24 illegal song downloads cost US woman $220,000 dollars

In the first US trial to challenge the illegal downloadin of musci on the Internet, a single mother from Minnesota was ordered Thursday to pay 220,000 dollars for sharing 24 songs online.
Jammie Thomas, 30, was the first among more than 26,000 people sued by the world's most powerful recording companies to refuse a settlement after being slapped with a lawsuit by the Recording Industry of America and six major music labels.

She turned down an offer to pay a few thousands dollars in fines and instead took the case to court.

Unlike some who insist on the right to share files over the Internet, Thomas says she was wrongfully targeted by SafeNet, a contractor employed by the recording industry to patrol the Internet for copyrighted material.

Her lawyer said earlier this week that she had racked up some 60,000 dollars in legal fees because she refused to be bullied.

And while Thomas insisted on the courthouse steps that she had never downloaded or uploaded music, her lawyer tried to convince jurors there was no way to prove who had uploaded songs on the Kazaa file sharing network.

A jury took just five hours to decide that evidence provided by the music labels showed otherwise and found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement, court records showed.

Thomas, an employee of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, an Indian tribe, was ordered to pay a 9,250-dollar fine for each of 24 shared songs cited in the case, including Godsmack's "Spiral," Destiny's Child's "Bills, Bills, Bills" and Sara McLachlan's "Building a Mystery."

It could have been a lot worse.

The fine could have reached 150,000 dollars a song if the jury had found "willful" copyright infringement.

Had the record companies sued her for all 1,702 songs found in the online folder the fine could have run in the millions.

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I have mixed feeling about the subject. On one hand, I can't justify downloading the songs illegally when you can pay $0.99 per song on iTunes. Seems like a reasonable price and it's nice to be able to pick and choose songs without having to drop $13 on an overall crappy CD. On the other hand, I like the concept of "file sharing" as cost effective and effecient means of accessing content online.

The thing about this is, the RIAA was never required to prove that she was the one who downloaded the songs. From this article:

The jury did not require the prosecution to show that Thomas' computer had a file-sharing program installed at the time that they inspected her hard drive. And the RIAA did not have to show that the defendant was at the keyboard when RIAA investigators accessed Thomas' share folder.

You have to love a legal system that doesn't require actual proof to be provided for someone to be found guilty. I'm not trying to say the system we use in Canada is better than anywhere else because our system is definitely flawed but a lawsuit of this nature would never be allowed to proceed, much less result in a conviction based on this evidence.

Really? This seems like a classic case of misinformed jurors. How would the Canadian legal system prevent that?

Our system wouldn't allow a lawsuit like this to proceed in the first place. The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) tried doing this a couple of years ago and the judge basically said "Stop trying to abuse our legal system for higher profits" and threw the cases out. Also, up here the jury typically doesn't decide what is or is not valid evidence. The judge tells them what evidence to consider or exclude.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

You have to love a legal system that doesn't require actual proof to be provided for someone to be found guilty.

Technically, there's no "guilt" or "innocence" in a civil trial.

Also, be sure to note that it's not downloading that gets people sued, it's making songs available to others for download.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Our system wouldn't allow a lawsuit like this to proceed in the first place. The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) tried doing this a couple of years ago and the judge basically said "Stop trying to abuse our legal system for higher profits" and threw the cases out. Also, up here the jury typically doesn't decide what is or is not valid evidence. The judge tells them what evidence to consider or exclude.

Um, same here.

But yes, there is a lower standard of proof in civil trials (it varies, but is almost always lower than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of criminal trials). I'd be surprised if Canada was terribly different in that respect.

I'm going to read the articles and see what was going on here.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Also, be sure to note that it's not downloading that gets people sued, it's making songs available to others for download.

That part is still up for debate; specifically, what 'making available' means in the first place, and whether or not that is enough, or actual sharing is required.

One nifty little article with a number of even more nifty sources can be found here: http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9793438-38.html

absurddoctor wrote:

That part is still up for debate; specifically, what 'making available' means in the first place, and whether or not that is enough, or actual sharing is required.

But ultimately it's hard to have a private action unless there is actual harm done to the plaintiff.