Posted on 10/04/2007 9:44:30 PM PDT by janetjanet998
DULUTH, Minn. (AP) -- The recording industry won a key fight Thursday against illegal music downloading when a federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay $222,000 for sharing copyrighted music online.
The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her $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, told The Associated Press. "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, if anything, to pursue collecting the money from Thomas.
Toder said the plaintiff's attorney fees are automatically awarded in such judgments under copyright law, meaning Thomas could actually owe as much as a half-million dollars. However, he said he suspected the record companies "will probably be people we can deal with."
Jurors left without commenting.
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.
Record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 over file-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores. Many other defendants have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars.
The RIAA says the lawsuits have mitigated illegal sharing, even though music file-sharing is rising overall. The group says the number of households that have used file-sharing programs to download music has risen from 6.9 million monthly in April 2003, before the lawsuits began, to 7.8 million in March 2007.
During the three-day trial, the record companies presented evidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by a Kazaa 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" 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.
"I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence here is great," he said.
Copyright law sets a damage range of $750 to $30,000 per infringement, or up to $150,000 if the violation was "willful." Jurors ruled that Thomas' infringement was willful but awarded damages of $9,250 per song; Gabriel said they did not explain to attorneys afterward how they reached that amount.
Thomas, of Brainerd, works for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe's Department of Natural Resources.
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."
Thomas' testimony was complicated by the fact that she had replaced her computer's hard drive after the sharing was alleged to have taken place -- and later than she said in a deposition before trial.
The hard drive in question was not presented at trial by either party.
Record companies said Thomas was sent an instant message in February 2005, warning her that she was violating copyright law. Her hard drive was replaced the following month, not in 2004, as she said in the deposition.
"I don't think the jury believed my client regarding the events concerning the replacement of the hard drive," Toder said.
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.
The fact is that most people that download music are NOT going to go out and buy the CD anyway...
PING~~!
I haven’t purchased a cd ever since they started doing this crap years ago, and I used to purchase a few a month to add to my over 1000 cd collection.
These crooks get absolutely ZERO money from me anymore.
I suspect the number of lawsuits filed will increase, and the number of settlement offers to defendants will decrease.
I am going to burn half a dozen CD’s and hand them out to friends. The record industry makes me sick.
This is pretty much the end of the RIAA campaign. Once this gets absorbed by the masses in the US, the first reaction will cause millions more to move into networks that the RIAA (or any organization) can’t monitor.
According to this verdict, one 500GB hard drive full of mp3’s is worth about ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
It gets really preposterous once you think about it like that.
The RIAA is just pissing in the ocean. There is no way they can take millions of people to court. They will just do a few selective prosecutions and ruin some people's lives. Their lawyers will get filty rich.
Maybe everyone needs to start selling used hard drives on e-bay that are coincidentally full of music files. That might outfox ‘em...
The fact is that most people that download music rob banks are NOT going to go out and buy the CD earn their own money anyway...
There... fixed it for you.
You poor thing, looks like it’s time for you to find a different racket.
Face it, the RIAA business model is dead, nothing can be done to bring it back, adapt or die.
For $9250, you can buy well over nine thousand songs on iTunes, or well over ten thousand off of Yahoo, or a hundred thousand at some of the Russian sites.
I would so love it if an appeals court awarded the music companies damages of $26 for the illegally shared songs, and stuck the sharer with the attorney costs. Because, at this moment, the RIAA’s position is that there is no legal manner of copying a CD; ripping it and putting it on your music player, is, in their minds, illegal, and if it holds at this value, everyone’s got a hundred-fifty thousand dollar liability for each CD they rip to their iPod or the like.
I understand protecting rights, but if someone walks into my store, and physically takes a CD out of it, the maximum civil liability I can get out of the shoplifter is the CD itself. Why is virtual theft so much more highly valued?
Even if you oppose file-sharing, this is moronic. In this case, we’re talking about something like thirty dollars worth of music. This is absurd.
you really have no clue...how old are you 85?
But on what planet are stolen songs worth $9,200 apiece? Something tells me the jurors in this case are all about to take “vacations” to Switzerland.
I am 45 and I am an artist. You steal my stuff, I can come after you. I have the law on my side. What do you have? You got a bucket of spit. This moronic woman could have settled for a few thousand bucks. But, no. She had to fight it in court. Nice move, chump. Pay up.
“I understand protecting rights, but if someone walks into my store, and physically takes a CD out of it, the maximum civil liability I can get out of the shoplifter is the CD itself. Why is virtual theft so much more highly valued?”
Because those were fines for breaking the law 1702 times, the number of alleged violations. People get fined for speeding and other offenses when no one at all was harmed. And I’m not so sure about shoplifting laws, but each state could have slightly differently laws and fines could be assessed by the states.
example...if they are having a 70's party and want some 70's music they are not going to go out of buy $800 worth of CD's....
You are killing yourself. I, and many others of us out there, have not bought a single CD since the RIAA began strong-arming people. Music industry types need to realize that we music purchasers are disgusted with them. These sorts of actions only remind us of just how disgusting they are. I am done with music and do not intend to ever purchase another CD.
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