RIAA's $1.92M Verdict Means Nothing But Absurdity

Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota mother of four, was found to have "committed willful violation" of copyrights for songs by the likes of Green Day and Sheryl Crow. Thomas-Rasset was originally tried for illegal file sharing back in 2007 -- and asked to pay $220,000 (about $9,100 a song) -- but a mistrial was declared in late 2008 after a judge said his error in issuing jury instructions might have influenced the outcome.

The $80,000-a-song hit handed down during the new trial was decided by the jury, but the number is well within the range provided by United States Copyright Law, which allows for penalties as small as $750 and as high as $150,000 per copyright violation.

But does that $80,000-per-song number -- especially in an age where the shuttering of one famous file sharing platform often begets five more -- qualify as "grossly excessive"? That's the term the U.S. Supreme Court uses when punitive damages so enormously outweigh, according to the Court's definition, the defendant's reprehensibility, the harm to the plaintiff and difference between comparable civil penalties? That's one of many debates the RIAA's actions have teed up, inadvertently or not.

Will the RIAA continue to attack the problem of illegal file sharing at its end points -- that is, hunting suspected file sharers with media circus trials like this one and moving to shut down services such as Kazaa, which in the era of BitTorrent and other file sharing platforms was well on its way to obsolescence? If it does, the outrage and backlash the RIAA is getting hit with all over the blogosphere will only get louder and nastier.

Why? It demonstrates, fundamentally, that the RIAA is fighting a twenty-first century conflict with a twentieth-century mindset. Attempting to extract enormous sums from the likes of Thomas-Rasset -- who told reporters outside the courtroom last week that there was no way she'd be able to pay up the full amount -- suggests as much. So does the recent trial of Swedish BitTorrent behemoth The Pirate Bay: another court win for recording industry executives, but yet another Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound to the entertainment industry that its leaders continue to demonstrate they have no idea how to bind.