Jury off-mark by factor 10 in MP3.com damage award

p>Even though one of them was a math teacher, a Federal US jury made a huge

calculation mistake when ordering MP3.com to pay damages to Tee Vee Toons

records, America’s largest independent record label, for copyright violations.

Instead of $3 million, the jurors awarded TVT just $300,000. The small award was

welcomed by MP3.com layers and executives as a major victory that would likely

deter other record labels from going into costly litigation to recover

relatively minor damages.

After seeing news reports on television about the verdict, however, several

jurors contacted US District Judge Jed Rakoff and told him they had made an

apparent error in calculating the damages. "The total was supposed to be

between two and three million,'' said Rakoff, adding that there appears no case

history for such jury error. Resolving the matter may be extremely complicated.

In general, a jury verdict is final. In many cases, judges have lowered the

often excessively large amounts awarded to a plaintiff by juries, but rarely, if

ever has the presiding judge allowed a jury to reconsider the amount of award it

announced in the courtroom. TVT had asked for $8.5 million in damages from

MP3.com for posting 145 copyrighted TVT CDs online The jury awarded TVT amounts

ranging from $750 to $3,125 for each CD. Apparently, that was supposed to be

$7,500 to $31,250. Jurors said they had decided on one amount of around $3

million, but wrongly divided the damage award by 100, instead of 10. Lawyers for

MP3.com told Rakoff Monday that there was no basis for changing the award. One

of the jurors was a math teacher, an MP3.com attorney noted. The TVT lawsuit was

the first by a number of independent labels. Earlier, MP3.com paid $56 million

in settlements to the five major record labels MP3.com has about $130 million in

cash and, including a reserve fund of $42.9 million set aside for damage awards

in pending suits.