No Rock And Roll Fun

NORWAY JUDGES FINE STUDENT: The Supreme Court in Oslo has ruled that a student must pay the sixteen thousand (American) dollars compensation to a bunfh of record labels, upholding a finding in a lower court. The case was brought by the IFPI through Tono (the RIAA in Norway) - and some of those same multinational labels we love in the rest of the world; the accused had created a webpage offering links to mp3 files - 170 in all. This, the court decided, was violating the law by showing people how to break the law.

There's two things about the ruling. First, the damages - which, we reckon, comes out at about three hundred and fifty quid or so for every song linked to; a ridiculous level of compensation which - even at official download prices - implies that a lot of people must have been using those links. Which is the second point, really: the IFPI weren't called upon to prove either that they or their labels had really experienced any loss at this sort of level as a result of the activities of this kid, nor did they demonstrate in court that the tracks being linked to actually were being hosted illegally: it was apparently just generally accepted that they must have been.

In their original submission, the IFPI tried to argue it had made losses:

The Respondents have had a financial loss due to a reduced sale. Based on the numbers presented and the information on the number of visitors of napster.no an estimated loss must be set to NOK 40,000. The loss per download must be equal to the loss for marginal contribution of each non-sale set to NOK 15 per CD single. In addition must be added a loss per album not sold. The holders of the rights must as well receive a compensation for control costs accumulated due to the activities on the web pages of Bruvik. It is important to set a warning example for financial liability. The compensation should not be subject to mitigation.

... which is clearly something that needs to be seriously questioned in court. How can the record companies be allowed to have their claim that an illegal download represents one unsold CD single or one unsold portion of a CD album? Surely - if anything - it would be an unsold download; but even that is far from a given. Even more ridiculous is the claim that people merely looking at the list of links equals a lost CD sale. It's the height of the cock of the poppy. While we're sure the Norwegian Supreme Court is a bunch of great guys, they don't seem to have been able to grasp the finer details of this case.