Posts Tagged ‘Jammie Thomas’

Wired is reporting that Jammie Thomas, the first person in the U.S. to bring a Recording Industry Association of America file sharing lawsuit to trial, is pushing the judge for a retrial.

This the case where the RIAA first won the suit, another judge overturned the verdict in September, and then the RIAA and Thomas locked in a battle last month to appeal the mistrial decision.

Why is this significant? “The mistrial meant that, with 30,000 cases the RIAA has filed against peer-to-peer users, none has reached a verdict. Most of the cases have settled out of court,” the article said. In short, to reach a verdict, there has to be some kind of agreement on what constitutes burden of proof when it comes to file sharing. Our verdict for the RIAA? Drop the BS, stop suing people, and figure out how to be competitive in the new digital age of online stores, mobile devices, and social networking.

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In at least one case, we finally have an answer. A Slashdot post reports that the RIAA has agreed to accept $200 per infringement in the organization’s case against Jammie Thomas, in lieu of the $750 per infringement they usually seek in cases like this.

“[After] the judge denied the RIAA’s reconsideration motion and scheduled a trial date, the RIAA filed papers agreeing to take the $200-per-recording amount. While $200 is still about 600 times the amount of the actual damages, it’s better than paying 26,000 times the actual damages, which is what the RIAA tried to squeeze out of Ms. Thomas.”

Thomas was 16 at the time of the alleged infringements. This was the case that led the lead Sony BMG lawyer to say in court that copying your own music is stealing, even if you’ve already paid for it and it’s for your own personal use. It sounded quite ridiculous in light of how Sony MP3 players come with software that let you do just that.

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To the surprise of absolutely no one, the Recording Industry Association of America is appealing last month’s decision in the Jammie Thomas case, where the judge declared a mistrial in the only RIAA file sharing suit to go to trial in the United States, according to Wired.

Back on September 24th, a judge overturned the RIAA’s $220,000 verdict against Thomas (a mother of three) after ruling, incorrectly, that jurors could rule against Thomas for copyright infringement for uploading songs to Kazaa.

The decision basically meant that the “RIAA’s 5-year-old copyright infringement litigation campaign has never been successful at trial,” the report said. The RIAA wants the court to reexamine the exact level of proof necessary to win a judgment against an individual.

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MediaPost is reporting that in a dramatic reversal for the record industry, a federal district court judge just overturned a $220,000 verdict against single mother Jammie Thomas.

This is the one where the judge had originally ruled that a defendant could be liable just for making music tracks available on Kazaa. In a new trial, the report said that the RIAA will now have to prove that someone actually downloaded the tracks—hopefully without employing more of the questionable tactics they’ve become famous for.

The judge also said in the ruling that the damages originally rewarded to the RIAA were ridiculously high.

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