Copyright penalties in Europe

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Copyright in Europe, versus the USA.

Accused file-swapper Jammie Thomas-Rasset was yesterday hit with a $1.5 million fine for downloading and distributing tunes by Richard Marx, Journey, Def Leppard, the Goo Goo Dolls, No Doubt, and others. Each of the 24 songs at issue in the case cost her $62,500. Meanwhile, the same offense in Germany might cost you €15 ($21) a song.

In October, the Hamburg Regional Court ruled on the case of a young man accused of sharing the songs “Engel” and “Dreh’ dich nicht um” over peer-to-peer networks. The infringement had taken place back in 2006, when the young man was 16, and it occurred using the family Internet connection. The music publishers sued.

The Hamburg court decided that the best way to handle the issue was to consider what a comparable license would have cost an individual. In setting this amount, they relied on arbitration proceedings between music companies and current license offers for on-demand music made available for private use. The court had no way of knowing how many people the two songs were shared with, but it noted that neither song was recent (and thus would have less demand) and that the two tracks had only been made available by the 16-year-old for a short time.

In Hamburg, the publishers had requested €300 per track, but the court decided that €15 was the proper per-track payment, for a grand total of €30 ($42). The boy’s father, who paid for the Internet connection, was also found not to be liable for his son’s actions and had to pay nothing.

Post external references

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    http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/42-german-p2p-fine-stark-contrast-to-seven-figure-us-judgments.ars
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