Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Tenenbaum Case; Allows Charade To Continue

from the onwards-and-onwards dept

As we expected, the Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal by Joel Tenenbaum's lawyers to jump straight to the Constitutional questions concerning the ridiculous statutory damages awards for sharing a couple dozen songs. While reports are claiming that the Supreme Court has "upheld the $675,000" damages award, that's slightly misleading. At this point, the court simply refused to hear the appeal. As we pointed out in our post last week, this is really a procedural issue now. A jury had awarded $675,000 and Judge Nancy Gertner reduced the award based on Constitutional reasoning, rather than going through the remittitur process (allowing the record labels to request a new trial). The Appeals court rejected this saying that judges are supposed to avoid the constitutional questions if there's another way.

So, all this really means at this point is that the process is going to get extended (which certainly works in the RIAA's favor). It seems likely that the judge will now use the remittitur process to lower the award, and the RIAA will (once again) choose to have the case heard again. Eventually, it might be able to make its way up the appeals chain again. Or, Tenenbaum could decide that too much of his life is being wasted on this and just settle (which is what the RIAA is hoping for). So, today's refusal to hear the appeal isn't as big a deal as some are making it out to be, but it sure sucks for the guy who's at the center of this.

Filed Under: joel tenenbaum, procedural issue, statutory damages
Companies: riaa