After a valiant and creative defense from Charles Nesson and his law students, Joel Tenenbaum lost the legal battle that has captured the Internet’s attention for days under the nickname Joel Fights Back, in reference to the fact that Joel chose to go to court rather than settle under pressure like the majority of the targets of the RIAA. The final verdict of his case came in a few minutes ago.

$22500 per MP3 is completely unreasonable. To put it in perspective, Air France paid $24000 to each of the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. This makes a single MP3 worth slightly less than a human life.

I won’t recount the whole story here. The link above as well as these blogs do a better job of explaining it all than I ever could. I just want to share my thoughts on the subject.

I pirate music. All of my friends pirate music. Any of us could have been in Joel’s place. Indeed, the MP3s he shared were shared by millions of other people. He was just a drop in the ocean. This is where the injustice bothers me most; it’s just luck that he’s on that stand, rather than me or one of my close friends, or pretty much anyone my age. Hell, I’d bet that every single student I see on campus when school starts again is guilty of the same crime Joel is. How can any of us say he deserves such a verdict?

This isn’t justice, and it makes me ashamed of my country’s justice system.

UPDATE: JoelFightsBack.com is accepting donations. I have donated $30 to helping Joel out with this financial burden, and (hopefully)with future legal defense. While I don’t like the idea of paying money that could end up in the hands of the RIAA, I sympathize so strongly with their cause that this was the least I could do.

Well, the obvious problem with this is that piracy isn’t stealing. Under the law, piracy is “copyright infringement” — stealing implies depriving another of a possession or property, and piracy does not take anything away from the owners of the copyright, other than an abstract loss of potential profit. In other words, when a DVD is copied, the original DVD remains intact.

A less obvious difference between copyright infringement and stealing is the amount of trouble you’ll be in for committing each of them, respectively. This woman was fined 2.4 million dollars for downloading 24 songs, or about two albums worth of music. What do you think would have happened if she had just been caught attempting to steal two albums from a record store? Her punishment would have been much less harsh, at the very least.

This seems very counter-intuitive. Stealing obviously and directly harms another person, by depriving them of property. Piracy does no such thing. As a trend, perhaps, piracy is harmful to copyright holders (I contend that it is not nearly as harmful as it is made out to be in this respect, but for sake of argument I’ll concede this point here), but it’s absurd to claim that, on an individual level, copying a CD deserves orders of magnitude more punishment than stealing a CD.

There’s still room for disagreement here — I’m only pointing out that the rhetoric on the side of the copyright holders is hollow and misleading. There’s a legitimate case to be made on their side, but they aren’t making it — to me, that says something important. I’m not here to play the part of the anarchist, calling for the abolition of copyright. There are two extremes on this issue, and I don’t belong to either one. I do, however, think that piracy can be acceptable. Or, said in a more pessimistic way: piracy is unstoppable. Whether it’s morally defensible or not, it isn’t going away, and calling pirates “thieves” won’t change a damn thing. Actually, it might change one thing — it’ll drive those on our side to be more and more extreme in their opposition to copyright. When I bought an e-book and found that the DRM would prevent me from reading it on my device, I pirated it — and, importantly, I felt doing so was morally justified. The more draconian the DRM, the more people will pirate. The more media companies pull Youtube videos and send take-down letters, the more people will pirate. We’re watching corporations actively participating in their own demise.

In the words of Lawrence Lessig: they criminalize our culture. I’m sure everyone reading this article can think of some funny, original, creative Youtube video that was removed because it contained some copyrighted material. Is it any surprise that we fight back?

I can’t really say I believe downloading an album is “fine,” morally, but I do it anyway. I still buy albums I like (as I do with games, movies, etc), but that comes out of a need to give back to the artists. I never buy media just to have it, because simply having the CD means nothing to me; I could have just downloaded it. The only thing the propaganda and rhetoric does is make me feel less and less guilty about piracy.