At That Cost, She Could Hire the Bands to Play Live

In a case of major overkill, a federal jury recently ordered a woman to pay $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs from the Internet. The article is unclear about the breakdown of the fine, though it seems that given the 99¢ cost of each song on iTunes, to have a punitive component 80,000 times the value of the of the asset seems a little over the top. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe fine for shoplifting a Thomas the Tank Engine (a $10.99 value) toy train would be around $880,000.

I remember the days of Napster back in the 1999-2001 when downloading was rampant. It coincided with the explosion of broadband access in universities and I remember the screeches from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) that its industry was absolutely doomed if illegal downloading continued. I'm not going to fault them for crying "Chicken Little", but they rightly changed their business model by moving their assets to the digital marketplace (iTunes and Amazon, for example) and the industry is holding course. Yes, there were parallel actions taking in terms of shutting down rampant illegal downloading, but the key to success was mostly around providing a reasonably price point where customers were willing to pay.

It's fair to say that illegal piracy still occurs. But it's been driven underground to a level of technical complexity (and illegitimacy and fears of downloading malware) that most people would rather just fork over the 99¢. Fines of $1.9 million don't serve as a deterrent as much as make people question the sanity of the judicial system and the heavy-handedness of the RIAA.