NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “At Fordham Law School’s annual IP Law Conference this year, Slashdot member NewYorkCountryLawyer had a chance to square off with Kenneth Doroshow, a Senior Vice President of the RIAA, over the subject of copyright statutory damages. Doroshow thought the Jammie Thomas verdict of $222,000 was okay, since he stated, Ms. Thomas might have distributed 10 million unauthorized copies. NYCL, on the other hand, who has previously derided the $9250-per-song file verdict as ‘one of the most irrational things [he has] ever seen in [his] life in the law’, stated at the Fordham conference that the verdict had made the United Says ‘a laughingstock throughout the world’. An Australian professor on the panel stated ‘The comment has been made a few times that America is out of whack and you’re a laughingstock in the rest of the world. As the only non-American on the panel, that’s true. We do see the cases like Thomas in our newspapers, and we think: “Wow, those crazy Americans, what are they up to now?” This whole notion of statutory damages is not something that we’ve within our Copyright Act. You actually have to be able to prove damage for you to be able to be compensated for that.’ NYCL also got to debate the ‘making available’ issue, saying that there was no ‘making available’ right in US copyright law, despite the insistence of the program’s moderator, the ‘keynote’ speaker, and a ‘majority vote’ of the audience that there was such a right. The next day 2 decisions came down, and a month later yet another decision came down, all rejecting the ‘making available’ theory.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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