Court Rules Against Chicago Woman in Download Suit
A federal appeals court ruled against a Chicago woman charged with illegally downloading music on the Internet. In its decision late Fri., the 7th U.S. Appeals Court, Chicago, upheld a $22,500 judgment against Cecilia Gonzalez, 29, rejecting her defense that she was only sampling songs to decide which to buy The defendant in BMG Music v. Gonzalez, an immigrant mother of 5, used peer-to-peer (P2P) service Kazaa to download tracks. She based her fair-use claim on the Sony Betamax case.
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Gonzalez, one of thousands of users sued by the music industry, landed in court when she refused to pay $3,500 under a settlement offer. The U.S. Dist. Court, Chicago, previously ruled she should pay $750 for each of 30 songs she allegedly distributed. The appeals court agreed, granting BMG summary judgment and about $30,000 in statutory damages. Over several weeks, Gonzalez had downloaded nearly 1,370 copyrighted songs and “kept them on her computer until she was caught,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the court’s opinion.
“A copy downloaded, played, and retained on one’s hard drive for future use is a direct substitute for a purchased copy -- and without the benefit of the license fee paid to the broadcaster,” the court said: “The premise of Betamax is that the broadcast was licensed for one transmission and thus one viewing. Betamax held that shifting the time of this single viewing is fair use.” The files Gonzalez obtained were posted in violation of copyright law; there was no license covering a single transmission -- and she kept the copies, the court said: “Time-shifting by an authorized recipient this is not.”
Easterbrook likened Gonzalez’s actions to shoplifting, saying her trial-use defense was “no more relevant than a thief’s contention that he shoplifted ‘only 30’ compact discs, planning to listen to them at home and pay later for any he liked.” Gonzalez’s attorney, Geoff Baker, told Washington Internet Daily he’s more disappointed by the court’s calling his client a thief than by the ruling itself. The “inflammatory [shoplifter] analogy” in this case is disrespectful to Gonzalez and “potentially to the entire system,” he said: “How many shoplifters buy 99% of the goods they take? She truly believed what she was doing was absolutely legal.” Gonzalez, who bought hundreds of dollars worth of CDs annually, already owned many of the tracks she downloaded, Baker said.
The court also denounced Gonzalez’s claim that her “try-before-you-buy basis is good advertising for copyright proprietors, expanding the value of their inventory.” The opinion cited the unanimous Supreme Court MGM v. Grokster decision as “considerable empirical support.” Copyright law lets content creators decide how to promote their works; infringers like Gonzalez can’t ask courts to “second guess the market and call wholesale copying ‘fair use’ if they think that authors err in understanding their own economic interests or that Congress erred in granting authors the rights in the copyright statute,” the court said.
Gonzalez hasn’t decided whether she'll ask the Supreme Court to take the case, Baker said: “Christmas is more important to her and her 5 kids than Judge Easterbrook calling her names.”
An RIAA spokesman said his group is pleased at the decision. “The law here is quite clear. Our goal with all these anti-piracy efforts is to protect the ability of the music industry to invest in the bands of tomorrow and give legal online services a chance to flourish,” he said.