RIAA Settles Kazaa Copyright Battle with Bronx Woman
Denise Barker, a Bronx woman charged with copyright infringement by downloading eight copyrighted recordings via the peer-to-peer file sharing application Kazaa, has settled a three-year lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for $6,050. Her lawyer, Ray Beckerman admits her client’s act of file sharing but in her defense, challenges the constitutionality of the Copyright Act as quoted by the plaintiffs. According to Beckerman, the damages the act authorizes per download is unconstitutional and against the U.S. Supreme Court precedents.
The defendant filed the answer to the plaintiff’s statement on July 28, 2008 at the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, New York.
RIAA filed the lawsuit on behalf of plaintiffs: Elektra Entertainment Group, Inc.; UMG Recordings, Inc.; and Virgin Records America, Inc., owners of the said copyrighted recordings.
How Attorney Ray Beckerman Fought the RIAA
Beckerman argues that the download cost of each recording would only amount to $3.50. This means that the penalties requested by the said plaintiffs go way above a thousand times of the actual injury to the recording industry, charging fines that amount to $750 to $150,000 per recording. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that financial damages must not exceed a 9-to-1 ratio, or it would be deemed unconstitutional.
Barker admitted to the fact that she is a user of the peer-to-peer file sharing application Kazaa as of November 12, 2004 and has actively shared contents with other users in the network including the eight copyrighted recordings duly owned by the plaintiffs. This is alleged by the plaintiffs to be so by her merely making it available on her computer for other Kazaa members to download in her “My Shared Folder”. However, she denies that the plaintiffs issued appropriate copyright notices that could have avoided the lawsuit and subsequent alleged copyright infringements. Barker and her lawyer also state that there is no actual proof that the copyrighted recordings were the exact recording the defendant downloaded and made available. Such a claim was also supported by the U.S. Court of Appeals precedent in BMG Music v. Gonzales, Seventh Circuit, 2005.
Beckerman also cites that the mere joining of and participating in Kazaa, an online media distribution system, cannot be misconstrued as a specific act of copyright infringement.
It was also revealed in the case that the documents referred to by the plaintiff in their complaints were procured by an unlicensed investigator, MediaSentry, now known as Safenet, Inc. The said investigator is therefore guilty of unlawfully pretexting and invasion of defendant’s privacy making the plaintiffs who paid and asked for their services “guilty of unclean hands.”
Attorney Ray Beckerman, on behalf of his client Denise Barker, requested for a dismissal of the complaint, and asked for the defendant to be awarded costs, disbursements, attorney’s fees, and other damages applicable.
RIAA already has sued 20,000 individuals for copyright infringement via file sharing on behalf of member record labels such as the above-mentioned plaintiffs. Most of the cases were settled out of court for a few thousand dollars each. For example, Denise could have settled for $4,000 once she had received one of the RIAA’s prelitigation settlement letters. Instead, she now has to make monthly payments of $110 per month for the next four-and-a-half years plus attorneys’ fees. Of course, RIAA’s legal bills must have been astronomical.
Jammie Thomas’ case in Minnesota was the only one among the 20,000 RIAA lawsuits that has gone to trial. Thomas was sued for infringing on 24 songs downloaded via Kazaa in 2007. She denied her guilt and challenged the constitutionality of the Copyright Act but was found liable by the jury in October last year. She was ordered to pay $222,000 total damages.
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