A federal judge has found Arizona resident Jeffrey Howell liable for copyright infringement and ordered him to pay more than $40,000 in damages to the record industry, according to MediaPost.

“Howell’s brazen destruction of evidence has wholly undermined the integrity of these judicial proceedings,” Judge Neil Wake wrote. “Howell’s actions have made it impossible to decide this case on the merits.”

The report said that the ruling could bode poorly for some of the 20,000-plus other alleged file-sharers that the record industry has targeted in recent years, despite the fact that most users wouldn’t instinctively know how to handle a random lawsuit from the RIAA.

“Most people don’t have the instinct to do what a lawyer would tell you to do—take that hard drive out of your computer, set it aside and don’t touch it,” said Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s not an intuition that most people have upon being sued.”

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