Mom loses big in piracy case
2007-10-05 15:36
Duluth, Minnesota - A US woman who took the music industry to court over a piracy fine, has been ordered to pay $220 000 (about R1.5m).
A federal jury ruled that Jammie Thomas, of Minnesota, must pay six record companies $9 250 (about R63 000) for each of the 24 songs she illegally shared online.
Thomas 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 seven major music labels.
Unlike some who insist on the right to share files over the internet, Thomas said she was wrongfully targeted by SafeNet, a contractor employed by the recording industry to patrol the internet for copyrighted material.
"I did not download or upload any music, period," Thomas, 30, said outside the federal courthouse in Duluth on Wednesday.
Her lawyer said at the time that Thomas refused to be bullied.
"No one can prove which computer actually did this," defence attorney Brian Toder said in his opening statement.
He argued that someone else could have easily hijacked her internet address in order to upload songs on the Kazaa file sharing network.
But industry lawyers said there was clear evidence that Thomas, an employee of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, a native American Indian tribe, shared more than 1 700 songs with potentially millions of computer users.
"Piracy is a tremendous problem affecting the music industry," said the first witness, Jennifer Pariser, head of litigation and anti-piracy for Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-largest record company in the world.
"It has caused billions of dollars in harm in the past four or five years."
Rather than pursue Thomas for all 1 072 songs in the public folder found on Kazaa, she was being sued for sharing just 25 songs by Virgin Records, Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Brothers Records and UMG Recordings Inc.
- AP