The recording industry won a key fight against illegal music downloading when a federal jury ordered a woman to pay US$222,000 for sharing copyrighted music online.
The jury on Thursday ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her US$9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs online in violation of their copyrights.
"She was in tears. She's devastated," Thomas' attorney, Brian Toder, said. "This is a girl that lives from paycheck to paycheck, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheck garnished for the rest of her life."
Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies, said, "This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK."
He said no decision had yet been made about what the record companies would do to pursue collecting the money from Thomas.
Toder said the plaintiff's attorney fees are automatically awarded in such judgments under copyright law, meaning the Minnesota woman could actually owe as much as US$500,000. However, he said he suspected the record companies "will probably be people we can deal with."
In the first such lawsuit to go to trial, the record companies accused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas denied wrongdoing and testified that she didn't have a Kazaa account.
During the trial, the record companies presented evidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by a Kazaa user under the name "tereastarr." Their witnesses testified that the Internet address used by "tereastarr" belonged to Thomas.
Toder said in his closing that the companies never proved "Jammie Thomas, a human being, got on her keyboard and sent out these things."
"We don't know what happened," Toder told jurors. "All we know is that Jammie Thomas didn't do this."
Gabriel called that defense "misdirection, red herrings, smoke and mirrors."
He told jurors a verdict against Thomas would send a message to other illegal downloaders.
Copyright law sets a damage range of US$750 to US$30,000 per infringement, or up to US$150,000 if the violation was "willful." Jurors ruled that Thomas' infringement was willful but awarded damages of US$9,250 per song; Gabriel said they did not explain to attorneys afterward how they reached that amount.
Before the verdict, an official with an industry trade group said he was surprised it had taken so long for one of the industry's lawsuits against individual downloaders to come to trial.
Illegal downloads have "become business as usual, nobody really thinks about it," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which coordinates the lawsuits. "This case has put it back in the news. Win or lose, people will understand that we are out there trying to protect our rights."
The record companies involved in the lawsuit are Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings, Capitol Records and Warner Bros Records.
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