How serious is copyright infringement?
The copyright statutes tell us that a lot of money can be awarded in copyrigt infringement cases, but we rarely see it happen except in big-operation piracy operations that also fall under the criminal codes. Last week, though, ordinary Joe (or Jeffery, actually) from Arizona, who was accused of illegal file sharing on his home computer, apparently for his own personal use, found out just how expensive a few illegal files can really be.
And it happened without a shred of evidence.
Let me explain, because this is important. The RIAA filed a lawsuit against Jeffrey Howell, and the judge issued a standard order to Howell not to mess with his computer hard-drive, because there might be evidence relevant to the case on it.
Howell, who represented himself and apparently never spoke to a lawyer, formatted the hard-drive and took other steps to wipe his computer clean, in clear violation of the judge’s order.
You can’t disobey a judge without running smack into serious consequences. Here, the judge said the extent of the evidence tampering indicated there was a good chance that evidence supporting the RIAA’s claims had been there, so he found in favor of the RIAA and ordered Howell to pay $40,500 in damages, plus court costs, which were tiny in comparison since not much had actually happened in court thanks to Howell’s destruction.
The bottom line is that destruction of evidence is NEVER a good idea.
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