With Tenenbaum Facing $675,000 Judgment, Who’s Next?

With Joel Tenenbaum having lost his copyright infringement case and fined $675,000 for illegally downloading music from the Internet, the question is, who's next?

A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has been pursuing the music copyright infringement cases, said Monday that a few dozen lawsuits are pending, but none are currently scheduled for trial.

The RIAA filed more than 30,000 lawsuits against alleged illegal music downloaders after launching its enforcement efforts in 2003, according to the spokeswoman. But that includes suits against named individuals and "John Doe" suits, and there's some overlap since every named suit was at one point a John Doe suit, she said in an e-mail.

Many of those cases have been settled out of court, often in the amount of several thousand dollars, and there are only "a few dozen left pending and a handful of those in the later stages of the legal process," the RIAA spokeswoman said. Currently there are no cases scheduled for trial.

Last year the RIAA stopped filing new lawsuits, opting instead to work with Internet service providers to try to prevent illegal music file sharing.

Friday a Federal Court jury in Boston fined Joel Tenenbaum, a physics graduate student at Boston University, $675,00 for copyright infringement for illegally downloading 30 songs and sharing them online. That worked out to a fine of $22,500 for each song.

The jury reached its decision after deliberating for three hours. But the jury didn't decide that Tenenbaum had committed copyright infringement. That ruling was made by Judge Nancy Gertner, who issued a "directed finding" that Tenenbaum was guilty of copyright infringement after he acknowledged liability under oath Thursday, admitting that he had illegally downloaded music from the Internet and shared it.

Tenenbaum, 25, said he downloaded hundreds of songs between 1999 and 2007 from peer-to-peer file-sharing sites such as Napster, Limewire and Kazaa.

The lawsuit listed four recording companies as plaintiffs: Arista Records LLC, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group Recordings Inc. and Warner Brothers Records Inc.

"I'm disappointed, but not surprised," Tenenbaum told reporters after the verdict, according to the Boston Globe. He could have been fined as much as $150,000 for each song, or $4.5 million. Tenenbaum's mother told the Globe he would have to file for bankruptcy.

The lawsuit against Tenenbaum was only the second such suit to go to trial. In June a jury fined Jammie Thomas-Rasset of Brainerd, Minn., $1.92 million in a similar case.

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