news

Judge orders woman pay $220,000 in file-sharing ruling

Heather Shall on 10/8/07 @ 8:39 PM

The verdict is in on the first music downloading lawsuit taken to court and it's enough to make even the most prolific downloader shake in his or her boots. A judge ordered late last week that a Minnesota woman pay $220,000 in fines for allegedly sharing 24 songs on Kazaa under the screen name "tereastarr". No, you're not missing a decimal point -- that's $9,250 per song.

The defendant, 30-year-old Jammie Thomas (a single mother of two), testified under oath that she didn't own a Kazaa account despite the fact that her internet service provider confirmed that her IP address was the home of the "tereastarr" account. Complicating the case was the fact that Thomas had recently replaced her hard drive, thus leaving the prosecution with no hard evidence of her having the songs in question in her possession.

Over the past four years the RIAA has filed approximately 26,000 lawsuits over file-sharing. Most have been settled out of court with defendants paying the recording companies a few thousand dollars. This was the first case to ever make it to the court room, proving if nothing else that the record companies are not afraid to see their cases all the way through to trial (and that they can win).