In finding Tenenbaum guilty of willful copyright infringement, the Boston court's jury fined the 25 year-old doctoral student a sum of $22,500 for each illegally downloaded song, far less than the maximum statutory fine of $150,000 per song that the jury could have hit him with.

The damages awarded today were about a third less than the massive $1.92 million fine that was assessed against in a similar music piracy case that was decided in June.

As with Tenenbaum, Thomas-Rasset too was found liable for illegally downloading 24 copyright songs. But in her case, the jury awarded the music companies which had sued her, $80,000 per infringed song.

The verdict in the Tenenbaum case came after a brief trial that began Monday and ended yesterday when Tenenbaum admitted under direct questioning that he had illegally downloaded and distributed all of the songs at the center of the case.

Tenenbaum was sued for copyright infringement by the RIAA in 2007. His case shot to prominence last fall when Harvard law school professor Charles Nesson in his fight with the RIAA. The RIAA claimed to have found more than 800 illegally downloaded songs in a shared folder on his computer, but the case focused on a representative sample of just 30 of those songs.