WOW, what a scorcher - record damages for record companies

The BBC has just posted news that British Phonographic Industry, which represents the interests of recording companies in the UK, has secured a whopping total of £41 million damages against CD-Wow, following proceedings in which the Hong Kong-based web retailer was found both to have infringed copyright and to have broken contractual undertakings it gave to cease infringing. The quantum works out as £37 million in damages plus interest to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Offhand the IPKat suspects that this may be a new British Record for Copyright Damages. Can anyone confirm?

Meanwhile the war for the hearts and minds of the British public goes on. CD-Wow vows to carry on selling cheap CDs and may appeal: "We are the little guys selling CDs to the UK market and they (the BPI) have picked on us for that reason", says its boss Henrik Wesslen. For BPI, Geoff Taylor disagrees: "CD-Wow is no consumer champion. ... The vibrancy of British music depends on a fair return on the investments that allow British talent to shine. This decision is an important step in ensuring that British music has a bright future".

With UK retail sales of £21.7 million in 2005, CD-Wow was the third largest online music retailer there after Amazon and Play. The company blamed its copyright infringements on "human error", which seems to the IPKat a curious basis upon which to champion the public's right to buy cheap recordings. Merpel is glad to see CD-Wow nailed, since it hasn't exactly done much to boost the local British economy in terms of job-creation or subsidising creativity, but she can't help thinking that British consumers wouldn't have been so keen to shop at CD-Wow if the retail price of CDs in the UK had been as cheap as it was in some other jurisdictions where the same goods were lawfully marketed, such as the US.

Earlier IPKat posts here, here and here