One of the most Draconian suggestions for combating book piracy is to go after the people who download books from file-sharing sites. So far print and e-book publishers have refrained from doing so, mostly because it is bad public relations to sue customers. The music industry had no such scruples when, earlier in the decade, it went after music downloaders, taking some 30,000 of them to court.

Just about all of the cases except one were settled.(See Can You be Sued for Downloading a Book?) The one holdout was a fellow named Joel Tenenbaum, who opted not to accept a cheap settlement offer back in 2003, when he was accused of willfully infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them on fileshare website KaZaA. Last July a federal jury in Boston ordered him to pay $675,000 to various record companies – that’s $22,500 per song.

“I’m thankful that it wasn’t much bigger, that it wasn’t millions,” he said after the verdict. Well yes, but given that the average settlement was between $3,000 – $12,000, his statement was undoubtedly uttered through a clenched jaw and a stiff upper lip. His attorney says the penalty will bankrupt him.

“Oy Tenenbaum!”punned Ben Sheffner writing about the case for the ArsTechnica website.

The trial was a slam-dunk for the plaintiffs. “Plaintiffs built their case with forensic evidence collected by MediaSentry, which showed that he was sharing over 800 songs from his computer on August 10, 2004,” Sheffner goes on to say. “A subsequent examination of his computer showed that Tenenbaum had used a variety of different peer-to-peer programs, from Napster to KaZaA to AudioGalaxy to iMesh, to obtain music for free, starting in 1999. And he continued to infringe, even after his father warned him in 2002 that he would get sued, even after he received a harshly-worded letter from the plaintiffs’ law firm in 2005, even after he was sued in 2007, and all the way through part of 2008.”

It’s hard to quantify the effects on would-be file-sharers of the suits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, but it’s safe to assume that the same peer-to-peer network that shared music shared news of the lawsuits as well, and downloaders took their keyboards and sought easier pickings.

Like e-books.

The effect on music downloads, at least KaZaA, was dramatic. Under tremendous legal pressure, the company changed its name to Kazaa and went straight. If you visit their website you’ll see a banner proclaiming “Kazaa is 100% legal and supported by” such record labels as Atlantic, Warner, Sony, EMI and Atlantic.

If book publishers were willing to drop their misgivings about public relations, you might one day see a similar banner hoisted by a book pirate listing Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin and HarperCollins as supporters.

Richard Curtis