Searching for Damages

In a quite astonishing lawsuit, Universal Music could be demanding hundreds of millions in damages from Grooveshark’s music streaming service. Claims in the lawsuit lay waste to Grooveshark’s insistence that they enjoy �safe harbor’ under the DMCA, stating categorically that bosses and other workers at the company, from the CEO down, personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service.

This is the argument of publishing houses, and increasingly, artists: they should be able to decide whether you get to make non-rivalrous use of what they created, and whether your use damages them. Electronic files have zero marginal costs. But hotel rooms and airplane seats also have near-zero marginal costs. Is it therefore okay to sneak into a hotel room, as long as you make the bed perfectly before you leave?

The Department of Justice has filed a brief siding with the RIAA in its civil case against the file-sharing student Joel Tenenbaum.The RIAA is protesting a demand from the student's legal team, who want the court to reduce the massive $675,000 fine on due process grounds, to the minimum statutory damages of $750 per song.

Spanish music group Promusicae has sued Enrique Dans, professor at the IE Business School and a well-known blogger, after he claimed that the group is a copyright monopoly that violates antitrust laws. In addition to a public apology, the Spanish version of the RIAA is demanding 20,000 euros in damages. The professor, however, is prepared to fight the case until the bitter end and says he's protected by the right to freedom of expression.

After failing to hand himself over to authorities as required in January, Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm lost his chance to serve his sentence in an open prison. As a final surrender deadline looms, it’s been revealed that interest charges being applied since May 2006 have boosted the damages award against the site’s founders by 60% to nearly $11 million, a huge $4.06 million uplift.

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