> First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties. The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensa

> First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties. The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages. > Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work. The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ per-work, yet if musical recordings were subject to the same statutory compulsory licensing as musical compositions, they would only be liable for 0.124$ per copy, a nearly 6000x difference between compensatory and statutory damages for their single copy of a work. Of course, it could be reasonable to have statutory damages as a punitive measure to dissuade copyright infringement, but the Supreme Court has ruled that punitive damages in excess of a 10:1 ratio with compensatory damages is almost certainly unconstitutional in a lawsuit [3]. That is not binding on Congress with respect to law, but it is certainly troubling that we have decided that music copyright infringement is so heinous as to demand a nearly 600x greater punitive damage ratio compared to what is already at the limits of what is considered constitutional when no specific ratio is specified. [1] https://www.dcba.org/mpage/vol210209art3 https://www.dcba.org/mpage/vol210209art3 [2] https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages