The Real Copyright Pirates
by Jennie Rose Halperin
In 2003, five major record labels sued Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum for copyright infringement based on 30 songs he had shared on Kazaa. Tenenbaum fought back, and six years later the case went to trial; he lost, and a jury awarded the labels $675,000, $22,500 for each song. This was a fraction of the statutory maximum fine of $4.5 million Tenenbaum faced. Litigation continued for seven more years, during which the $675,000 award was reduced, and then upheld in full; Tenenbaum’s bankruptcy was concluded in March 2016. By that point he was in his thirties, Kazaa no longer existed, and the songs he’d shared—“Californication,” “When I Come Around,” “Adam’s Song,” “Heart Shaped Box”—remain preserved in legal filings, a 2003 White College Male time capsule.
The media circus surrounding the case was so pervasive that when we met Joel in Boston in 2021, my husband recognized him from the news. I never asked him about the lawsuit; apparently he doesn’t like to talk about it.
In his expert testimony in the Tenenbaum case, EFF co-founder and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow wrote, “[T]he Internet, and peer-to-peer technology in particular, allow us to do that which we, as humans, fundamentally need to do: share art.”
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