Federal Jury Awards RIAA $675K In Tenenbaum Copyright Case

A federal jury ordered Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum Friday to pay $675,000 in damages to major record labels for willful copyright infringement after he illegally downloaded and shared music over online peer-to-peer networks.

Tenenbaum, a graduate student from Providence, R.I, admitted to a jury Friday that he illegally downloaded 30 songs from numerous online file-sharing networks over an eight-year time span, violating federal copyright laws.

Following Tenenbaum's confession, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the jury had only to decide if the infringement was willful and what the amount of damages awarded to the four prosecuting recording labels should be. After a three-hour deliberation Friday, the federal jury ordered Tenenbaum to pay a financial penalty of $675,000, which translates to about $22,500 per song.

"We are grateful for the jury's service and their recognition of the impact of illegal downloading on the music community," the RIAA said in a statement. "We appreciate that Mr. Tenenbaum finally acknowledged that artists and music companies deserve to be paid for their work. From the beginning that's what this case has been about. We only wish he had done so sooner rather than lie about his illegal behavior."

Tenenbaum admitted on the witness stand that he continually downloaded songs between 1999 and 2007, once sharing more than 800 songs in 2004 on a variety of peer-to-peer networks, including Napster, KaZaA and AudioGalaxy. However, music companies only sought damages for 30 songs.

Tenenbaum's attorney, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Nesson, requested that the jury "send a message" to the music industry, asking jurors to diminish any financial penalties to 99 cents per song -- the amount he would have been required to pay had he legally purchased the music, according to reports.

Under federal law, music companies are entitled to damages of between $750 and $30,000 per song. However, Tenenbaum could have been required to pay the music companies a maximum penalty of $4.5 million -- as much as $150,000 per illegally downloaded track if the jury found that the copyright infringement was willful.

The Tenenbaum illegal music-downloading case is only the second in the U.S. to go to trial. A Minneapolis federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay music companies nearly $2 million for copyright infringement. The jury ordered Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, to pay $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song, for 24 illegally downloaded songs, after determining that she had willfully violated federal copyright laws.