ArsTechnica.com, April 12, 2009 by Nate Anderson
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/profs-protest-massive-p2p-damage-awards.ars
The authors aren’t opposed to the idea of statutory damages, which were designed to provide relief in cases where it was quite difficult to quantify the actual losses suffered by the copyright holder…. But ending up on the hook for up to $150,000 just for swapping a single song on a file-sharing network? Craziness—and far too likely to be used against regular people. “In today’s world, where the average person in her day-to-day life interacts with many copyrighted works in a way that may implicate copyright law,” says the paper, “the dangers posed by the lack of meaningful constraints on statutory damage awards are particularly acute.”