German Court Finds File Sharer Guilty, Fines Him $42. Wait…What?
In stark contrast to the ridiculous fines doled upon Jamie Thomas, it appears that the German court system has both common sense and the ability to tell major labels/music industry lobbyists to go screw themselves. A man in Germany was accused of sharing two songs back in 2006 when he was just 16 years old. The songs in question — “Engel” and “Dreh’ dich nicht um” (whip out that German dictionary). In the U.S. under our “completely legal, reasonable, and fair” guidelines, such a punishment would equal out to roughly $120,000. In Germany however, the same penalty for sharing two songs is $42.
Assuming the price of a song at the a-la-carte price of $0.99, $42 for two is a solid 20x the normal price. That’s a far cry from the markup the music industry is getting from settlements and full blown lawsuits in the U.S. But of course, if file sharing fines were actually anything close to reasonable, the music industry wouldn’t make any money, and as such, wouldn’t use them to prop up their broken industry.
Hmm. Just think about that.
When trying to grow your business, especially one in this digital age with competitors cropping up by the hundreds if not thousands, shooting yourself in the foot with poor business decisions doesn’t seem like a very good way to continue rolling in the dough. For Newsday (which is owned by Cablevision) a paywall isn’t necessarily the best idea as many customers expect a free web portal, the way they are going about it is all wrong. The likely scenario would seem to be as such:
