Music pirate fined USD 22,500 per song - expensive KaZaa usage

A now 29 year old man is convicted to pay a fine of $675,000 for downloading and distributing 30 songs on Kazaa in 2004. An U.S. court decided this after a legal battle of almost 10 years. Joel Tenenbaum downloaded 30 songs from KaZaa which was a very popular download application back then.

Joel Tenenbaum

ADVERTISEMENT

KaZaa was the successor of Napster which used centralized severs, to avoid legal issues KaZaa was designed to work without central servers. It worked similar to Bittorrent, files that were downloaded also became available for others to download. Tenenbaum has been convicted for downloading and due to the last feature, also for automatically distributing the songs.

Sony, Warner Brothers, Atlantic Records, Arista Records and UMG Recordings initially demanded a $3500 compensation from the then 20 year old Tenenbaum who was a student at Boston University. When Tenenbaum didn't agree the companies started a lawsuit in 2009. That year the student was fined $675,000 which could have been as high as $4.5 million. Tenenbaum appealed and the fine was lowered to $67,500. After a new lawsuit the original fine was imposed again and Tenenbaum tried to get the case in court again.

This was unsuccessful for him and Wednesday the fine was definitively confirmed. This means that the original fine of $675,000, which equals $22,500 per song, has to be paid by Tenenbaum.

ADVERTISEMENT

No posts to display