How Big Should Statutory Damages Be for Copyright Violations?: Report on a Roundtable about Section 104 of the PRO IP Act

In "Roundtable on Copyright Damages: 'What Are We Doing Here?'," Sherwin Siy reports on an important roundtable discussion about Section 104 of the PRO IP Act.

Here's an excerpt:

My problem with the provision then was that no one present at the hearing was particularly keen on it—neither the Department of Justice nor the Chamber of Commerce were pushing it particularly hard. Nor was it really clear that this provision did much good to improve the state of copyright law. It has been fairly clear that this is something that the RIAA wants—it would allow them to recover a much larger sum in statutory damages. For instance, if a 10-song album were infringed, the statutory damages would not range from $750 to $150,000, as they do today, but could be as high as $7500 to $1.5 million.