RIAA Scores a Big Win in P2P Case

Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota woman who was sharing songs on her Kazaa P2P network, now has to pay almost a quarter of a million dollars to the RIAA. Ouch. Goes to show that music piracy, mixed with stupid P2P users, results in big dollar scores.

Doh! Well at least she still has a full MP3 player. That was worth it, right?

From Reuters here:

The recording industry has won a major fight in its effort to stop illegal music downloading with a U.S. jury decision to impose $222,000 damages against a Minnesota woman who used a Web service to share music.

The jury in the civil case in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota on Thursday found Jammie Thomas infringed copyrighted song recordings, and awarded damages of $9,250 for each of the 24 recordings cited. The verdict marked the first jury trial in the U.S. industry’s drive to combat piracy with lawsuits against an individual.

According to court documents, the record companies sued Thomas in April 2006 after 1,702 music files involving artists such as Green Day, Aerosmith and Guns ‘N’ Roses were traced to a computer tied to her. A year earlier, investigators had located an individual with the screen name “tereastarr@KaZaA” using the Kazaa file-sharing software program.

“This individual was downloading copyrighted sound recordings from other users of the Kazaa network, and was distributing copyrighted sound recordings stored on her computer to other Kazaa users,” the plaintiffs said.

Well, you get what you deserve. For years Jammie Thomas had heard that sharing music over the internet was wrong, but she didn’t think the law applied to her. Or maybe she was buying into all the BS that “everybody does it, so its okay.” Or the anti-RIAA crowd had her convinced that she could win this in court.

CNET has a great write-up of why Thomas was pummeled in court.