Statutory Damages and the Tenenbaum Litigation
Posted: 4 Jun 2010
Date Written: March 25, 2009
Abstract
Joel Tenenbaum looks a lot like every other defendant who has been accused by the music industry of illegally sharing copyrighted work online, but with one key difference: his defense attorney is Harvard Law School Professor Charlie Nesson, and Nesson is out to turn his case into a public referendum not only on the music industry’s efforts to enforce copyright through these direct-infringer suits, but also on the copyright rules that make the industry litigation possible. In this podcast, we engage Nesson’s key arguments, focusing especially on Nesson’s claim that copyright law’s statutory damages regime runs afoul of constitutional protections against excessive and/or arbitrary civil damages awards. Guests include Professor Nesson himself; Steven Marks, General Counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America; and three of the leading academic experts on punitive damages: New York University Professor Catherine Sharkey, Florida State Professor Dan Markel, and George Washington University Professor Thomas Colby. UCLA Law Professor Doug Lichtman moderates. (Podcast available for free in the archives at ipcolloquium.com.)
Keywords: copyright, copyright infringement, damages, remedies, constitutional, intellectual property, statutory damages, tennenbaum, nesson
JEL Classification: K00, K11, O34
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation