US woman fined $.22m for sharing songs online

CHICAGO—In the first US trial to challenge the illegal downloading of music on the Internet, a single mother from Minnesota was ordered Thursday to pay $220,000 for sharing 24 songs online.

Jammie Thomas, 30, a single mother, was the first among more than 26,000 people sued by the world’s most powerful recording companies to refuse a settlement after being slapped with a lawsuit by the Recording Industry of America and six major music labels.

She turned down an offer to pay a few thousand dollars in fines and instead took the case to court.

Unlike some who insist on the right to share files over the Internet, Thomas says she was wrongfully targeted by SafeNet, a contractor employed by the recording industry to patrol the Internet for copyrighted material.

Her lawyer said earlier this week that she had racked up some $60,000 in legal fees because she refused to be bullied.

And while Thomas insisted on the courthouse steps that she had never downloaded or uploaded music, her lawyer tried to convince jurors there was no way to prove who had uploaded songs on the Kazaa file sharing network.

A jury took just five hours to decide that evidence provided by the music labels showed otherwise and found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement, court records showed.

Thomas, an employee of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, an Indian tribe, was ordered to pay a $9,250 fine for each of 24 shared songs cited in the case, including Godsmack’s “Spiral,” Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills” and Sara McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery.”

It could have been a lot worse.

The fine could have reached $150,000 a song if the jury had found “willful” copyright infringement.

Had the record companies sued her for all 1,702 songs found in the online folder, the fine could have run in the millions.

The recording industry hopes the judgment will be enough to dissuade music lovers from downloading songs from the Internet without paying for them.

“This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not okay,” Richard Gabriel, the lead lawyer for the music companies that sued the woman, said Thursday after the three-day civil trial in this city on the shore of Lake Superior.

In closing arguments he had told the jury, “I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence here is great.”

Thomas maintained she had done nothing wrong.

“She was in tears. She’s devastated,” Thomas’ lawyer, Brian Toder, said. “This is a girl that lives from paycheck to paycheck, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheck garnished for the rest of her life.”

Toder said the plaintiff’s attorney fees were automatically awarded in such judgments under copyright law, meaning Thomas could actually owe as much as a half-a-million dollars. But he said he suspected the record companies “will probably be people we can deal with.”

Gabriel said no decision had yet been made about what the record companies would do, if anything, to pursue collecting the money from Thomas.

Since 2003, record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits over file-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores.

Before the verdict, an official with an industry trade group said he was surprised it had taken so long for one of the industry’s lawsuits against individual downloaders to come to trial.

Illegal downloads had “become business as usual. Nobody really thinks about it,” said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which coordinates the lawsuits. “This case has put it back in the news. Win or lose, people will understand that we are out there trying to protect our rights.” AFP and AP