Alfred Yen at Madisonian.net recently commented on a short Newsweek piece about the penalties that can be imposed on parents for the legal infractions of their children. (The full piece is reproduced here.) He points out that

Leading the list of monetary fines (there is also listed a 6 months jail sentence in Kansas for allowing underage drinking at home) was “illegal downloads,” with a fine of “up to $150,000.” Next was “weapons” in California (up to $30,000 “if someone is killed or injured because a child was allowed access to a weapon,” followed by vandalism in Arkansas (a mere $15,000). So, according to this list, the worst thing a parent can do is give his or her child access to a Internet-connected computer that gets used to download infringing material. It’s apparently worse than giving him or her access to a gun that is used to shoot someone. Interesting priorities.

Yep. Of course, this $150,000 number rarley happens in practice, at least with individuals. In the RIAA lawsuits brought against individuals by the RIAA or its member labels, the overwhelming majority are settled, apparently at around $3750. (See Ray Beckerman’s thoughtful and regularly updated synopsis of the RIAA lawsuit process.) The $150,000 number is more a comment on the priorities apparently embodied in copyright law — though motivated in part by lobbying from the music industry, among others.

One of the many troubling things about the RIAA’s strategy of suing individuals for copyright infringement across peer-to-peer networks is that these individuals are sometimes under age, and the RIAA has been willing and eager to extend responsibility to the parents. This is just another aspect of their effort to extend liability and penalty towards secondary agents, whether it be the makers of the file-trading networks, the producers of technologies like mp3 players, the ISPs, the universities.

This may be changing, however. Back in February, an Oklahoma judge found in favor of the defendant in Capitol v. Foster. Foster was charged with copyright infringement, but she claimed that she was not the user they had identified and had never downloaded music from the Internet. Her daughter may or may not have been the one who had been downloading, but the record label decided to push the case, arguing that as the owner of the Internet account used, Foster should be held responsible anyway. The court agreed. And this month, they ordered the record label to pay Foster’s lawyer’s fees, which had ballooned to $68,685.23. Groklaw notes that this decision may have serious repurcussions for this strategy, as it is the first time the RIAA has had to cover costs of those wrongfully sued, which apparently happens quite often. It may also explain why the RIAA has slowed its lawsuit strategy (stopped at 17,587?) and replaced it with its “pre-litigation letter” approach — 2,423 and counting. But it is also a nice reminder