But it wants, like, unbelievably huge damages anyway cuz…they’re the MPAA:
by Chris Morran
If you read stories about movie piracy, you’ll hear the industry throw around some very specific numbers about how much money is lost to pirates by the U.S. movie business every year, but when it comes time to actually detail those damages in court, the MPAA says actual piracy damages “are not capable of meaningful measurement.”
TorrentFreak reports on a recent federal court filing by the MPAA in its lawsuit against a BitTorrent search engine.
The search engine would like to make the argument that piracy is not hurting the movie industry and intends to present evidence to support this contention. But the MPAA has requested that this issue be excluded from the trial because measuring the actual economic impact of piracy on the movie industry is too complex.
“To permit consideration of actual damages under these circumstances would be perverse – and particularly unfair – given that Plaintiffs elected statutory damages precisely because their actual damages are not capable of meaningful measurement,” reads the filing.
The MPAA also states that this is all a non-issue, saying that the search engine “should not be permitted to exploit the inherent difficulty of proving actual damages in a case such as this as a basis for lowering the statutory damages award, especially when the very purpose of statutory damages was to provide a remedy that is not dependent on proof of actual damages.”