Times: Copyright Infringement Does Not Pay for Joel Tenenbaum

Warning - copyright infringement is a serious and costly crime... even more serious if you can prove that it was willful.

Graduate Student Fined in Music Download Case

A jury decided on Friday that a Boston University graduate student who admitted to downloading more than 800 songs from the Internet between 1999 and 2007 should pay $675,000 in damages to four record labels for copyright violations, The Associated Press reported. The student, Joel Tenenbaum, right, testified Thursday in federal district court in Boston that he had downloaded and shared hundreds of songs by artists including Nirvana, Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins, and said he had lied in pretrial depositions when he said friends or siblings may have downloaded the songs to his computer. The record labels involved in the case have focused on 30 songs that Mr. Tenenbaum, 25, downloaded. Under federal law they were entitled to $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, but the jury was permitted to raise that to as much as $150,000 a track if it found the infringements were willful.