Legal News

A Loss for Nesson: BU Student Hit With $675,000 Fine

By Ashby Jones

Looks like the foam trick didn’t work out all that well, after all.

The jury in the civil suit pitting the RIAA against a Boston University graduate student who admitted to illegally downloading 30 songs late Friday ordered the student, Joel Tenenbaum, to pay $675,000 to several record companies.

But Tenenbaum, the client of Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson (pictured), who opened the trial with an interesting demonstration involving a brick of foam, didn’t appear all that chagrined, according to the National Law Journal report. Under the copyright law, Tenenbaum could have been hit with a $4.5 million tab. Tenenbaum said he was happy the verdict wasn’t in the millions and “not displeased with the jury given how the trial went.”

Nesson, however, seemed less pleased. He said he expects to appeal the judgment – and contends that U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner’s ruling before the trial began that Tenenbaum couldn’t cite fair use was “vulnerable.”

“It’s not a fair verdict because the jury never got to consider the fairness issue,” Nesson said. “We had a pretty darn good argument.”

According to the NLJ story, throughout closing arguments on Friday, even after Tenenbaum had admitted culpability, Nesson tried to convince the jury to keep damages low. He argued that Tenenbaum was “addicted” to downloading music, and that the college student was only taking advantage of available technology. On Friday, Nesson called as a witness ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall, a Mellon Fellow at MIT, to demonstrate the current ease of buying an MP3 from Amazon.com. Such technology wasn’t as readily available at the time period in issue, in 2004, argued Nesson.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 03, 2009 (boomark / email).