In the first high profile case of its kind, a jury has ordered US woman Jammie Thomas-Rasset to stump up a massive $1.92 million for illegally downloading 24 songs off the Internet using the peer to peer file sharing network Kazaa.
This amounts to a whopping $80,000 for each of the songs she downloaded. The money is to be distributed between six record companies: Sony BMG Music, Arista Records, Capitol Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. and UMG Recordings.
But will she pay?
“There’s no way they’re ever going to get that,” said Thomas-Rasset, “I’m a mom, limited means, so I’m not going to worry about it now.”
Thomas-Rasset is no stranger to the courts for digital piracy as she was previously convicted almost two years ago in October 2007 and on that occasion was ordered to pay $220,000 although the judge at the time threw it out calling it “wholly disproportionate” and “oppressive”.
Maybe she thought she might have the same luck this time around but unfortunately she didn’t. The 32 year old single mother of four from Minnesota tried to claim as part of her defence that her ex husband or even her children might have downloaded the songs but the jury were having none of it and took less than five hours to reach their verdict.
On summing up the case, attorney Timothy Reynolds said “she infringed my clients’ copyrights and then tried to cover it up”. She had made the music available to “millions on the internet” he said.
Most of the cases actually filed for illegal music downloads are settled out of court, usually for between 3 and 5 thousands dollars, but Thomas-Rasset refused a settlement agreement and instead became the first case out of thousands filed to actually go to trial.
The case was originally brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who in December last year, too late for this woman, said they were going to stop filing lawsuits against people who downloaded small amounts of music illegally and instead would be notifying Internet Service Providers when large numbers of songs were being downloaded and would be trying to get the ISPs to take the appropriate action.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. Thomas-Rasset still has the opportunity to settle the matter.
“Since day one we have been willing to settle this case and we remain willing to do so” said Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for The RIAA.
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she must have made a good sum of money by giving it to millions on internet…moreover she has not done it for the 1st time….so it would be better for her to settle outside…
How much does each song cost? 99 cents, I think she published 24 songs to a million people each. A 3k to 5k settlement doesn’t sound bad anymore. How much is value of a song is the big question here.
I don’t understand. Why are the charges so high?
what??. is that true?. why the charge was so high?.
I think that the fines are so high for this one person because she is actually contending that she did not do it. The vast majority of people who download tens of thousands of songs via P2P settle out of court. The ISP’s have much to much data that they are willing to share with RIAA and the courts. (sad face)