I don't think it's an attempt to act hip as much as it is that thanks to social networking, you don't need the actual numbers to give the impression of being a formidable political force anymore. Sockpuppetry and astroturfing are the mainstays of political discourse on the internet now, with huge spikes nearing election season.
I meant that statement more in the sense of pretending to be relevant but anyway here's some law
In a copyright suit against Limewire, Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York has ruled that statutory damages are only owed on a per-work basis, not a per-download basisFirst, a little background. Sometimes it can be hard to prove damages in a copyright suit, that is to say it can be hard to put a number to how the defendant's infringement has harmed you. (This is especially so in light of the much-debated disconnect between downloads and lost sales.) So, the Copyright Act lets rightsholders opt to bypass the whole issue of damages and take a
statutory award, within a range fixed by the statute*, instead. The rationale is that in a case where the exact damages are speculative or otherwise unclear, it's better to err on the side of letting the rightsholder recover.
* $750-30,000, specifics determined "as the court considers just."
17 USC ? 504(c). If the infringement was innocent, the floor scales down to $200. If the infringement was willful**, the cap scales up to $150,000.
** This is why the usual "South Park/Haruhi/Touhou/etc. doesn't belong to me" disclaimer is stupid. Not only does it not help--it's
copyright, not
attributionright--but you're acknowledging that you're using IP that doesn't belong to you, which makes the infringement willful.
Now, statutory damages are handled
per work infringed. That's why you see suits against music downloaders getting so pricey--$30,000 per work, x 10 songs downloaded, that's $300,000 right there. But the plaintiffs here wanted to take it a step further. They wanted to take Limewire for the statutory amount
per download, that is, collecting damages multiple times for the same work. Wood's response:
As it stands now, Defendants face a damage award that "could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not over a billion dollars)." (Pl. Mem. Of Law in Support of Prelim. Inj, at 8 (Dkt. Entry No. 243).) Indeed, if one multiples the maximum statutory damage award ($150,000) by approximately 10,000 post-1972 works, Defendants face a potential award of over a billion dollars in statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants' damages could reach into the trillions. . . . As Defendants note, Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is "more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877." (Def. Mem. at 2-3.)
Of course, $150,000 per work infringed is still a hefty sum, considering the plaintiffs identify 11,000 songs that were infringed through Limewire. But this decision seems to be a far more faithful reading of the statute, and it's nice to see that the record companies can't get
everything they want.
