Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

According to Wired, a federal jury found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in June in the nation’s only RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial. Thomas-Rasset is said have infringed upon 24 songs and has charged her almost nearly $2 million. Unfortunately for Thomas-Rasset, this trial occurs just two years after the judge claimed a mistrial; in this trial she was ordered to pay around $220,000. Nevertheless, Thomas-Rasset chose to have a new trial instead of settling like the thousands of other users the RIAA has sued or threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Problems were encountered when she testified; claiming that her children may have utilized her computer for the purpose of file-sharing on Kazaa. In her previous trial, she claimed a file-sharing hack hijacked her WiFi connection; although she did not own a WiFi router.

According to Commerce Times, Tim Reynolds, an attorney for the RIAA, explained to jurors that the record companies would prove that Thomas-Rasset, illegally shared songs on the Kazaa network. He claimed that because of women like Thomas-Rasset, this illegal downloading has cost the music industry not only billions of dollars but has also been responsible for thousands of lost jobs. Once again, Thomas-Rasset claims that she did not share files illegally. Her defense attorney, Kiwi Camara, counters that the record companies cannot prove that she shared files illegally. In fact, he called her “one of the industry’s best customers, with a collect of over 200 CDs.”