My lawyer friends will appreciate this story. Last week jurors in a federal court trial in New York awarded $300,000 to an independent record label for copyright violations – delivered as 145 individual awards, one for each infringed song. The defendant, MP3.com, was ecstatic, since it’s already been stung with multimillion dollar verdicts in other cases, and the plaintiff in this case was seeking $8.5 million.
Over the weekend jurors read news accounts and started calling the judge to confess that they messed up. They meant to award three million dollars, you see, and just got tripped up by that hard multiplication and division stuff.
The judge is meeting with the jurors and trying to figure out what in the world to do next.
