5 ms·

Really? CNN said it was closer to $80,000 when the Napster cases were breaking.[1] Maybe they offered $2/song for the settlement, but according to this articl

• tzs 9y ago
  $2 or so (up to maybe $4 in some cases) per song is what they asked for when they sent an initial settlement offer to infringers, before taking any legal action. If the person would not settle and the RIAA went on to actually sue the person, the RIAA would only sue over a small fraction of the infringed songs. In the case the article you linked is talking about, they caught her infringing over 1700 songs, and asked for $5000. $5000/1700 = ~$3/song. When she would not settle, and they sued, they sued over 24 songs. I don't think I've ever seen an official explanation of why they only sue for a handful of songs, but a couple plausible reasons come to mind: 1. They will ask for statutory damages rather than actual damages [1]. Statutory damages are normally a minimum of $750 per infringed work, although that can be reduced to as low as $200 per infringed work if if the infringer was not aware and had not reason to be aware that they were infringing. They only need 7 songs to win the amount they were willing to settle for when they sent their first letter, or 25 if they think there is any chance the defendant might get the reduced $200 rate. 2. For each song they include in the lawsuit, they have to make sure all the paperwork is in order with the copyright office proving ownership. Copies of that have to be introduced into evidence at the trial. The defense is going to attack every one of these. The defense is going to ask for all the contracts with the artist and try to prove that the RIAA does not have the right to represent them. All of this takes time and costs money for no real gain. In the particular case you cited, the damage award went way above the minimum largely because the defendant tried to destroy evidence, tried to blame her children for the copying, and blatantly lied on the stand. The jury has wide discretion to pick the statutory damage amount from a range, and they picked from the high end of the range. And do you know what the RIAA did after the jury awarded that large amount? They again offered to settle for a relatively small amount. (I don't remember the exact amount--I think it was around $15000, which based on 1700 songs they caught her infringing would be around $9/song). That's been the pattern for every RIAA case that went to trial, I believe. (Only a handful went to trial, because most infringers were smart enough to realize that (1) they had no defense, and (2) minimum statutory damages were going to be way more than the RIAA was asking for, and so they settled early). [1] Actual damages are very hard to determine in most non-commercial copyright infringement cases (and actually they are often very hard to determine in commercial infringement cases, too).