load music over the Internet when a federal jury ordered a 30-year-old Minnesota woman to pay US$222,000 for copyright infringement. The victory could embolden the industry in its four-year legal campaign against piracy at a time when illegal sharing of music online is dramatically reducing music sales.
The decision by the jury in a federal district court in Duluth, Minn., against Jammie Thomas, an Indian reservation employee, is the first case of its type to come to trial. The verdict could convince others accused of pirating music to settle their cases.
The Record Industry Association of America, which represents the six music labels that brought the case, has brought 26,000 lawsuits against individuals for copying or letting others copy songs online. More than 10,000 cases have been settled, with defendants typically paying less than US$5,000 to do so.
Despite years of litigation by the major record labels since file-sharing computer programs began spreading with the advent of Napster in 1999, illegal downloads are 10 times as common as legal digital sales and are still growing at 60 percent a year, said Russ Crupnick of market researcher NPD Group.
“The landscape is still very much what it was three or four years ago,” said Eric Garland, chief executive of the piracy-tracking company BigChampagne. “It’s still a one-horse race, and piracy is the lead horse.”
The Record Industry Association said the contest would be even more lopsided if it stopped suing. Most Americans would acknowledge that sharing music files over the Internet is illegal, reversing poll findings from four years ago.
Thomas, a single mother of two, testified this week that she had not used the Kazaa online service for swapping music with strangers. But evidence showed that a Kazaa user named “tereastarr” had offered up 1,700 songs and that Thomas went by the same name on other online destinations. In addition, her Internet service provider said it had assigned Thomas the numeric Internet address that on Feb. 21, 2005, had connected to Kazaa.
Copyright law sets a range of US$750 to US$30,000 per infringement for awarding damages in such cases, or up to US$150,000 if the violation was “willful.” Jurors ruled that Thomas’ infringement was willful but awarded damages of US$9,250 for each of the 24 targeted songs.
Some people following the case said the jury had taken a middle course between the most lenient and the most punitive.
Thomas and her attorney had no immediate comment.
But the recording industry association was ebullient. “We welcome the jury’s decision,” the RIAA said in a statement. “The law here is clear, as are the consequences for breaking it.”
The record labels that sued Thomas were Arista Records, Capitol Records Inc., Interscope Records, Sony BMG, UMG Recordings Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.
The RIAA has gone after and shut down some of the world’s biggest file-sharing operations, such as Napster and Grokster, only to see others take their place.
