Accused file-swapper Jammie Thomas-Rasset was yesterday hit with a $1.5 million fine for downloading and distributing tunes by Richard Marx, Journey, Def Leppard, the Goo Goo Dolls, No Doubt, and others. Each of the 24 songs at issue in the case cost her $62,500. Meanwhile, the same offense in Germany might cost you €15 ($21) a song.

In October, the Hamburg Regional Court ruled on the case of a young man accused of sharing the songs "Engel" and "Dreh' dich nicht um" over peer-to-peer networks. The infringement had taken place back in 2006, when the young man was 16, and it occurred using the family Internet connection. The music publishers sued.

The Hamburg court decided that the best way to handle the issue was to consider what a comparable license would have cost an individual. In setting this amount, they relied on arbitration proceedings between music companies and current license offers for on-demand music made available for private use. The court had no way of knowing how many people the two songs were shared with, but it noted that neither song was recent (and thus would have less demand) and that the two tracks had only been made available by the 16-year-old for a short time.

In Hamburg, the publishers had requested €300 per track, but the court decided that €15 was the proper per-track payment, for a grand total of €30 ($42). The boy's father, who paid for the Internet connection, was also found not to be liable for his son's actions and had to pay nothing.

This calculation paralleled testimony in the Thomas-Rasset trial, though the amounts were wildly different. Several music company executives were asked on the witness stand about how much they would charge to license a track to an individual for unlimited P2P distribution; all said that a license for such tracks as "Pour Some Sugar on Me" would have to compensate the labels for all expected future revenue from those songs and that this would therefore run into the millions of dollars. (Because Thomas-Rasset replaced her hard drive soon after the infringement, no one could say how long her computer had been offering the songs to others.)

The cases are certainly not identical in their details, but they nicely illustrate just how different approaches to copyright infringement can be. The German judges seem to have treated their file-swapper as a small business who provided music to a few other people and billed him the going rate for such a license. The US jury was told much about the need for "general deterrence" of all file-swappers, and much of the testimony and argument was moralistic in tone (Thomas-Rasset needed to "take responsibility").