed before, and is left with the mess of having to find all that cash, or find a way of getting out of paying.
All of which means this case only really showed us one thing - and we already knew that. Even when the law is clearly on the content owners' side, this suing the fans thing doesn't really help anyone but the lawyers - not the fans, not the labels. There has to be another way. Of course the RIAA have already realised that, which made continuing with the whole Tenenbaum thing extra silly. Both sides wanted the infamous 'sue-the-fans' era to go out with a bang. Neither side got what they wanted.