In one of the most ridiculous verdicts I've seen, the jury decided that Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first woman who was charged with copyright infringement and offered to settle but decided to fight the RIAA, is guilty and owes the recording industry 1.92 million dollars, or $80,000 per song.

As we mentioned in our original article, Jammie's case was full of holes, and she probably would have done better if she had just settled with the RIAA. But what's striking here is the amount of money awarded to the recording industry for infringing the copyright for just one song.

It reminds me of a recent Penny Arcade comic which mocks Microsoft's Zune Pass, which offers unlimited selection of music for 15 dollars per month; since time never ends, this technically amounts to infinity dollars. Since the music is DRMed, if you ever stop paying, you lose all your music.

It's just a joke, but it makes a good point. How much is one song worth to you? How much is it worth to the author? How much is it worth to the recording industry? You can push arguments to favor each side, and ultimately you can always claim that a song never fully loses its value and it can therefore be set to an arbitrary, insanely high amount of money.

The problem with this approach is that it results in cases like the one against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who now has (there are indications that the RIAA is still willing to settle with a much lower amount of money, but it's irrelevant; what's important is the principle of the matter) to pay 1.92 million dollars for infringing the copyright of 24 songs.

In a word, it's stupid. Those 24 songs aren't worth that much. If 100,000 people were to pirate them (a modest number, if you trust the numbers frequently cited in those RIAA piracy reports), that would bring the total damages related to these 24 songs to $1,920,000,000,00. Need I play the numbers game further? It just doesn't make sense; besides the obvious fact that the punishment must fit the crime, which it doesn't in this case, there's also the fact that the RIAA is blowing the damages piracy has caused them completely out of proportions. Unfortunately, the jury has sided with them in this particular case; hopefully, initiatives like the Pirate Party, which recently managed to enter the European Parliament, will change people's perception of copyright altogether.

[Image courtesy of Penny Arcade]