Out-Law News 1 min. read
Judge declares mistrial in Jammie Thomas file-sharing case
26 Sep 2008, 1:31 pm
A US judge this week granted a retrial to a woman found liable for copyright infringement for sharing music files. He said the award of damages of $222,000 was "unprecedented and oppressive” and ruled that he had erred on the level of proof required.
The US record industry won its first federal jury trial for file-sharing last October. Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay damages to six record labels for willful copyright infringement after she made songs publicly available on the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
However, on Wednesday, Judge Michael Davis of the US District Court in Duluth, Minnesota, declared a mistrial and said that the original award was "wholly disproportionate" to the actual damages the record labels had incurred.
Thomas was found liable for sharing 24 songs. Judge Davis noted this was the equivalent of three CDs with a cost of about $54. But the total award to the recording companies, calculated at $9,250 per song, was more than 4,000 times the actual cost of three CDs.
Judge Davis said he had given an incorrect instruction to the jury on the level of proof required by the RIAA. He had told jurors last year that the act of "making [music files] available" via a peer-to-peer network was sufficient to prove unauthorised distribution of copyright material without evidence that others had downloaded the files.
In August this year he said that he might have been wrong, and on Wednesday made his revised opinion official and ordered a retrial with different jury instructions.
The ruling noted: “Thomas not only gained no profit from her alleged activities, she sought no profits. Part of the justification for large statutory damages awards in copyright cases is to deter actors by ensuring the possible penalty for infringing substantially outweighs the potential gain from infringing.”
It continued: “Unfortunately, by using Kazaa, Thomas acted like countless other Internet users. Her alleged acts were illegal, but common. Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive.”
Digital rights groups claim that downloads made by RIAA investigators should not count against a defendant because the detectives were authorised by the music industry to make the downloads.
The RIAA has a right to appeal for the original verdict to stand.