Jury Awards $220K for Illegal Music Downloads

DULUTH, Minn., Oct. 17, 2007 — -- The recording industry won a key fightThursday against illegal music downloading when a federal juryfound a Minnesota woman shared copyrighted music online and levied$220,000 in damages against her.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six recordcompanies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused onin the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs in all.

Thomas and her attorney, Brian Toder, declined comment as theyleft the courthouse.

In the first such lawsuit to go to trial, the record companiesaccused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission andoffering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomasdenied wrongdoing and testified that she didn't have a Kazaaaccount.

Record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 overfile-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to getmusic for free instead of paying for recordings in stores. Manyother defendants have settled by paying the companies a fewthousand dollars.

During the three-day trial, the record companies presentedevidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by aKazaa user under the name "tereastarr." Their witnesses,including officials from an Internet provider and a security firm,testified that the Internet address used by "tereastarr" belongedto Thomas.

Toder said in his closing that the companies never proved"Jammie Thomas, a human being, got on her keyboard and sent outthese things."

"We don't know what happened," Toder told jurors. "All weknow is that Jammie Thomas didn't do this."

Richard Gabriel, the companies' lead attorney, called thatdefense "misdirection, red herrings, s He told jurors a verdict against Thomaswould send a message toother illegal downloaders.

"I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence hereis great," he said.

Copyright law sets a damage range of $750 to $30,000 perinfringement, or up to $150,000 if the violation was "willful."Jurors ruled that Thomas' infringement was willful but awardeddamages in a middle range.

Before the verdict, an official with an industry trade groupsaid he was surprised it had taken so long for one of theindustry's lawsuits against individual downloaders to come totrial.

Illegal downloads have "become business as usual, nobody reallythinks about it," said Cary Sherman, president of the RecordingIndustry Association of America, which coordinates the lawsuits.

"This case has put it back in the news. Win or lose, people willunderstand that we are out there trying to protect our rights."

Thomas's her testimony was complicated by the fact that she hadreplaced her computer's hard drive after the sharing was alleged tohave taken place -- and later than she said in a deposition beforetrial.

The hard drive in question was not presented at trial by eitherparty, though Thomas used her new one to show the jury how fast itcopies songs from CDs. That was an effort to counter an industrywitness's assertion that the songs on the old drive got there toofast to have come from CDs she owned - and therefore must have beendownloaded illegally.

Record companies said Thomas was sent an instant message inFebruary 2005, warning her that she was violating copyright law.Her hard drive was replaced the following month, not in 2004, asshe said in the deposition.

The record companies involved in the lawsuit are Sony BMG,Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc.,Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.