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RIAA Appeals Award of Attorneys' Fees
Fishing Expedition writes in with a story in Ars reporting that the RIAA has decided to appeal a judge's decision to award attorneys' fees to defendant Debbie Foster in Capitol Records v. Foster. If the award stands, the RIAA could find itself in trouble in numerous other cases, and they know it. Their real fear, more than the attorneys' fees, is the judge's finding that the RIAA's arguments for contributory and vicarious infringement claims in cases like this one are not viable.
And that's how it should be. Always. If you lose, you pay, with the theory that you'll learn your lesson and not do it again. Conversely, if they win, they get more money. It's a risk they took from the getgo, and have been getting away with it because there have been few real challenges against them.
The problem is that no one would sue a large company paying $5000 an hour for attorneys, for fear of losing being more costly than any possible judgment from winning. The law should limit the loser to paying only as much as his or her own attorney fees to the winner. That way it only depends on how seriously each side takes its case, and realistically it will have the same effect where it matters, namely where individuals need to sue large corporations. If they lose, they're only out twice as much as they would have paid their own lawyer, not $millions. If they win, the corporation almost certainly spent more than they did on lawyers, so they'll pay the whole bill. It makes even more sense when you consider that the corporation can essentially throw as many lawyers on the case as they want just to frighten an opponent with huge attorney fees because the lawyers are employees and they'd be paying them no matter what they were working on.