Several major record labels are asking the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a rehearing en banc in their piracy lawsuit against Grande Communications. They argue that the court erred in holding that piracy damages should be calculated per album, rather than per song. They argue that this decision, which will lower the $47 million damages award, doesn’t reflect the way that music is commercialized today.
They should just look at how many times the pirates listened to each song, and base the fine on the prevailing streaming rate to artists. Then the damages will calculate to like $5. Or if you really want to make them hurt look at how long they had the files and charge them the streaming subscription rate for like 3 years, then they may owe hundreds of dollars.
The problem with that is it doesn’t provide disincentive. If you catch 1% of pirates, the fine has to be more than 100x the loss to make it an economic disincentive.
You know, assuming these are tangible goods that cannot be copied without harming the creator. Reality is piracy does not correlate with sales very well.
When corporations steal from their employees by wage theft, they are penalized “double damages” or twice what they stole. Seems that would be reasonable to apply to this.
When the fuck has economic disincentive ever been a priority for civil courts? Large corporations do billions of dollars of damage on a regular basis, and get fined for millions.
