A U.S. District Court judge ruled Monday that a Boston University graduate student will have to pay the hefty fine imposed on him for illegally downloading music, but she said she cannot stop him from promoting such behavior and the law must be more lenient on file sharing in some cases.

Judge Nancy Gertner signed off on Joel Tenenbaum’s $675,000 required payment to the Recording Industry Association of America as compensation for the 30 songs he illegally downloaded and shared.

However, Gertner said she cannot constitutionally rule against Tenenbaum’s right to promote his actions, according to a Dec. 7 Boston Globe article.

‘The word ‘promote’ is far too vague to withstand the scrutiny of the First Amendment,’ she said. ‘Although plaintiffs are entitled to statutory damages, they have no right to silence defendant’s criticism.’

Gertner pointed to Tenenbaum’s defense as one of the reasons she upheld the ruling in favor of the RIAA. Tenenbaum proposed a fair-use defense, which stated that all music downloaded was either going to be purchased eventually or that Tenenbaum had used P2P file-sharing before the music was available for download, according to ComputerWorld.

Gertner wrote in her final ruling that Tenenbaum’s defense was ‘a version of fair-use [defense] so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress created, defying both statute and precedent.’

Though she ruled in favor of the RIAA, Gertner also expressed concern over the level of penalties that the recording industry can seek in her final ruling.

‘The Court, deeply concerned by the rash of file-sharing lawsuits, the imbalance of resources between the parties, and the upheaval of norms of behavior brought on by the internet [sic], did everything in its power to permit Tenenbaum to make his best case for fair use,’ she wrote in her ruling, posted on The Docket, the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s newsblog.

She wrote that judicial policies on file sharing should not be so set in stone, considering the position of the issue in history.

‘The advent of widespread internet [sic] access in the 1990s threw a number of norms into disarray, offering sudden access to a wealth of digitized media and giving the veneer of privacy or anonymity to acts that had public consequences,’ she wrote. ‘At the beginning of this period, both law and technology were unsettled.’

She also mentioned other nuances that faced courts ruling on file sharing cases.

‘It might matter, too, with whom [a defendant] shared files ‘- a few friends or the world ‘- as well as how many copyrighted works he shared, and for how long,’ she wrote.

Tenenbaum told The Globe he will likely seek a new trial and ask Gertner to cut the fine he is ordered to pay.

Look for further coverage in The Daily Free Press tomorrow.