New Trial Granted In Music Download Case

Minnesota Woman Had Been Ordered To Pay $222,000 For Offering To Share 24 Songs

(AP)  A federal judge granted a new trial to a Minnesota woman convicted of pirating music files in the nation's first file-sharing trial, ruling Wednesday he made an error in the jury instructions that "substantially prejudiced" her rights.

Jammie Thomas was convicted last October and a jury in Duluth found her guilty of copyright infringement for offering to share 24 songs on the Kazaa file sharing network. She was ordered to pay $222,000 to six record companies.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis granted her motion for a new trial, while also imploring Congress to change copyright laws to prevent excessive awards in similar cases.

At issue was whether the record companies had to prove anyone else actually downloaded their copyrighted songs, as Thomas' lawyer argued, or whether it was enough to argue, as the industry did, that a defendant simply made copyrighted music available for copying.

Relying on a 1993 appeals court decision, Davis concluded in his 44-page ruling Wednesday that the law requires that actual distribution be shown. In his jury instructions, he had said it didn't.

Andrew Bridges, a San Francisco attorney and frequent participant in Internet music litigation, said Davis' reasoning is likely to be "very persuasive" in other courts.

"This decision is extremely important," Bridges said. "This is the most thoughtful decision by a court yet on these issues."

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, Jonathan Lamy, said Davis' decision was "not unexpected" given his previous public comments that he thought he had made an error. He said the plaintiffs were still assessing their legal options.

"Regardless of this narrow issue, a jury of her own peers unanimously found Ms. Thomas liable for copyright theft and for causing significant harm to the music community," Lamy said. "We have confidence in our case and the facts assembled against the defendant."

Because he ordered a new trial, Davis didn't directly rule on Thomas' request that he void the $222,000 damage award as excessive. But he called on Congress to change the federal Copyright Act to address liability and damages in similar peer-to-peer file-sharing network cases.

Davis wrote that he didn't discount the industry's claim that illegal downloading has hurt the recording business, but called the award "wholly disproportionate" to the plaintiff's damages.

The judge said Thomas, of Brainerd, allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs, which he said was the equivalent of around three CDs that would cost less than $54. He said the total award was more than 4,000 times the cost of three CDs.

"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 in order to profit in the securities market," he wrote, referring to another case he cited.

Davis suggested that damages that are more than 100 times the costs of the works would serve as a "sufficient deterrent" to illegal downloading. He also stressed that Thomas had sought no profits from her alleged illegal activities.

"Unfortunately, by using Kazaa, Thomas acted like countless other Internet users," he wrote. "Her alleged acts were illegal, but common. Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive."

Thomas and her attorney, Brian Toder, did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

[gmond]

The story here is about file sharing, and one person being made a scapegoat, not storage media. Free software to rip retail media to any type of portable format is easily available, and flash media, usb, hd, ssd, cd, dvd, even floppy disks can last as long as you need and can die just as suddenly.

[rational_1]

tmittelstaed, thanks for your post from the inside of an ISP. I''d wondered about the mechanics of cases like this and appreciate you taking the time to explain.

I still have a separate problem with RIAA and encryption. Anyone who has young kids (like me) knows that CDs and DVDs have limited lifespans in their hands. I''d be more sympathetic to the CD/DVD industries if they would provide replacement discs for a nominal fee should the discs we buy get trashed. After all we aren''t really buying the disc, but the content. So for me at least copying is a way of ensuring I don''t lose the content that I''ve purchased. Why don''t recording/movie companies offer to replace damaged discs if you send them a trashed original? It''s not worth it to them financially.

[wdrussell1]

The RIAA should never be allowed to collect more than the value of what was stolen.

[jmurrieta11]

"The only time that we would ever turn over a customer name to the RIAA is if we had contacted the customer, told them to get their system shut down and cleaned, as well as turned off their account for a period of time as a warning, and we were still getting RIAA notifications about them.


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Posted by tmittelstaed



Or maybe got some fat payoffs from the RIAA?

[tmittelstaed]

I work at an ISP and have dealt with Kazaa and these kinds of cases many times before. 90% of the time it is a virus or trojan horse program on the customer''s computer and the customer isn''t even aware they are sharing out copyrighted material. And in the remaining 10% it is dumb kids who stop doing it as soon as we forward the RIAA notifications to their parents. I''ve actually only seen 1 customer who we got a -second- RIAA notification on, and after they called in when we turned off their account, and I explained how serious it is and how much risk they were taking by not cleaning up their system, or turning off the filesharing or whatever, they stopped doing it.
You really, really have to be incredibly stubborn to be sued by the RIAA. You have to ignore -repeated- notifications by your ISP that you have been detected making copyrighted software available online, and you have to make a LOT of it available for a LONG time.
This defendant didn''t just offer up 24 songs, she offered up hundreds, for months at a time. She also would have had to ignore repeated warnings by her ISP for her name to be turned over to the RIAA. The only time that we would ever turn over a customer name to the RIAA is if we had contacted the customer, told them to get their system shut down and cleaned, as well as turned off their account for a period of time as a warning, and we were still getting RIAA notifications about them.