Damages for pirating 24 copyrighted songs: $1.92 million
Last year, in ordering a new Internet-piracy trial for Jammie Thomas-Rasset, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis called the $222,000 in fines imposed by a jury on the defendant for making 24 copyrighted songs available on her computer hard drive “unprecedented and oppressive.”
Wonder what Davis thinks now?
On Thursday, another jury in Duluth, Minn., again found the 32-year-old Brainerd, Minn., woman liable in U.S. District Court for infringing 24 copyrights controlled by the four major record labels. Only this time it awarded damages of $1.92 million or $80,000 per song --- nearly nine times the amount of the earlier verdict, and considerably more than the minimum amount set forth by copyright law of $750 per song.
Thomas-Rasset made history in 2007 by becoming the first accused infringer to take the music industry to court in its five-year legal campaign against music piracy. Most of the 30,000 lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America were settled out of court, with the consumers purging their files, agreeing to stop file-sharing and paying fines ranging from $3,000 to $5,000.
Thomas-Rasset lost her court case, but Davis later declared a mistrial because he had made some mistakes in his instructions to the jury.
Just as she had in the first trial, Thomas-Rasset asserted her innocence. But her claims were undermined by the prosecution, which linked the infringing files to her computer and user name, and demonstrated that she had disposed of a hard drive containing the incriminating files two weeks after legal proceedings began.
The prosecution demonstrated that a copyright security company, MediaSentry, downloaded some of the copyrighted files from the shared directory on Thomas-Rasset's computer. The plaintiffs weren't able to prove that anyone but MediaSentry downloaded songs off her computer because Kazaa, the peer-to-peer network Thomas-Rasset was using, kept no such records. But the prosecution said the 24 copyrighted files were made availabe to "millions" of users and logic dictates that many of them downloaded the songs.
While the verdict of liability was not surprising, the amount of the damages certainly was. It raised serious questions on two fronts: It clearly seemed well beyond any reasonable expectation that Thomas-Rasset would ever be able to pay it (after the trial, she said, “It’s like squeezing blood from a turnip”), and it implies that the plaintiffs suffered nearly $2 million in losses from her use of 24 files that could be purchased for $24. Though ostensibly handing a decisive victory to the music industry in its war against file-sharers, the verdict also served to highlight the disconnect between the law and the new ways in which consumers are discovering music.
As Davis stated in his 44-page ruling last year ordering a new trial, “The defendant is an individual, a consumer. She is not a business. She sought no profit from her acts... The court does not condone Thomas’ actions, but it would be a farce to say that a single mother’s acts of using Kazaa are the equivalent, for example, to the acts of global financial firms illegally infringing on copyrights” to profit.
Davis’ pleas for perspective went further. He urged Congress “to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages to peer-to-peer network cases.” After all, he said, Thomas-Rasset was only acting “like countless other Internet users. Her alleged acts were illegal, but common.”
greg@gregkot.com
Tribune wire services contributed to this report.