DULUTH, Minn. — The recording industry won a key fight Thursday against illegal music downloading when a federal jury found a Minnesota woman shared copyrighted music online and levied $222,000 in damages against her.
The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared the songs 1,702 times online in violation of their copyrights.
Thomas and her attorney, Brian Toder, declined comment as they left the courthouse.
“This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK,” said Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music firms.
In the first such lawsuit to go to trial, the record companies accused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas denied wrongdoing and testified that she didn’t have a Kazaa account.
Record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 over file-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores. Many other defendants have settled by paying the firms a few thousand dollars.
The RIAA says the lawsuits have mitigated illegal sharing, even though music file-sharing is rising overall. The group says the number of households that have used file-sharing programs to download music has risen from 6.9 million monthly in April 2003, before the lawsuits began, to 7.8 million in March 2007.
During the trial, the record firms presented evidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by a Kazaa user under the name “tereastarr.”
Their witnesses, including officials from an Internet provider and a security firm, testified that the Internet address used by “tereastarr” belonged to Thomas.
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