Actual lawyer wrote:
Actually Avocado the biggest copyright infringement awards are typically based on statutory damages, contrary to your insinuation.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/281166-statutory-damages-are-a-vital-part-of-the-copyright-system%3famp
Nonsense. And the very article that you helpfully linked to supports my point:
The $150,000 figure stands at the center of complaints against statutory damages, causing at least one excitable advocate to claim that potential statutory damages resulting from a single copyright infringement case can be "as high as approximately $100+ trillion in 2015 dollars, almost twice the world's current gross domestic product." Such vacuous commentary is unfortunately characteristic of the debate over statutory damages, where emotions tend to run roughshod over clear thinking.
. . .
Further, if the statute is really "too vague" and jury instructions are insufficient, then one might expect an epidemic of unreasonable statutory damages awards. Not according to the data.
Lex Machina, which recently released detailed data on intellectual property (IP) litigation (subscription required), found that from 2000 to 2015, total damages in copyright cases involving statutory damages were a little over $674 million (including legal fees, etc.), or about $45 million per year. Moreover, the top 28 cases accounted for $226 million, or 34 percent of the total damages. Put another way, about one-third of damages are accounted for by the top 2 percent of damage judgments.
And these large judgments aren't against Silicon Valley innovators. The largest judgment in the sample — $37.5 million — was awarded in Elsevier, Inc. v. Does 1-10. This award was a default judgment in favor of Elsevier because the defendants never filed an answer to the complaint or otherwise appeared in court. The second largest judgment — another default judgment for over $28 million — was awarded in ABS-CBN Corporation et al. v. pinoy-ako.info. Both "Does 1-10" or "pinoy-ako.info" were blatant piracy sites or their anonymous operators, not innovators.
In other words, the total amount of statutory damages awarded in all copyright cases over a sixteen-year period was less than the actual damages in a single big copyright case, such as Oracle's $1.3 billion award against SAP in 2010. And the amounts involved in really, really big cases, like Apple v. Microsoft, dwarf all of those statutory damage awards put together. Moreover, as that article indicates, the biggest statutory damage awards are typically in cases against anonymous individuals or entities or defendants with insignificant assets who offer little or no defense in court. Those are not big copyright cases, which generally involve defendants that actually have money and are reluctant to part with it without a fight.
